Systematic Theology

                    A Compendium and Commonplace-Book

               Designed For The Use Of Theological Students

                                    By

                   Augustus Hopkins Strong, D.D., LL.D.

President and Professor of Biblical Theology in the Rochester Theological
                                 Seminary

                           Revised and Enlarged

                             In Three Volumes

                                 Volume 2

                           The Doctrine of Man

                             The Judson Press

                               Philadelphia

                                   1907





CONTENTS


Part IV. The Nature, Decrees, And Works of God. (Continued)
   Chapter IV. The Works Of God; Or The Execution Of The Decrees.
      Section I.—Creation.
         I. Definition Of Creation.
         II. Proof of the Doctrine of Creation.
            1. Direct Scripture Statements.
            2. Indirect evidence from Scripture.
         III. Theories which oppose Creation.
            1. Dualism.
            2. Emanation.
            3. Creation from eternity.
            4. Spontaneous generation.
         IV. The Mosaic Account of Creation.
            1. Its twofold nature,—as uniting the ideas of creation and of
            development.
            2. Its proper interpretation.
         V. God’s End in Creation.
            1. The testimony of Scripture.
            2. The testimony of reason.
         VI. Relation of the Doctrine of Creation to other Doctrines.
            1. To the holiness and benevolence of God.
            2. To the wisdom and free-will of God.
            3. To Christ as the Revealer of God.
            4. To Providence and Redemption.
            5. To the Observance of the Sabbath.
      Section II.—Preservation.
         I. Definition of Preservation.
         II. Proof of the Doctrine of Preservation.
            1. From Scripture.
            2. From Reason.
         III. Theories which virtually deny the doctrine of Preservation.
            1. Deism.
            2. Continuous Creation.
         IV. Remarks upon the Divine Concurrence.
      Section III.—Providence.
         I. Definition of Providence.
         II. Proof of the Doctrine of Providence.
            1. Scriptural Proof.
            2. Rational proof.
         III. Theories opposing the Doctrine of Providence.
            1. Fatalism.
            2. Casualism.
            3. Theory of a merely general providence.
         IV. Relations of the Doctrine of Providence.
            1. To miracles and works of grace.
            2. To prayer and its answer.
            3. To Christian activity.
            4. To the evil acts of free agents.
      Section IV.—Good And Evil Angels.
         I. Scripture Statements and Imitations.
            1. As to the nature and attributes of angels.
            2. As to their number and organization.
            3. As to their moral character.
            4. As to their employments.
               A. The employments of good angels.
               B. The employments of evil angels.
         II. Objections to the Doctrine of Angels.
            1. To the doctrine of angels in general.
            2. To the doctrine of evil angels in particular.
         III. Practical uses of the Doctrine of Angels.
            A. Uses of the doctrine of good angels.
            B. Uses of the doctrine of evil angels.
Part V. Anthropology, Or The Doctrine Of Man.
   Chapter I. Preliminary.
      I. Man a Creation of God and a Child of God.
      II. Unity of the Human Race.
         1. The argument from history.
         2. The argument from language.
         3. The argument from psychology.
         4. The argument from physiology.
      III. Essential Elements of Human Nature.
         1. The Dichotomous Theory.
         2. The Trichotomous Theory.
      IV. Origin of the Soul.
         1. The Theory of Preëxistence.
         2. The Creatian Theory.
         3. The Traducian Theory.
      V. The Moral Nature of Man.
         1. Conscience.
         2. Will.
   Chapter II. The Original State Of Man.
      I. Essentials of Man’s Original State.
         1. Natural likeness to God, or personality.
         2. Moral likeness to God, or holiness.
            A. The image of God as including only personality.
            B. The image of God as consisting simply in man’s natural
            capacity for religion.
      II. Incidents of Man’s Original State.
         1. Results of man’s possession of the divine image.
         2. Concomitants of man’s possession of the divine image.
   Chapter III. Sin, Or Man’s State Of Apostasy.
      Section I.—The Law Of God.
         I. Law in General.
         II. The Law of God in Particular.
         III. Relation of the Law to the Grace of God.
      Section II.—Nature Of Sin.
         I. Definition of Sin.
            1. Proof.
            2. Inferences.
         II. The Essential Principle of Sin.
            1. Sin as Sensuousness.
            2. Sin as Finiteness.
            3. Sin as Selfishness.
      Section III.—Universality Of Sin.
         I. Every human being who has arrived at moral consciousness has
         committed acts, or cherished dispositions, contrary to the divine
         law.
         II. Every member of the human race, without exception, possesses
         a corrupted nature, which is a source of actual sin, and is
         itself sin.
      Section IV.—Origin Of Sin In The Personal Act Of Adam.
         I. The Scriptural Account of the Temptation and Fall in Genesis
         3:1-7.
            1. Its general, character not mythical or allegorical, but
            historical.
            2. The course of the temptation, and the resulting fall.
         II. Difficulties connected with the Fall considered as the
         personal Act of Adam.
            1. How could a holy being fall?
            2. How could God justly permit Satanic temptation?
            3. How could a penalty so great be justly connected with
            disobedience to so slight a command?
         III. Consequences of the Fall, so far as respects Adam.
            1. Death.
            2. Positive and formal exclusion from God’s presence.
      Section V.—Imputation Of Adam’s Sin To His Posterity.
         I. Theories of Imputation.
            1. The Pelagian Theory, or Theory of Man’s natural Innocence.
            2. The Arminian Theory, or Theory of voluntarily appropriated
            Depravity.
            3. The New School Theory, or Theory of uncondemnable
            Vitiosity.
            4. The Federal Theory, or Theory of Condemnation by Covenant.
            5. Theory of Mediate Imputation, or Theory of Condemnation for
            Depravity.
            6. The Augustinian Theory, or Theory of Adam’s Natural
            Headship.
         II.—Objections to the Augustinian Doctrine of Imputation.
      Section VI.—Consequences Of Sin To Adam’s Posterity.
         I. Depravity.
            1. Depravity partial or total?
            2. Ability or inability?
         II. Guilt.
            1. Nature of guilt.
            2. Degrees of guilt.
         III. Penalty.
            1. Idea of penalty.
            2. The actual penalty of sin.
      Section VII.—The Salvation Of Infants.
Part VI. Soteriology, Or The Doctrine Of Salvation Through The Work Of
Christ And Of The Holy Spirit.
   Chapter I. Christology, Or The Redemption Wrought By Christ.
      Section I.—Historical Preparation For Redemption.
         I. Negative Preparation,—in the history of the heathen world.
         II. Positive Preparation,—in the history of Israel.
      Section II.—The Person Of Christ.
         I. Historical Survey of Views Respecting the Person of Christ.
         II. The two Natures of Christ,—their Reality and Integrity.
            1. The Humanity of Christ.
            2. The Deity of Christ.
         III. The Union of the two Natures in one Person.
            1. Proof of this Union.
            2. Modern misrepresentations of this Union.
            3. The real nature of this Union.
      Section III.—The Two States Of Christ.
         I. The State of Humiliation.
            1. The nature of this humiliation.
            2. The stages of Christ’s humiliation.
         II. The State of Exaltation.
            1. The nature of this exaltation.
            2. The stages of Christ’s exaltation.
      Section IV.—The Offices Of Christ.
         I. The Prophetic Office of Christ.
            1. The nature of Christ’s prophetic work.
            2. The stages of Christ’s prophetic work.
         II. The Priestly Office of Christ.
            1. Christ’s Sacrificial Work, or the Doctrine of the
            Atonement.
               A. Scripture Methods of Representing the Atonement.
               B. The Institution of Sacrifice, more especially as found
               in the Mosaic system.
               C. Theories of the Atonement.
                  1st. The Socinian, or Example Theory of the Atonement.
                  2nd. The Bushnellian, or Moral Influence Theory of the
                  Atonement.
                  3d. The Grotian, or Governmental Theory of the
                  Atonement.
                  4th. The Irvingian Theory, or Theory of Gradually
                  Extirpated Depravity.
                  5th. The Anselmic, or Commercial Theory of the
                  Atonement.
                  6th. The Ethical Theory of the Atonement.
               D. Objections to the Ethical Theory of the Atonement.
               E. The Extent of the Atonement.
            2. Christ’s Intercessory Work.
         III. The Kingly Office of Christ.






                               [Cover Art]

[Transcriber’s Note: The above cover image was produced by the submitter
at Distributed Proofreaders, and is being placed into the public domain.]





Christo Deo Salvatori.

“THE EYE SEES ONLY THAT WHICH IT BRINGS WITH IT THE POWER OF
SEEING.”—_Cicero._

“OPEN THOU MINE EYES, THAT I MAY BEHOLD WONDROUS THINGS OUT OF THY
LAW.”—_Psalm 119:18._

“FOR WITH THEE IS THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE: IN THY LIGHT SHALL WE SEE
LIGHT.”—_Psalm 36:9._

“FOR WE KNOW IN PART, AND WE PROPHESY IN PART; BUT WHEN THAT WHICH IS
PERFECT IS COME, THAT WHICH IS IN PART SHALL BE DONE AWAY.”—_1 Cor. 13:9,
10._





PART IV. THE NATURE, DECREES, AND WORKS OF GOD. (CONTINUED)




Chapter IV. The Works Of God; Or The Execution Of The Decrees.



Section I.—Creation.


I. Definition Of Creation.


By creation we mean that free act of the triune God by which in the
beginning for his own glory he made, without the use of preëxisting
materials, the whole visible and invisible universe.

Creation is designed origination, by a transcendent and personal God, of
that which itself is not God. The universe is related to God as our own
volitions are related to ourselves. They are not ourselves, and we are
greater than they. Creation is not simply the idea of God, or even the
plan of God, but it is the idea externalized, the plan executed; in other
words, it implied an exercise, not only of intellect, but also of will,
and this will is not an instinctive and unconscious will, but a will that
is personal and free. Such exercise of will seems to involve, not
self-development, but self-limitation, on the part of God; the
transformation of energy into force, and so a beginning of time, with its
finite successions. But, whatever the relation of creation to time,
creation makes the universe wholly dependent upon God, as its originator.


    F. H. Johnson, in Andover Rev., March, 1891:280, and What is
    Reality, 285—“Creation is designed origination.... Men never could
    have thought of God as the Creator of the world, were it not that
    they had first known themselves as creators.” We agree with the
    doctrine of Hazard, Man a Creative First Cause. Man creates ideas
    and volitions, without use of preëxisting material. He also
    indirectly, through these ideas and volitions, creates
    brain-modifications. This creation, as Johnson has shown, is
    without hands, yet elaborate, selective, progressive.
    Schopenhauer: “Matter is nothing more than causation; its true
    being is its action.”

    Prof. C. L. Herrick, Denison Quarterly, 1896:248, and
    Psychological Review, March, 1899, advocates what he calls
    _dynamism_, which he regards as the only alternative to a
    materialistic dualism which posits matter, and a God above and
    distinct from matter. He claims that the predicate of reality can
    apply only to energy. To speak of energy as _residing in_
    something is to introduce an entirely incongruous concept, for it
    continues our guest _ad infinitum_. “Force,” he says, “is energy
    under resistance, or self-limited energy, for all parts of the
    universe are derived from the energy. Energy manifesting itself
    under self-conditioning or differential forms is force. The change
    of pure energy into force is creation—the introduction of
    resistance. The progressive complication of this interference is
    evolution—a form of orderly resolution of energy. Substance is
    pure spontaneous energy. God’s substance is his energy—the
    infinite and inexhaustible store of spontaneity which makes up his
    being. The form which self-limitation impresses upon substance, in
    revealing it in force, is not God, because it no longer possesses
    the attributes of spontaneity and universality, though it emanates
    from him. When we speak of energy as self-limited, we simply imply
    that spontaneity is intelligent. The sum of God’s acts is his
    being. There is no _causa posterior_ or _extranea_, which spurs
    him on. We must recognize in the source what appears in the
    outcome. We can speak of _absolute_, but not of _infinite_ or
    _immutable_, substance. The Universe is but the partial expression
    of an infinite God.”

    Our view of creation is so nearly that of Lotze, that we here
    condense Ten Broeke’s statement of his philosophy: “Things are
    concreted laws of action. If the idea of being must include
    permanence as well as activity, we must say that only the personal
    truly is. All else is flow and process. We can interpret ontology
    only from the side of personality. Possibility of interaction
    requires the dependence of the mutually related many of the system
    upon an all-embracing, coördinating One. The finite is a mode or
    phenomenon of the One Being. Mere things are only modes of
    energizing of the One. Self-conscious personalities are created,
    posited, and depend on the One in a different way. Interaction of
    things is immanent action of the One, which the perceiving mind
    interprets as causal. Real interaction is possible only between
    the Infinite and the created finite, _i. e._, self-conscious
    persons. The finite is not a part of the Infinite, nor does it
    partly exhaust the stuff of the Infinite. The One, by an act of
    freedom, posits the many, and the many have their ground and unity
    in the Will and Thought of the One. Both the finite and the
    Infinite are free and intelligent.

    “Space is not an extra-mental reality, _sui generis_, nor an order
    of relations among realities, but a form of dynamic appearance,
    the ground of which is the fixed orderly changes in reality. So
    time is the form of change, the subjective interpretation of
    timeless yet successive changes in reality. So far as God is the
    ground of the world-process, he is in time. So far as he
    transcends the world-process in his self-conscious personality, he
    is not in time. Motion too is the subjective interpretation of
    changes in things, which changes are determined by the demands of
    the world-system and the purpose being realized in it. Not
    atomism, but dynamism, is the truth. Physical phenomena are
    referable to the activity of the Infinite, which activity is given
    a substantive character because we think under the form of
    substance and attribute. Mechanism is compatible with teleology.
    Mechanism is universal and is necessary to all system. But it is
    limited by purpose, and by the possible appearance of any new law,
    force, or act of freedom.

    “The soul is not a function of material activities, but is a true
    reality. The system is such that it can admit new factors, and the
    soul is one of these possible new factors. The soul is created as
    substantial reality, in contrast with other elements of the
    system, which are only phenomenal manifestations of the One
    Reality. The relation between soul and body is that of interaction
    between the soul and the universe, the body being that part of the
    universe which stands in closest relation with the soul (_versus_
    Bradley, who holds that ‘body and soul alike are phenomenal
    arrangements, neither one of which has any title to fact which is
    not owned by the other’). Thought is a knowledge of reality. We
    must assume an adjustment between subject and object. This
    assumption is founded on the postulate of a morally perfect God.”
    To Lotze, then, the only real creation is that of finite
    personalities,—matter being only a mode of the divine activity.
    See Lotze, Microcosmos, and Philosophy of Religion. Bowne, in his
    Metaphysics and his Philosophy of Theism, is the best expositor of
    Lotze’s system.


In further explanation of our definition we remark that

(_a_) Creation is not “production out of nothing,” as if “nothing” were a
substance out of which “something” could be formed.


    We do not regard the doctrine of Creation as bound to the use of
    the phrase “creation out of nothing,” and as standing or falling
    with it. The phrase is a philosophical one, for which we have no
    Scriptural warrant, and it is objectionable as intimating that
    “nothing” can itself be an object of thought and a source of
    being. The germ of truth intended to be conveyed in it can better
    be expressed in the phrase “without use of preëxisting materials.”


(_b_) Creation is not a fashioning of preëxisting materials, nor an
emanation from the substance of Deity, but is a making of that to exist
which once did not exist, either in form or substance.


    There is nothing divine in creation but the origination of
    substance. Fashioning is competent to the creature also. Gassendi
    said to Descartes that God’s creation, if he is the author of
    forms but not of substances, is only that of the tailor who
    clothes a man with his apparel. But substance is not necessarily
    material. We are to conceive of it rather after the analogy of our
    own ideas and volitions, and as a manifestation of spirit.
    Creation is not simply the thought of God, nor even the plan of
    God, but rather the externalization of that thought and the
    execution of that plan. Nature is “a great sheet let down from God
    out of heaven,” and containing “nothing that is common or
    unclean;” but nature is not God nor a part of God, any more than
    our ideas and volitions are ourselves or a part of ourselves.
    Nature is a partial manifestation of God, but it does not exhaust
    God.


(_c_) Creation is not an instinctive or necessary process of the divine
nature, but is the free act of a rational will, put forth for a definite
and sufficient end.


    Creation is different in kind from that eternal process of the
    divine nature in virtue of which we speak of generation and
    procession. The Son is begotten of the Father, and is of the same
    essence; the world is created without preëxisting material, is
    different from God, and is made by God. Begetting is a necessary
    act; creation is the act of God’s free grace. Begetting is
    eternal, out of time; creation is in time, or with time.

    Studia Biblica, 4:148—“Creation is the voluntary limitation which
    God has imposed on himself.... It can only be regarded as a
    Creation of free spirits.... It is a form of almighty power to
    submit to limitation. Creation is not a development of God, but a
    circumscription of God.... The world is not the expression of God,
    or an emanation from God, but rather his self-limitation.”


(_d_) Creation is the act of the triune God, in the sense that all the
persons of the Trinity, themselves uncreated, have a part in it—the Father
as the originating, the Son as the mediating, the Spirit as the realizing
cause.


    That all of God’s creative activity is exercised through Christ
    has been sufficiently proved in our treatment of the Trinity and
    of Christ’s deity as an element of that doctrine (see pages 310,
    311). We may here refer to the texts which have been previously
    considered, namely, _John 1:3, 4_—“_All things were made through
    him, and without him was not anything made. That which hath been
    made was life in him_”; _1 Cor. 8:6_—“_one Lord, Jesus Christ,
    through whom are all things_”; _Col. 1:16_—“_all things have been
    created through him, and unto him_”; _Heb. 1:10_—“_Thou, Lord, in
    the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth, and the
    heavens are the works of thy hands._”

    The work of the Holy Spirit seems to be that of completing,
    bringing to perfection. We can understand this only by remembering
    that our Christian knowledge and love are brought to their
    consummation by the Holy Spirit, and that he is also the principle
    of our natural self-consciousness, uniting subject and object in a
    subject-object. If matter is conceived of as a manifestation of
    spirit, after the idealistic philosophy, then the Holy Spirit may
    be regarded as the perfecting and realizing agent in the
    externalization of the divine ideas. While it was the Word though
    whom all things were made, the Holy Spirit was the author of life,
    order, and adornment. Creation is not a mere manufacturing,—it is
    a spiritual act.

    John Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1:120—“The creation
    of the world cannot be by a Being who is external. Power
    presupposes an object on which it is exerted. 129—There is in the
    very nature of God a reason why he should reveal himself in, and
    communicate himself to, a world of finite existences, or fulfil
    and realize himself in the being and life of nature and man. His
    nature would not be what it is if such a world did not exist;
    something would be lacking to the completeness of the divine being
    without it. 144—Even with respect to human thought or
    intelligence, it is mind or spirit which creates the world. It is
    not a ready-made world on which we look; in perceiving our world
    we make it. 152-154—We make progress as we cease to think our own
    thoughts and become media of the universal Intelligence.” While we
    accept Caird’s idealistic interpretation of creation, we dissent
    from his intimation that creation is a necessity to God. The
    trinitarian being of God renders him sufficient to himself, even
    without creation. Yet those very trinitarian relations throw light
    upon the method of creation, since they disclose to us the order
    of all the divine activity. On the definition of Creation, see
    Shedd, History of Doctrine, 1:11.


II. Proof of the Doctrine of Creation.


Creation is a truth of which mere science or reason cannot fully assure
us. Physical science can observe and record changes, but it knows nothing
of origins. Reason cannot absolutely disprove the eternity of matter. For
proof of the doctrine of Creation, therefore, we rely wholly upon
Scripture. Scripture supplements science, and renders its explanation of
the universe complete.


    Drummond, in his Natural Law in the Spiritual World, claims that
    atoms, as “manufactured articles,” and the dissipation of energy,
    prove the creation of the visible from the invisible. See the same
    doctrine propounded in “The Unseen Universe.” But Sir Charles
    Lyell tells us: “Geology is the autobiography of the earth,—but
    like all autobiographies, it does not go back to the beginning.”
    Hopkins, Yale Lectures on the Scriptural View of Man: “There is
    nothing _a priori_ against the eternity of matter.” Wardlaw, Syst.
    Theol., 2:65—“We cannot form any distinct conception of creation
    out of nothing. The very idea of it might never have occurred to
    the mind of man, had it not been traditionally handed down as a
    part of the original revelation to the parents of the race.”

    Hartmann, the German philosopher, goes back to the original
    elements of the universe, and then says that science stands
    petrified before the question of their origin, as before a
    Medusa’s head. But in the presence of problems, says Dorner, the
    duty of science is not petrifaction, but solution. This is
    peculiarly true, if science is, as Hartmann thinks, a complete
    explanation of the universe. Since science, by her own
    acknowledgment, furnishes no such explanation of the origin of
    things, the Scripture revelation with regard to creation meets a
    demand of human reason, by adding the one fact without which
    science must forever be devoid of the highest unity and
    rationality. For advocacy of the eternity of matter, see
    Martineau, Essays, 1:157-169.

    E. H. Johnson, in Andover Review, Nov. 1891:505 sq., and Dec.
    1891:592 sq., remarks that evolution can be traced backward to
    more and more simple elements, to matter without motion and with
    no quality but being. Now make it still more simple by divesting
    it of existence, and you get back to the necessity of a Creator.
    An infinite number of past stages is impossible. There is no
    infinite number. Somewhere there must be a beginning. We grant to
    Dr. Johnson that the only alternative to creation is a
    materialistic dualism, or an eternal matter which is the product
    of the divine mind and will. The theories of dualism and of
    creation from eternity we shall discuss hereafter.


1. Direct Scripture Statements.


A. Genesis 1:1—“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” To
this it has been objected that the verb ברא does not necessarily denote
production without the use of preexisting materials (see Gen. 1:27 “God
created man in his own image”; _cf._ 2:7—“the Lord God formed man of the
dust of the ground”; also Ps. 51:10—“Create in me a clean heart”).


    “In the first two chapters of Genesis ברא is used (1) of the
    creation of the universe (_1:1_); (2) of the creation of the great
    sea monsters (_1:21_); (3) of the creation of man (_1:27_).
    Everywhere else we read of God’s _making_, as from an already
    created substance, the firmament (_1:7_), the sun, moon and stars
    (_1:16_), the brute creation (_1:25_); or of his _forming_ the
    beasts of the field out of the ground (_2:19_); or, lastly, of his
    _building up_ into a woman the rib he had taken from man (_2:22_,
    margin)”—quoted from Bible Com., 1:31. Guyot, Creation, 30—“_Bara_
    is thus reserved for marking the first introduction of each of the
    three great spheres of existence—the world of matter, the world of
    life, and the spiritual world represented by man.”


We grant, in reply, that the argument for absolute creation derived from
the mere word ברא is not entirely conclusive. Other considerations in
connection with the use of this word, however, seem to render this
interpretation of Gen. 1:1 the most plausible. Some of these
considerations we proceed to mention.

(_a_) While we acknowledge that the verb ברא “does not necessarily or
invariably denote production without the use of preëxisting materials, we
still maintain that it signifies the production of an effect for which no
natural antecedent existed before, and which can be only the result of
divine agency.” For this reason, in the Kal species it is used only of
God, and is never accompanied by any accusative denoting material.


    No accusative denoting material follows _bara_, in the passages
    indicated, for the reason that all thought of material was absent.
    See Dillmann, Genesis, 18; Oehler, Theol. O. T., 1:177. The
    quotation in the text above is from Green, Hebrew Chrestomathy,
    67. But E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 88, remarks: “Whether
    the Scriptures teach the absolute origination of matter—its
    creation out of nothing—is an open question.... No decisive
    evidence is furnished by the Hebrew word _bara_.”

    A moderate and scholarly statement of the facts is furnished by
    Professor W. J. Beecher, in S. S. Times, Dec. 23, 1893:807—“To
    create is to originate divinely.... Creation, in the sense in
    which the Bible uses the word, does not exclude the use of
    materials previously existing; for man was taken from the ground
    (_Gen. 2:7_), and woman was builded from the rib of a man
    (_2:22_). Ordinarily God brings things into existence through the
    operation of second causes. But it is possible, in our thinking,
    to withdraw attention from the second causes, and to think of
    anything as originating simply from God, apart from second causes.
    To think of a thing thus is to think of it as created. The Bible
    speaks of Israel as created, of the promised prosperity of
    Jerusalem as created, of the Ammonite people and the king of Tyre
    as created, of persons of any date in history as created (_Is.
    43:1-15_; _65:18_; _Ez. 21:30_; _28:13, 15_; _Ps. 102:18_; _Eccl.
    12:1_; _Mal. 2:10_). Miracles and the ultimate beginnings of
    second causes are necessarily thought of as creative acts; all
    other originating of things may be thought of, according to the
    purpose we have in mind, either as creation or as effected by
    second causes.”


(_b_) In the account of the creation, ברא seems to be distinguished from
עשה, “to make” either with or without the use of already existing material
(ברא לעשות, “created in making” or “made by creation,” in 2:3; and ויעש,
of the firmament, in 1:7), and from יצר, “to form” out of such material.
(See ויברא, of man regarded as a spiritual being, in 1:27; but ויצר, of
man regarded as a physical being, in 2:7.)


    See Conant, Genesis, 1; Bible Com., 1:37—“ ‘created to make’ (in
    _Gen. 2:3_) = created out of nothing, in order that he might make
    out of it all the works recorded in the six days.” Over against
    these texts, however, we must set others in which there appears no
    accurate distinguishing of these words from one another. _Bara_ is
    used in _Gen. 1:1_, _asah_ in _Gen. 2:4_, of the creation of the
    heaven and earth. Of earth, both _yatzar_ and _asah_ are used in
    _Is. 45:18_. In regard to man, in _Gen. 1:27_ we find _bara_; in
    _Gen. 1:26_ and _9:6_, _asah_; and in _Gen. 2:7_, _yatzar_. In
    _Is. 43:7_, all three are found in the same verse: “_whom I have_
    _bara_ _for my glory, I have_ _yatzar_, _yea, I have_ _asah_
    _him_.” In _Is. 45:12_, “_asah_ _the earth, and_ _bara_ _man upon
    it_”; but in _Gen. 1:1_ we read: “_God_ _bara_ _the earth_,” and
    in _9:6_ “_asah_ _man_.” _Is. 44:2—__“__the Lord that_ _asah_
    _thee_ (_i. e._, man) and _yatzar_ _thee_”; but in _Gen. 1:27_,
    God “_bara_ _man_.” _Gen. 5:2_—“_male and female_ _bara_ _he
    them_.” _Gen. 2:22_—“_the rib_ _asah_ _he a woman_”; _Gen.
    2:7_—“_he_ _yatzar_ _man_”; _i. e._, _bara_ male and female, yet
    _asah_ the woman and _yatzar_ the man. _Asah_ is not always used
    for _transform_: _Is. 41:20_—“_fir-tree, pine, box-tree_” in
    nature—_bara_; _Ps. 51:10_—“_bara_ _in me a clean heart_”; _Is.
    65:18_—God “_bara_ _Jerusalem into a rejoicing_.”


(_c_) The context shows that the meaning here is a making without the use
of preëxisting materials. Since the earth in its rude, unformed, chaotic
condition is still called “the earth” in verse 2, the word ברא in verse 1
cannot refer to any shaping or fashioning of the elements, but must
signify the calling of them into being.


    Oehler, Theology of O.T., 1:177—“By the absolute _berashith_, ‘_in
    the beginning_,’ the divine creation is fixed as an absolute
    beginning, not as a working on something that already existed.”
    _Verse 2_ cannot be the beginning of a history, for it begins with
    “_and_.” Delitzsch says of the expression “_the earth was without
    form and void_”: “From this it is evident that the void and
    formless state of the earth was not uncreated or without a
    beginning. ... It is evident that ‘_the heaven and earth_’ as God
    created them in the beginning were not the well-ordered universe,
    but the world in its elementary form.”


(_d_) The fact that ברא may have had an original signification of
“cutting,” “forming,” and that it retains this meaning in the Piel
conjugation, need not prejudice the conclusion thus reached, since terms
expressive of the most spiritual processes are derived from sensuous
roots. If ברא does not signify absolute creation, no word exists in the
Hebrew language that can express this idea.

(_e_) But this idea of production without the use of preëxisting materials
unquestionably existed among the Hebrews. The later Scriptures show that
it had become natural to the Hebrew mind. The possession of this idea by
the Hebrews, while it is either not found at all or is very dimly and
ambiguously expressed in the sacred books of the heathen, can be best
explained by supposing that it was derived from this early revelation in
Genesis.


    E. H. Johnson, Outline of Syst. Theol., 94—“_Rom. 4:17_ tells us
    that the faith of Abraham, to whom God had promised a son, grasped
    the fact that God calls into existence ‘_the things that are
    not_.’ This may be accepted as Paul’s interpretation of the first
    verse of the Bible.” It is possible that the heathen had
    occasional glimpses of this truth, though with no such clearness
    as that with which it was held in Israel. Perhaps we may say that
    through the perversions of later nature-worship something of the
    original revelation of absolute creation shines, as the first
    writing of a palimpsest appears faintly through the subsequent
    script with which it has been overlaid. If the doctrine of
    absolute creation is found at all among the heathen, it is greatly
    blurred and obscured. No one of the heathen books teaches it as do
    the sacred Scriptures of the Hebrews. Yet it seems as if this “One
    accent of the Holy Ghost The heedless world has never lost.”

    Bib. Com., 1:31—“Perhaps no other ancient language, however
    refined and philosophical, could have so dearly distinguished the
    different acts of the Maker of all things [as the Hebrew did With
    its four different words], and that because all heathen philosophy
    esteemed matter to be eternal and uncreated.” Prof. E. D. Burton:
    “Brahmanism, and the original religion of which Zoroastrianism was
    a reformation, were Eastern and Western divisions of a primitive
    Aryan, and probably monotheistic, religion. The Vedas, which
    represented the Brahmanism, leave it a question whence the world
    came, whether from God by emanation, or by the shaping of material
    eternally existent. Later Brahmanism is pantheistic, and Buddhism,
    the Reformation of Brahmanism, is atheistic.” See Shedd, Dogm.
    Theol., 1:471, and Mosheim’s references in Cudworth’s Intellectual
    System, 3:140.

    We are inclined still to hold that the doctrine of absolute
    creation was known to no other ancient nation besides the Hebrews.
    Recent investigations, however, render this somewhat more doubtful
    than it once seemed to be. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, 142, 143,
    finds creation among the early Babylonians. In his Religions of
    Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, 372-397, he says: “The elements of
    Hebrew cosmology are all Babylonian; even the creative word itself
    was a Babylonian conception; but the spirit which inspires the
    cosmology is the antithesis to that which inspired the cosmology
    of Babylonia. Between the polytheism of Babylonia and the
    monotheism of Israel a gulf is fixed which cannot be spanned. So
    soon as we have a clear monotheism, absolute creation is a
    corollary. As the monotheistic idea is corrupted, creation gives
    place to pantheistic transformation.”

    It is now claimed by others that Zoroastrianism, the Vedas, and
    the religion of the ancient Egyptians had the idea of absolute
    creation. On creation in the Zoroastrian system, see our treatment
    of Dualism, page 382. Vedic hymn in Rig Veda, 10:9, quoted by J.
    F. Clarke, Ten Great Religions, 2:205—“Originally this universe
    was soul only; nothing else whatsoever existed, active or
    inactive. He thought: ‘I will create worlds’; thus he created
    these various worlds: earth, light, mortal being, and the waters.”
    Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 216-222, speaks of a papyrus on the
    staircase of the British Museum, which reads: “The great God, the
    Lord of heaven and earth, who made all things which are ... the
    almighty God, self-existent, who made heaven and earth; ... the
    heaven was yet uncreated, uncreated was the earth; thou hast put
    together the earth; ... who made all things, but was not made.”

    But the Egyptian religion in its later development, as well as
    Brahmanism, was pantheistic, and it is possible that all the
    expressions we have quoted are to be interpreted, not as
    indicating a belief in creation out of nothing, but as asserting
    emanation, or the taking on by deity of new forms and modes of
    existence. On creation in heathen systems, see Pierret,
    Mythologie, and answer to it by Maspero; Hymn to Amen-Rha, in
    “Records of the Past”; G. C. Müller, Literature of Greece, 87, 88;
    George Smith, Chaldean Genesis, chapters 1, 3, 5 and 6; Dillmann,
    Com. on Genesis, 6th edition, Introd., 5-10; LeNormant, Hist.
    Ancienne de l’Orient, 1:17-26; 5:238; Otto Zöckler, art.:
    Schöpfung, in Herzog and Plitt, Encyclop.; S. B. Gould, Origin and
    Devel. of Relig. Beliefs, 281-292.


B. Hebrews 11:3—“By faith we understand that the worlds have been framed
by the word of God, so that what is seen hath not been made out of things
which appear” = the world was not made out of sensible and preëxisting
material, but by the direct fiat of omnipotence (see Alford, and Lünemann,
Meyer’s Com. _in loco_).


    Compare 2 Maccabees 7:28—ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων ἐποίησεν αὐτὰ ὁ Θεός. This
    the Vulgate translated by “quia ex nihilo fecit illa Deus,” and
    from the Vulgate the phrase “creation out of nothing” is derived.
    Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, points out that Wisdom 11:17 has ἐξ
    ἀμόρφου ὕλης, interprets by this the ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων in 2 Maccabees,
    and denies that this last refers to creation out of nothing. But
    we must remember that the later Apocryphal writings were composed
    under the influence of the Platonic philosophy; that the passage
    in Wisdom may be a rationalistic interpretation of that in
    Maccabees; and that even if it were independent, we are not to
    assume a harmony of view in the Apocrypha. 2 Maccabees 7:28 must
    stand by itself as a testimony to Jewish belief in creation
    without use of preëxisting material,—belief which can be traced to
    no other source than the Old Testament Scriptures. Compare _Ex.
    34:10_—“_I will do marvels such as have not been wrought_ [marg.
    “_created_”] _in all the earth_”; _Num. 16:30_—“_if Jehovah make a
    new thing_” [marg. “_create a creation_”]; _Is. 4:5_—“_Jehovah
    will create ... a cloud and smoke_”; _41:20_—“_the Holy One of
    Israel hath created it_”; _45:7, 8_—“_I form the light, and create
    darkness_”; _57:19_—“_I create the fruit of the lips_”;
    _65:17_—“_I create new heavens and a new earth_”; _Jer.
    31:22_—“_Jehovah hath created a new thing._”

    _Rom. 4:17_—“_God, who giveth life to the dead, and calleth the
    things that are not, as though they were_”; _1 Cor. 1:28_—“_things
    that are not_” [did God choose] “_that he might bring to naught
    the things that are_”; _2 Cor. 4:6_—“_God, that said, Light shall
    shine out of darkness_”—created light without preëxisting
    material,—for darkness is no material; _Col. 1:16, 17_—“_in him
    were all things created ... and he is before all things_”; so also
    _Ps. 33:9_—“_he spake, and it was done_”; _148:5_—“_he commanded,
    and they were created._” See Philo, Creation of the World, chap.
    1-7, and Life of Moses, book 3, chap. 36—“He produced the most
    perfect work, the Cosmos, out of non-existence (τοῦ μὴ ὄντος) into
    being (εἰς τὸ εἶναι).” E. H. Johnson, Syst. Theol., 94—“We have no
    reason to believe that the Hebrew mind had the idea of creation
    out of _invisible_ materials. But creation out of _visible_
    materials is in _Hebrews 11:3_ expressly denied. This text is
    therefore equivalent to an assertion that the universe was made
    without the use of _any_ preëxisting materials.”


2. Indirect evidence from Scripture.


(_a_) The past duration of the world is limited; (_b_) before the world
began to be, each of the persons of the Godhead already existed; (_c_) the
origin of the universe is ascribed to God, and to each of the persons of
the Godhead. These representations of Scripture are not only most
consistent with the view that the universe was created by God without use
of preëxisting material, but they are inexplicable upon any other
hypothesis.


    (_a_) _Mark 13:19_—“_from the beginning of the creation which God
    created until now_”; _John 17:5_—“_before the world was_”; _Eph.
    1:4_—“_before the foundation of the world._” (_b_) _Ps.
    90:2_—“_Before the mountains were brought forth, Or ever thou
    hadst formed the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to
    everlasting thou art God_”; _Prov. 8:23_—“_I was set up from
    everlasting, from the beginning, Before the earth was_”; _John
    1:1_—“_In the beginning was the Word_”; _Col. 1:17_—“_he is before
    all things_”; _Heb. 9:14_—“_the eternal Spirit_” (see Tholuck,
    Com. _in loco_). (_c_) _Eph. 3:9_—“_God who created all things_”;
    _Rom. 11:36_—“_of him ... are all things_”; _1 Cor. 8:6_—“_one
    God, the Father, of whom we are all things ... one Lord, Jesus
    Christ, through whom are all things_”; _John 1:3_—“_all things
    were made through him_”; _Col 1:16_—“_in him were all things
    created ... all things have been created through him, and unto
    him_”; _Heb. 1:2_—“_through whom also he made the worlds_”; _Gen.
    1:2_—“_and the Spirit of God moved_ [marg. “_was brooding_”] _upon
    the face of the waters._” From these passages we may also infer
    that (1) all things are absolutely dependent upon God; (2) God
    exercises supreme control over all things; (3) God is the only
    infinite Being; (4) God alone is eternal; (5) there is no
    substance out of which God creates; (6) things do not proceed from
    God by necessary emanation; the universe has its source and
    originator in God’s transcendent and personal will. See, on this
    indirect proof of creation, Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:231. Since
    other views, however, have been held to be more rational, we
    proceed to the examination of


III. Theories which oppose Creation.


1. Dualism.


Of dualism there are two forms:

A. That which holds to two self-existent principles, God and matter. These
are distinct from and coëternal with each other. Matter, however, is an
unconscious, negative, and imperfect substance, which is subordinate to
God and is made the instrument of his will. This was the underlying
principle of the Alexandrian Gnostics. It was essentially an attempt to
combine with Christianity the Platonic or Aristotelian conception of the
ὕλη. In this way it was thought to account for the existence of evil, and
to escape the difficulty of imagining a production without use of
preëxisting material. Basilides (flourished 125) and Valentinus (died
160), the representatives of this view, were influenced also by Hindu
philosophy, and their dualism is almost indistinguishable from pantheism.
A similar view has been held in modern times by John Stuart Mill and
apparently by Frederick W. Robertson.


    Dualism seeks to show how the One becomes the many, how the
    Absolute gives birth to the relative, how the Good can consist
    with evil. The ὕλη of Plato seems to have meant nothing but empty
    space, whose not-being, or merely negative existence, prevented
    the full realization of the divine ideas. Aristotle regarded the
    ὕλη as a more positive cause of imperfection,—it was like the hard
    material which hampers the sculptor in expressing his thought. The
    real problem for both Plato and Aristotle was to explain the
    passage from pure spiritual existence to that which is phenomenal
    and imperfect, from the absolute and unlimited to that which
    exists in space and time. Finiteness, instead of being created,
    was regarded as having eternal existence and as limiting all
    divine manifestations. The ὕλη, from being a mere abstraction,
    became either a negative or a positive source of evil. The
    Alexandrian Jews, under the influence of Hellenic culture, sought
    to make this dualism explain the doctrine of creation.

    Basilides and Valentinus, however, were also under the influence
    of a pantheistic philosophy brought in from the remote East—the
    philosophy of Buddhism, which taught that the original Source of
    all was a nameless Being, devoid of all qualities, and so,
    indistinguishable from Nothing. From this Being, which is
    Not-being, all existing things proceed. Aristotle and Hegel
    similarly taught that pure Being = Nothing. But inasmuch as the
    object of the Alexandrian philosophers was to show how something
    could be originated, they were obliged to conceive of the
    primitive Nothing as capable of such originating. They, moreover,
    in the absence of any conception of absolute creation, were
    compelled to conceive of a material which could be fashioned.
    Hence the Void, the Abyss, is made to take the place of matter. If
    it be said that they did not conceive of the Void or the Abyss as
    substance, we reply that they gave it just as substantial
    existence as they gave to the first Cause of things, which, in
    spite of their negative descriptions of it, involved Will and
    Design. And although they do not attribute to this secondary
    substance a positive influence for evil, they notwithstanding see
    in it the unconscious hinderer of all good.

    Principal Tulloch, in Encyc. Brit., 10:704—“In the Alexandrian
    Gnosis ... the stream of being in its ever outward flow at length
    comes in contact with dead matter which thus receives animation
    and becomes a living source of evil.” Windelband, Hist.
    Philosophy, 129, 144, 239—“With Valentinus, side by side with the
    Deity poured forth into the Pleroma or Fulness of spiritual forms,
    appears the Void, likewise original and from eternity; beside Form
    appears matter; beside the good appears the evil.” Mansel, Gnostic
    Heresies, 139—“The Platonic theory of an inert, semi-existent
    matter, ... was adopted by the Gnosis of Egypt.... 187—Valentinus
    does not content himself, like Plato, ... with assuming as the
    germ of the natural world an unformed matter existing from all
    eternity.... The whole theory may be described as a development,
    in allegorical language of the pantheistic hypothesis which in its
    outline had been previously adopted by Basilides.” A. H. Newman,
    Ch. History, 1:181-192, calls the philosophy of Basilides
    “fundamentally pantheistic.” “Valentinus,” he says, “was not so
    careful to insist on the original non-existence of God and
    everything.” We reply that even to Basilides the Non-existent One
    is endued with power; and this power accomplishes nothing until it
    comes in contact with things non-existent, and out of them
    fashions the seed of the world. The things non-existent are as
    substantial as is the Fashioner, and they imply both objectivity
    and limitation.

    Lightfoot, Com. on Colossians, 76-113, esp. 82, has traced a
    connection between the Gnostic doctrine, the earlier Colossian
    heresy, and the still earlier teaching of the Essenes of
    Palestine. All these were characterized by (1) the spirit of caste
    or intellectual exclusiveness; (2) peculiar tenets as to creation
    and as to evil; (3) practical asceticism. Matter is evil and
    separates man from God; hence intermediate beings between man and
    God as objects of worship; hence also mortification of the body as
    a means of purifying man from sin. Paul’s antidote for both errors
    was simply the person of Christ, the true and only Mediator and
    Sanctifier. See Guericke, Church History, 1:161.

    Harnack, Hist. Dogma, 1:128—“The majority of Gnostic undertakings
    may be viewed as attempts to transform Christianity into a
    theosophy.... In Gnosticism the Hellenic spirit desired to make
    itself master of Christianity, or more correctly, of the Christian
    communities.”... 232—Harnack represents one of the fundamental
    philosophic doctrines of Gnosticism to be that of the Cosmos as a
    mixture of matter with divine sparks, which has arisen from a
    descent of the latter into the former [Alexandrian Gnosticism],
    or, as some say, from the perverse, or at least merely permitted
    undertaking of a subordinate spirit [Syrian Gnosticism]. We may
    compare the Hebrew Sadducee with the Greek Epicurean; the Pharisee
    with the Stoic; the Essene with the Pythagorean. The Pharisees
    overdid the idea of God’s transcendence. Angels must come in
    between God and the world. Gnostic intermediaries were the logical
    outcome. External works of obedience were alone valid. Christ
    preached, instead of this, a religion of the heart. Wendt,
    Teaching of Jesus, 1:52—“The rejection of animal sacrifices and
    consequent abstaining from temple-worship on the part of the
    Essenes, which seems out of harmony with the rest of their legal
    obedience, is most simply explained as the consequence of their
    idea that to bring to God a bloody animal offering was derogatory
    to his transcendental character. Therefore they interpreted the O.
    T. command in an allegorizing way.”

    Lyman Abbott: “The Oriental dreams; the Greek defines; the Hebrew
    acts. All these influences met and intermingled at Alexandria.
    Emanations were mediations between the absolute, unknowable,
    all-containing God, and the personal, revealed and holy God of
    Scripture. Asceticism was one result: matter is undivine,
    therefore get rid of it. License was another result: matter is
    undivine, therefore disregard it—there is no disease and there is
    no sin—the modern doctrine of Christian Science.” Kedney,
    Christian Doctrine, 1:360-373; 2:354, conceives of the divine
    glory as an eternal material environment of God, out of which the
    universe is fashioned.

    The author of “The Unseen Universe” (page 17) wrongly calls John
    Stuart Mill a Manichæan. But Mill disclaims belief in the
    _personality_ of this principle that resists and limits God,—see
    his posthumous Essays on Religion, 176-195. F. W. Robertson,
    Lectures on Genesis, 4-16—“Before the creation of the world all
    was chaos ... but with the creation, order began.... God did not
    cease from creation, for creation is going on every day. Nature is
    God at work. Only after surprising changes, as in spring-time, do
    we say figuratively, ‘God rests.’ ” See also Frothingham,
    Christian Philosophy.


With regard to this view, we remark:

(_a_) The maxim _ex nihilo nihil fit_, upon which it rests, is true only
in so far as it asserts that no event takes place without a cause. It is
false, if it mean that nothing can ever be made except out of material
previously existing. The maxim is therefore applicable only to the realm
of second causes, and does not bar the creative power of the great first
Cause. The doctrine of creation does not dispense with a cause; on the
other hand, it assigns to the universe a sufficient cause in God.


    Lucretius: “Nihil posse creari De nihilo, neque quod genitum est
    ad nihil revocari.” Persius: “Gigni De nihilo nihil, in nihilum
    nil posse reverti.” Martensen, Dogmatics, 116—“The nothing, out of
    which God creates the world, is the eternal possibilities of his
    will, which are the sources of all the actualities of the world.”
    Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 2:292—“When therefore it is
    argued that the creation of something from nothing is unthinkable
    and is therefore peremptorily to be rejected, the argument seems
    to me to be defective. The process is thinkable, but not
    imaginable, conceivable but not probable.” See Cudworth,
    Intellectual System, 3:81 _sq._ Lipsius, Dogmatik, 288, remarks
    that the theory of dualism is quite as difficult as that of
    absolute creation. It holds to a point of time when God began to
    fashion preëxisting material, and can give no reason why God did
    not do it before, since there must always have been in him an
    impulse toward this fashioning.


(_b_) Although creation without the use of preëxisting material is
inconceivable, in the sense of being unpicturable to the imagination, yet
the eternity of matter is equally inconceivable. For creation without
preëxisting material, moreover, we find remote analogies in our own
creation of ideas and volitions, a fact as inexplicable as God’s bringing
of new substances into being.


    Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 371, 372—“We have to a certain extent
    an aid to the thought of absolute creation in our own free
    volition, which, as absolutely originating and determining, may be
    taken as the type to us of the creative act.” We speak of “the
    creative faculty” of the artist or poet. We cannot give reality to
    the products of our imaginations, as God can to his. But if
    thought were only substance, the analogy would be complete. Shedd,
    Dogm. Theol., 1:467—“Our thoughts and volitions are created ex
    nihilo, in the sense that one thought is not made out of another
    thought, nor one volition out of another volition.” So created
    substance may be only the mind and will of God in exercise,
    automatically in matter, freely in the case of free beings (see
    pages 90, 105-110, 383, and in our treatment of Preservation).

    Beddoes: “I have a bit of _Fiat_ in my soul, And can myself create
    my little world.” Mark Hopkins: “Man is an image of God as a
    creator.... He can purposely create, or cause to be, a future
    that, but for him, would not have been.” E. C. Stedman, Nature of
    Poetry, 223—“So far as the Poet, the artist, is creative, he
    becomes a sharer of the divine imagination and power, and even of
    the divine responsibility.” Wordsworth calls the poet a “serene
    creator of immortal things.” Imagination, he says, is but another
    name for “clearest insight, amplitude of mind, And reason in her
    most exalted mood.” “If we are ‘_gods_’ (_Ps. 82:6_), that part of
    the Infinite which is embodied in us must partake to a limited
    extent of his power to create.” Veitch, Knowing and Being,
    289—“Will, the expression of personality, both as originating
    resolutions and moulding existing material into form, is the
    nearest approach in thought which we can make to divine creation.”

    Creation is not simply the thought of God,—it is also the will of
    God—thought in expression, reason externalized. Will is creation
    out of nothing, in the sense that there is no use of preëxisting
    material. In man’s exercise of the creative imagination there is
    will, as well as intellect. Royce, Studies of Good and Evil, 256,
    points out that we can be original in (1) the style or form of our
    work; (2) in the selection of the objects we imitate; (3) in the
    invention of relatively novel combinations of material. Style,
    subject, combination, then, comprise the methods of our
    originality. Our new conceptions of nature as the expression of
    the divine mind and will bring creation more within our
    comprehension than did the old conception of the world as
    substance capable of existing apart from God. Hudson, Law of
    Psychic Phenomena, 294, thinks that we have power to create
    visible phantasms, or embodied thoughts, that can be subjectively
    perceived by others. See also Hudson’s Scientific Demonstration of
    Future Life, 153. He defines genius as the result of the
    synchronous action of the objective and subjective faculties.
    Jesus of Nazareth, in his judgment, was a wonderful psychic.
    Intuitive perception and objective reason were with him always in
    the ascendant. His miracles were misinterpreted psychic phenomena.
    Jesus never claimed that his works were outside of natural law.
    All men have the same intuitional power, though in differing
    degrees.

    We may add that the begetting of a child by man is the giving of
    substantial existence to another. Christ’s creation of man may be
    like his own begetting by the Father. Behrends: “The relation
    between God and the universe is more intimate and organic than
    that between an artist and his work. The marble figure is
    independent of the sculptor the moment it is completed. It
    remains, though he die. But the universe would vanish in the
    withdrawal of the divine presence and indwelling. If I were to use
    any figure, it would be that of generation. The immanence of God
    is the secret of natural permanence and uniformity. Creation is
    primarily a spiritual act. The universe is not what we see and
    handle. The real universe is an empire of energies, a hierarchy of
    correlated forces, whose reality and unity are rooted in the
    rational will of God perpetually active in preservation. But there
    is no identity of substance, nor is there any division of the
    divine substance.”

    Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 36—“A mind is conceivable
    which should create its objects outright by pure self-activity and
    without dependence on anything beyond itself. Such is our
    conception of the Creator’s relation to his objects. But this is
    not the case with us except to a very slight extent. Our mental
    life itself begins, and we come only gradually to a knowledge of
    things, and of ourselves. In some sense our objects are given;
    that is, we cannot have objects at will or vary their properties
    at our pleasure. In this sense we are passive in knowledge, and no
    idealism can remove this fact. But in some sense also our objects
    are our own products; for an existing object becomes an object for
    us only as we think it, and thus make it our object. In this
    sense, knowledge is an active process, and not a passive reception
    of readymade information from without.” Clarke, Self and the
    Father, 38—“Are we humiliated by having data for our imaginations
    to work upon? by being unable to create material? Not unless it be
    a shame to be second to the Creator.” Causation is as mysterious
    as Creation. Balzac lived with his characters as actual beings. On
    the Creative Principle, see N. R. Wood, The Witness of Sin,
    114-135.


(_c_) It is unphilosophical to postulate two eternal substances, when one
self-existent Cause of all things will account for the facts. (_d_) It
contradicts our fundamental notion of God as absolute sovereign to suppose
the existence of any other substance to be independent of his will. (_e_)
This second substance with which God must of necessity work, since it is,
according to the theory, inherently evil and the source of evil, not only
limits God’s power, but destroys his blessedness. (_f_) This theory does
not answer its purpose of accounting for moral evil, unless it be also
assumed that spirit is material,—in which case dualism gives place to
materialism.


    Martensen, Dogmatics, 121—“God becomes a mere demiurge, if nature
    existed before spirit. That spirit only who in a perfect sense is
    able to commence his work of creation can have power to complete
    it.” If God does not create, he must use what material he finds,
    and this working with intractable material must be his perpetual
    sorrow. Such limitation in the power of the deity seemed to John
    Stuart Mill the best explanation of the existing imperfections of
    the universe.


The other form of dualism is:

B. That which holds to the eternal existence of two antagonistic spirits,
one evil and the other good. In this view, matter is not a negative and
imperfect substance which nevertheless has self-existence, but is either
the work or the instrument of a personal and positively malignant
intelligence, who wages war against all good. This was the view of the
Manichæans. Manichæanism is a compound of Christianity and the Persian
doctrine of two eternal and opposite intelligences. Zoroaster, however,
held matter to be pure, and to be the creation of the good Being. Mani
apparently regarded matter as captive to the evil spirit, if not
absolutely his creation.


    The old story of Mani’s travels in Greece is wholly a mistake.
    Guericke, Church History, 1:185-187, maintains that Manichæanism
    contains no mixture of Platonic philosophy, has no connection with
    Judaism, and as a sect came into no direct relations with the
    Catholic church. Harnoch, Wegweiser, 22, calls Manichæanism a
    compound of Gnosticism and Parseeism. Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.:
    Mani und die Manichäer, regards Manichæanism as the fruit, acme,
    and completion of Gnosticism. Gnosticism was a heresy in the
    church; Manichæanism, like New Platonism, was an anti-church. J.
    P. Lange: “These opposing theories represent various pagan
    conceptions of the world, which, after the manner of palimpsests,
    show through Christianity.” Isaac Taylor speaks of “the creator of
    the carnivora”; and some modern Christians practically regard
    Satan as a second and equal God.

    On the Religion of Zoroaster, see Haug, Essays on Parsees,
    139-161, 302-309; also our quotations on pp. 347-349; Monier
    Williams, in 19th Century, Jan. 1881:155-177—Ahura Mazda was the
    creator of the universe. Matter was created by him, and was
    neither identified with him nor an emanation from him. In the
    divine nature there were two opposite, but not opposing,
    principles or forces, called “twins”—the one constructive, the
    other destructive; the one beneficent, the other maleficent.
    Zoroaster called these “twins” also by the name of “spirits,” and
    declared that “these two spirits created, the one the reality, the
    other the non-reality.” Williams says that these two principles
    were conflicting only in name. The only antagonism was between the
    resulting good and evil brought about by the free agent, man. See
    Jackson, Zoroaster.

    We may add that in later times this personification of principles
    in the deity seems to have become a definite belief in two
    opposing personal spirits, and that Mani, Manes, or Manichæus
    adopted this feature of Parseeism, with the addition of certain
    Christian elements. Hagenbach, History of Doctrine, 1:470—“The
    doctrine of the Manichæans was that creation was the work of
    Satan.” See also Gieseler, Church History, 1:203; Neander, Church
    History, 1:478-505; Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theology, art.:
    Dualism; and especially Baur, Das manichäische Religionssystem. A.
    H. Newman, Ch. History, 1:194—“Manichæism is Gnosticism, with its
    Christian elements reduced to a minimum, and the Zoroastrian, old
    Babylonian, and other Oriental elements raised to the maximum.
    Manichæism is Oriental dualism under Christian names, the
    Christian names employed retaining scarcely a trace of their
    proper meaning. The most fundamental thing in Manichæism is its
    absolute dualism. The kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness
    with their rulers stand eternally opposed to each other.”


Of this view we need only say that it is refuted (_a_) by all the
arguments for the unity, omnipotence, sovereignty, and blessedness of God;
(_b_) by the Scripture representations of the prince of evil as the
creature of God and as subject to God’s control.


    Scripture passages showing that Satan is God’s creature or subject
    are the following: _Col. 1:16_—“_for in him were all things
    created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and
    things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities
    or powers_”; _cf._ _Eph. 6:12_—“_our wrestling is not against
    flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the
    powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the
    spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places_”; _2 Pet.
    2:4_—“_God spared not the angels when they sinned, but cast them
    down to hell, and committed them to pits of darkness, to be
    reserved unto judgment_”; _Rev. 20:2_—“_laid hold on the dragon,
    the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan_”; _10_—“_and the
    devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and
    brimstone._”

    The closest analogy to Manichæan dualism is found in the popular
    conception of the devil held by the mediæval Roman church. It is a
    question whether he was regarded as a rival or as a servant of
    God. Matheson, Messages of Old Religions, says that Parseeism
    recognizes an obstructive element in the nature of God himself.
    Moral evil is reality, and there is that element of truth in
    Parseeism. But there is no reconciliation, nor is it shown that
    all things work together for good. E. H. Johnson: “This theory
    sets up matter as a sort of deity, a senseless idol endowed with
    the truly divine attribute of self-existence. But we can
    acknowledge but one God. To erect matter into an eternal Thing,
    independent of the Almighty but forever beside him, is the most
    revolting of all theories.” Tennyson, Unpublished Poem (Life,
    1:314)—“Oh me! for why is all around us here As if some lesser God
    had made the world, But had not force to shape it as he would Till
    the high God behold it from beyond, And enter it and make it
    beautiful?”

    E. G. Robinson: “Evil is not eternal; if it were, we should be
    paying our respects to it.... There is much Manichæanism in modern
    piety. We would influence soul through the body. Hence
    sacramentarianism and penance. Puritanism is theological
    Manichæanism. Christ recommended fasting because it belonged to
    his age. Christianity came from Judaism. Churchism comes largely
    from reproducing what Christ did. Christianity is not perfunctory
    in its practices. We are to fast only when there is good reason
    for it.” L. H. Mills, New World, March, 1895:51, suggests that
    Phariseeism may be the same with Farseeism, which is but another
    name for Parseeism. He thinks that Resurrection, Immortality,
    Paradise, Satan, Judgment, Hell, came from Persian sources, and
    gradually drove out the old Sadduceean simplicity. Pfleiderer,
    Philos, Religion, 1:206—“According to the Persian legend, the
    first human pair was a good creation of the all-wise Spirit,
    Ahura, who had breathed into them his own breath. But soon the
    primeval men allowed themselves to be seduced by the hostile
    Spirit Angromainyu into lying and idolatry, whereby the evil
    spirits obtained power over them and the earth and spoiled the
    good creation.”

    Disselhoff, Die klassische Poesie und die göttliche Offenbarung,
    13-25—“The Gathas of Zoroaster are the first poems of humanity. In
    them man rouses himself to assert his superiority to nature and
    the spirituality of God. God is not identified with nature. The
    impersonal nature-gods are vain idols and are causes of
    corruption. Their worshippers are servants of falsehood.
    Ahura-Mazda (living-wise) is a moral and spiritual personality.
    Ahriman is equally eternal but not equally powerful. Good has not
    complete victory over evil. Dualism is admitted and unity is lost.
    The conflict of faiths leads to separation. While one portion of
    the race remains in the Iranian highlands to maintain man’s
    freedom and independence of nature, another portion goes
    South-East to the luxuriant banks of the Ganges to serve the
    deified forces of nature. The East stands for unity, as the West
    for duality. Yet Zoroaster in the Gathas is almost deified; and
    his religion, which begins by giving predominance to the good
    Spirit, ends by being honey-combed with nature-worship.”


2. Emanation.


This theory holds that the universe is of the same substance with God, and
is the product of successive evolutions from his being. This was the view
of the Syrian Gnostics. Their system was an attempt to interpret
Christianity in the forms of Oriental theosophy. A similar doctrine was
taught, in the last century, by Swedenborg.

We object to it on the following grounds: (_a_) It virtually denies the
infinity and transcendence of God,—by applying to him a principle of
evolution, growth, and progress which belongs only to the finite and
imperfect. (_b_) It contradicts the divine holiness,—since man, who by the
theory is of the substance of God, is nevertheless morally evil. (_c_) It
leads logically to pantheism,—since the claim that human personality is
illusory cannot be maintained without also surrendering belief in the
personality of God.


    Saturninus of Antioch, Bardesanes of Edessa, Tatian of Assyria,
    Marcion of Sinope, all of the second century, were representatives
    of this view. Blunt, Dict. of Doct. and Hist. Theology, art.:
    Emanation: “The divine operation was symbolized by the image of
    the rays of light proceeding from the sun, which were most intense
    when nearest to the luminous substance of the body of which they
    formed a part, but which decreased in intensity as they receded
    from their source, until at last they disappeared altogether in
    darkness. So the spiritual effulgence of the Supreme Mind formed a
    world of spirit, the intensity of which varied inversely with its
    distance from its source, until at length it vanished in matter.
    Hence there is a chain of ever expanding Æons which are increasing
    attenuations of his substance and the sum of which constitutes his
    fulness, _i. e._, the complete revelation of his hidden being.”
    Emanation, from _e_, and _manare_, to flow forth. Guericke, Church
    History, 1:160—“many flames from one light ... the direct contrary
    to the doctrine of creation from nothing.” Neander, Church
    History, 1:372-74. The doctrine of emanation is distinctly
    materialistic. We hold, on the contrary, that the universe is an
    expression of God, but not an emanation from God.

    On the difference between Oriental emanation and eternal
    generation, see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:470, and History Doctrine,
    1:11-18, 318, note—“1. That which is eternally generated is
    infinite, not finite; it is a divine and eternal person who is not
    the world or any portion of it. In the Oriental schemes, emanation
    is a mode of accounting for the origin of the finite. But eternal
    generation still leaves the finite to be originated. The begetting
    of the Son is the generation of an infinite person who afterwards
    creates the finite universe _de nihilo_. 2. Eternal generation has
    for its result a subsistence or personal hypostasis totally
    distinct from the world; but emanation In relation to the deity
    yields only an impersonal or at most a personified energy or
    effluence which is one of the powers or principles of nature—a
    mere _anima mundi_.” The truths of which emanation was the
    perversion and caricature were therefore the generation of the Son
    and the procession of the Spirit.

    Principal Tulloch, in Encyc. Brit., 10:704—“All the Gnostics agree
    in regarding this world as not proceeding immediately from the
    Supreme Being.... The Supreme Being is regarded as wholly
    inconceivable and indescribable—as the unfathomable Abyss
    (Valentinus)—the Unnameable (Basilides). From this transcendent
    source existence springs by emanation in a series of spiritual
    powers.... The passage from the higher spiritual world to the
    lower material one is, on the one hand, apprehended as a mere
    continued degeneracy from the Source of Life, at length
    terminating in the kingdom of darkness and death—the bordering
    chaos surrounding the kingdom of light. On the other hand the
    passage is apprehended in a more precisely dualistic form, as a
    positive invasion of the kingdom of light by a self-existent
    kingdom of darkness. According as Gnosticism adopted one or other
    of these modes of explaining the existence of the present world,
    it fell into the two great divisions which, from their places of
    origin, have received the respective names of the Alexandrian and
    Syrian Gnosis. The one, as we have seen, presents more a Western,
    the other more an Eastern type of speculation. The dualistic
    element in the one case scarcely appears beneath the pantheistic,
    and bears resemblance to the Platonic notion of the ὕλη, a mere
    blank necessity, a limitless void. In the other case, the
    dualistic element is clear and prominent, corresponding to the
    Zarathustrian doctrine of an active principle of evil as well as
    of good—of a kingdom of Ahriman, as well as a kingdom of Ormuzd.
    In the Syrian Gnosis ... there appears from the first a hostile
    principle of evil in collision with the good.”

    We must remember that dualism is an attempt to substitute for the
    doctrine of absolute creation, a theory that matter and evil are
    due to something negative or positive outside of God. Dualism is a
    theory of origins, not of results. Keeping this in mind, we may
    call the Alexandrian Gnostics dualists, while we regard emanation
    as the characteristic teaching of the Syrian Gnostics. These
    latter made matter to be only an efflux from God and evil only a
    degenerate form of good. If the Syrians held the world to be
    independent of God, this independence was conceived of only as a
    later result or product, not as an original fact. Some like
    Saturninus and Bardesanes verged toward Manichæan doctrine; others
    like Tatian and Marcion toward Egyptian dualism; but all held to
    emanation as the philosophical explanation of what the Scriptures
    call creation. These remarks will serve as qualification and
    criticism of the opinions which we proceed to quote.

    Sheldon, Ch. Hist., 1:206—“The Syrians were in general more
    dualistic than the Alexandrians. Some, after the fashion of the
    Hindu pantheists, regarded the material realm as the region of
    emptiness and illusion, the void opposite of the Pleroma, that
    world of spiritual reality and fulness; others assigned a more
    positive nature to the material, and regarded it as capable of an
    evil aggressiveness even apart from any quickening by the incoming
    of life from above.” Mansel, Gnostic Heresies, 139—“Like
    Saturninus, Bardesanes is said to have combined the doctrine of
    the malignity of matter with that of an active principle of evil;
    and he connected together these two usually antagonistic theories
    by maintaining that the inert matter was co-eternal with God,
    while Satan as the active principle of evil was produced from
    matter (or, according to another statement, co-eternal with it),
    and acted in conjunction with it. 142—The feature which is usually
    selected as characteristic of the Syrian Gnosis is the doctrine of
    dualism; that is to say, the assumption of the existence of two
    active and independent principles, the one of good, the other of
    evil. This assumption was distinctly held by Saturninus and
    Bardesanes ... in contradistinction to the Platonic theory of an
    inert semi-existent matter, which was adopted by the Gnosis of
    Egypt. The former principle found its logical development in the
    next century in Manichæaism; the latter leads with almost equal
    certainty to Pantheism.”

    A. H. Newman, Ch. History, 1:192—“Marcion did not speculate as to
    the origin of evil. The Demiurge and his kingdom are apparently
    regarded as existing from eternity. Matter he regarded as
    intrinsically evil, and he practised a rigid asceticism.” Mansel,
    Gnostic Heresies, 210—“Marcion did not, with the majority of the
    Gnostics, regard the Demiurge as a derived and dependent being,
    whose imperfection is due to his remoteness from the highest
    Cause; nor yet, according to the Persian doctrine, did he assume
    an eternal principle of pure malignity. His second principle is
    independent of and co-eternal with, the first; opposed to it
    however, not as evil to good, but as imperfection to perfection,
    or, as Marcion expressed it, as a just to a good being.
    218—Non-recognition of any principle of pure evil. Three
    principles only: the Supreme God, the Demiurge, and the eternal
    Matter, the two latter being imperfect but not necessarily evil.
    Some of the Marcionites seem to have added an evil spirit as a
    fourth principle.... Marcion is the least Gnostic of all the
    Gnostics.... 31—The Indian influence may be seen in Egypt, the
    Persian in Syria.... 32—To Platonism, modified by Judaism,
    Gnosticism owed much of its philosophical form and tendencies. To
    the dualism of the Persian religion it owed one form at least of
    its speculations on the origin and remedy of evil, and many of the
    details of its doctrine of emanations. To the Buddhism of India,
    modified again probably by Platonism, it was indebted for the
    doctrines of the antagonism between spirit and matter and the
    unreality of derived existence (the germ of the Gnostic Docetism),
    and in part at least for the theory which regards the universe as
    a series of successive emanations from the absolute Unity.”

    Emanation holds that some stuff has proceeded from the nature of
    God, and that God has formed this stuff into the universe. But
    matter is not composed of stuff at all. It is merely an activity
    of God. Origen held that ψυχή etymologically denotes a being
    which, struck off from God the central source of light and warmth,
    has cooled in its love for the good, but still has the possibility
    of returning to its spiritual origin. Pfleiderer, Philosophy of
    Religion, 2:271, thus describes Origen’s view: “As our body, while
    consisting of many members, is yet an organism which is held
    together by one soul, so the universe is to be thought of as an
    immense living being, which is held together by one soul, the
    power and the Logos of God.” Palmer, Theol. Definition, 63,
    note—“The evil of Emanationism is seen in the history of
    Gnosticism. An emanation is a portion of the divine essence
    regarded as separated from it and sent forth as independent.
    Having no perpetual bond of connection with the divine, it either
    sinks into degradation, as Basilides taught, or becomes actively
    hostile to the divine, as the Ophites believed.... In like manner
    the Deists of a later time came to regard the laws of nature as
    having an independent existence, _i. e._, as emanations.”

    John Milton, Christian Doctrine, holds this view. Matter is an
    efflux from God himself, not intrinsically bad, and incapable of
    annihilation. Finite existence is an emanation from God’s
    substance, and God has loosened his hold on those living portions
    or centres of finite existence which he has endowed with free
    will, so that these independent beings may originate actions not
    morally referable to himself. This doctrine of free will relieves
    Milton from the charge of pantheism; see Masson, Life of Milton,
    6:824-826. Lotze, Philos. Religion, xlviii, li, distinguishes
    creation from emanation by saying that creation necessitates a
    divine Will, while emanation flows by natural consequence from the
    being of God. God’s motive in creation is love, which urges him to
    communicate his holiness to other beings. God creates individual
    finite spirits, and then permits the thought, which at first was
    only his, to become the thought of these other spirits. This
    transference of his thought by will is the creation of the world.
    F. W. Farrar, on _Heb. 1:2_—“The word _Æon_ was used by the
    Gnostics to describe the various emanations by which they tried at
    once to widen and to bridge over the gulf between the human and
    the divine. Over that imaginary chasm John threw the arch of the
    Incarnation, when he wrote: ‘_The Word became flesh_’ (_John
    1:14_).”

    Upton, Hibbert Lectures, chap. 2—“In the very making of souls of
    his own essence and substance, and in the vacating of his own
    causality in order that men may be free, God already dies in order
    that they may live. God withdraws himself from our wills, so as to
    make possible free choice and even possible opposition to himself.
    Individualism admits dualism but not complete division. Our
    dualism holds still to underground connections of life between man
    and man, man and nature, man and God. Even the physical creation
    is ethical at heart: each thing is dependent on other things, and
    must serve them, or lose its own life and beauty. The branch must
    abide in the vine, or it withers and is cut off and burned” (275).

    Swedenborg held to emanation,—see Divine Love and Wisdom, 283,
    303, 905—“Every one who thinks from clear reason sees that the
    universe is not created from nothing.... All things were created
    out of a substance.... As God alone is substance in itself and
    therefore the real _esse_, it is evidence that the existence of
    things is from no other source.... Yet the created universe is not
    God, because God is not in time and space.... There is a creation
    of the universe, and of all things therein, by continual
    mediations from the First.... In the substances and matters of
    which the earths consist, there is nothing of the Divine in
    itself, but they are deprived of all that is divine in itself....
    Still they have brought with them by continuation from the
    substance of the spiritual sum that which was there from the
    Divine.” Swedenborgianism is “materialism driven deep and clinched
    on the inside.” This system reverses the Lord’s prayer; it should
    read: “As on earth, so in heaven.” He disliked certain sects, and
    he found that all who belonged to those sects were in the hells,
    condemned to everlasting punishment. The truth is not
    materialistic emanation, as Swedenborg imagined, but rather divine
    energizing in space and time. The universe is God’s system of
    graded self-limitation, from matter up to mind. It has had a
    beginning, and God has instituted it. It is a finite and partial
    manifestation of the infinite Spirit. Matter is an expression of
    spirit, but not an emanation from spirit, any more than our
    thoughts and volitions are. Finite spirits, on the other hand, are
    differentiations within the being of God himself, and so are not
    emanations from him.

    Napoleon asked Goethe what matter was. “_Esprit gelé_,”—frozen
    spirit was the answer Schelling wished Goethe had given him. But
    neither is matter spirit, nor are matter and spirit together mere
    natural effluxes from God’s substance. A divine institution of
    them is requisite (quoted substantially from Dorner, System of
    Doctrine, 2:40). Schlegel in a similar manner called architecture
    “frozen music,” and another writer calls music “dissolved
    architecture.” There is a “psychical automatism,” as Ladd says, in
    his Philosophy of Mind, 169; and Hegel calls nature “the corpse of
    the understanding—spirit to alienation from itself.” But spirit is
    the Adam, of which nature is the Eve; and man says to nature:
    “_This is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh_,” as Adam did
    in _Gen. 2:23_.


3. Creation from eternity.


This theory regards creation as an act of God in eternity past. It was
propounded by Origen, and has been held in recent times by Martensen,
Martineau, John Caird, Knight, and Pfleiderer. The necessity of supposing
such creation from eternity has been argued from God’s omnipotence, God’s
timelessness, God’s immutability, and God’s love. We consider each of
these arguments in their order.


    Origen held that God was from eternity the creator of the world of
    spirits. Martensen, in his Dogmatics, 114, shows favor to the
    maxims: “Without the world God is not God.... God created the
    world to satisfy a want in himself.... He cannot but constitute
    himself the Father of spirits.” Schiller, Die Freundschaft, last
    stanza, gives the following popular expression to this view:
    “Freundlos war der grosse Weltenmeister; Fühlte Mangel, darum
    schuf er Geister, Sel’ge Spiegel seiner Seligkeit. Fand das
    höchste Wesen schon kein Gleiches; Aus dem Kelch des ganzen
    Geisterreiches Schäumt ihm die Unendlichkeit.” The poet’s thought
    was perhaps suggested by Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther: “The flight
    of a bird above my head inspired me with the desire of being
    transported to the shores of the immeasurable waters, there to
    quaff the pleasures of life from the foaming goblet of the
    infinite.” Robert Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra, 31—“But I need now as
    then, Thee, God, who mouldest men. And since, not even when the
    whirl was worst, Did I—to the wheel of life With shapes and colors
    rife, Bound dizzily—mistake my end, To slake thy thirst.” But this
    regards the Creator as dependent upon, and in bondage to, his own
    world.

    Pythagoras held that nature’s substances and laws are eternal.
    Martineau, Study of Religion, 1:144; 2:250, seems to make the
    creation of the world an eternal process, conceiving of it as a
    self-sundering of the Deity, in whom in some way the world was
    always contained (Schurman, Belief in God, 140). Knight, Studies
    in Philos. and Lit., 94, quotes from Byron’s Cain, I:1—“Let him
    Sit on his vast and solitary throne, Creating worlds, to make
    eternity Less burdensome to his immense existence And
    unparticipated solitude.... He, so wretched in his height, So
    restless in his wretchedness, must still Create and recreate.”
    Byron puts these words into the mouth of Lucifer. Yet Knight, in
    his Essays in Philosophy, 143, 247, regards the universe as the
    everlasting effect of an eternal Cause. Dualism, he thinks, is
    involved in the very notion of a search for God.

    W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 117—“God is the source of the
    universe. Whether by immediate production at some point of time,
    so that after he had existed alone there came by his act to be a
    universe, or by perpetual production from his own spiritual being,
    so that his eternal existence was always accompanied by a universe
    in some stage of being, God has brought the universe into
    existence.... Any method in which the independent God could
    produce a universe which without him could have had no existence,
    is accordant with the teachings of Scripture. Many find it easier
    philosophically to hold that God has eternally brought forth
    creation from himself, so that there has never been a time when
    there was not a universe in some stage of existence, than to think
    of an instantaneous creation of all existing things when there had
    been nothing but God before. Between these two views theology is
    not compelled to decide, provided we believe that God is a free
    Spirit greater than the universe.” We dissent from this conclusion
    of Dr. Clarke, and hold that Scripture requires us to trace the
    universe back to a beginning, while reason itself is better
    satisfied with this view than it can be with the theory of
    creation from eternity.


(_a_) Creation from eternity is not necessitated by God’s omnipotence.
Omnipotence does not necessarily imply actual creation; it implies only
power to create. Creation, moreover, is in the nature of the case a thing
begun. Creation from eternity is a contradiction in terms, and that which
is self-contradictory is not an object of power.


    The argument rests upon a misconception of eternity, regarding it
    as a prolongation of time into the endless past. We have seen in
    our discussion of eternity as an attribute of God, that eternity
    is not endless time, or time without beginning, but rather
    superiority to the law of time. Since eternity is no more past
    than it is present, the idea of creation from eternity is an
    irrational one. We must distinguish _creation in eternity past_ (=
    God and the world coëternal, yet God the cause of the world, as he
    is the begetter of the Son) from _continuous creation_ (which is
    an explanation of preservation, but not of creation at all). It is
    this latter, not the former, to which Rothe holds (see under the
    doctrine of Preservation, pages 415, 416). Birks, Difficulties of
    Belief, 81, 82—“Creation is not from eternity, since past eternity
    cannot be actually traversed any more than we can reach the bound
    of an eternity to come. There was no _time_ before creation,
    because there was no _succession_.”

    Birks, Scripture Doctrine of Creation, 78-105—“The first verse of
    Genesis excludes five speculative falsehoods: 1. that there is
    nothing but uncreated matter; 2. that there is no God distinct
    from his creatures; 3. that creation is a series of acts without a
    beginning; 4. that there is no real universe; 5. that nothing can
    be known of God or the origin of things.” Veitch, Knowing and
    Being, 22—“The ideas of creation and creative energy are emptied
    of meaning, and for them is substituted the conception or fiction
    of an eternally related or double-sided world, not of what has
    been, but of what always is. It is another form of the see-saw
    philosophy. The eternal Self only is, if the eternal manifold is;
    the eternal manifold is, if the eternal Self is. The one, in being
    the other, is or makes itself the one; the other, in being the
    one, is or makes itself the other. This may be called a unity; it
    is rather, if we might invent a term suited to the new and
    marvellous conception, an unparalleled and unbegotten twinity.”


(_b_) Creation from eternity is not necessitated by God’s timelessness.
Because God is free from the law of time it does not follow that creation
is free from that law. Rather is it true that no eternal creation is
conceivable, since this involves an infinite number. Time must have had a
beginning, and since the universe and time are coëxistent, creation could
not have been from eternity.


    _Jude 25_—“_Before all time_”—implies that time had a beginning,
    and _Eph. 1:4_—“_before the foundation of the world_”—implies that
    creation itself had a beginning. Is creation infinite? No, says
    Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:459, because to a perfect creation unity
    is as necessary as multiplicity. The universe is an organism, and
    there can be no organism without a definite number of parts. For a
    similar reason Dorner, System Doctrine, 2:28, denies that the
    universe can be eternal. Granting on the one hand that the world
    though eternal might be dependent upon God and as soon as the plan
    was evolved there might be no reason why the execution should be
    delayed, yet on the other hand the absolutely limitless is the
    imperfect and no universe with an infinite number of parts is
    conceivable or possible. So Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin,
    1:220-225—“What has a goal or end must have a beginning; history,
    as teleological, implies creation.”

    Lotze, Philos. Religion, 74—“The world, with respect to its
    existence as well as its content, is completely dependent on the
    will of God, and not as a mere involuntary development of his
    nature.... The word ‘creation’ ought not to be used to designate a
    deed of God so much as the absolute dependence of the world on his
    will.” So Schurman, Belief in God, 146, 156, 225—“Creation is the
    eternal dependence of the world on God.... Nature is the
    externalization of spirit.... Material things exist simply as
    modes of the divine activity; they have no existence for
    themselves.” On this view that God is the Ground but not the
    Creator of the world, see Hovey, Studies in Ethics and Religion,
    23-56—“Creation is no more of a mystery than is the causal action”
    in which both Lotze and Schurman believe. “To deny that divine
    power can originate real being—can add to the sum total of
    existence—is much like saying that such power is finite.” No one
    can prove that “it is of the essence of spirit to reveal itself,”
    or if so, that it must do this by means of an organism or
    externalization. Eternal succession of changes in nature is no
    more comprehensible than are a creating God and a universe
    originating in time.


(_c_) Creation from eternity is not necessitated by God’s immutability.
His immutability requires, not an eternal creation, but only an eternal
plan of creation. The opposite principle would compel us to deny the
possibility of miracles, incarnation, and regeneration. Like creation,
these too would need to be eternal.


    We distinguish between idea and plan, between plan and execution.
    Much of God’s plan is not yet executed. The beginning of its
    execution is as easy to conceive as is the continuation of its
    execution. But the beginning of the execution of God’s plan is
    creation. Active will is an element in creation. God’s will is not
    always active. He waits for “_the fulness of the time_” (_Gal.
    4:4_) before he sends forth his Son. As we can trace back Christ’s
    earthly life to a beginning, so we can trace back the life of the
    universe to a beginning. Those who hold to creation from eternity
    usually interpret _Gen. 1:1_—“_In the beginning God created the
    heavens and the earth,_” and _John 1:1_—“_In the beginning was the
    Word,_” as both and alike meaning “in eternity.” But neither of
    these texts has this meaning. In each we are simply carried back
    to the beginning of the creation, and it is asserted that God was
    its author and that the Word already was.


(_d_) Creation from eternity is not necessitated by God’s love. Creation
is finite and cannot furnish perfect satisfaction to the infinite love of
God. God has moreover from eternity an object of love infinitely superior
to any possible creation, in the person of his Son.


    Since all things are created in Christ, the eternal Word, Reason,
    and Power of God, God can “_reconcile all things to himself_” in
    Christ (_Col. 1:20_). Athanasius called God κτίστης, ού
    τεχνίτης—Creator, not Artisan. By this he meant that God is
    immanent, and not the God of deism. But the moment we conceive of
    God as _revealing_ himself in Christ, the idea of creation as an
    eternal satisfaction of his love vanishes. God can have a plan
    without executing his plan. Decree can precede creation. Ideas of
    the universe may exist in the divine mind before they are realized
    by the divine will. There are purposes of salvation in Christ
    which antedate the world (_Eph. 1:4_). The doctrine of the
    Trinity, once firmly grasped, enables us to see the fallacy of
    such views as that of Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:286—“A
    beginning and ending in time of the creating of God are not
    thinkable. That would be to suppose a change of creating and
    resting in God, which would equalize God’s being with the
    changeable course of human life. Nor could it be conceived what
    should have hindered God from creating the world up to the
    beginning of his creating.... We say rather, with Scotus Erigena,
    that the divine creating is equally eternal with God’s being.”


(_e_) Creation from eternity, moreover, is inconsistent with the divine
independence and personality. Since God’s power and love are infinite, a
creation that satisfied them must be infinite in extent as well as eternal
in past duration—in other words, a creation equal to God. But a God thus
dependent upon external creation is neither free nor sovereign. A God
existing in necessary relations to the universe, if different in substance
from the universe, must be the God of dualism; if of the same substance
with the universe, must be the God of pantheism.


    Gore, Incarnation, 136, 137—“Christian theology is the harmony of
    pantheism and deism.... It enjoys all the riches of pantheism
    without its inherent weakness on the moral side, without making
    God dependent on the world, as the world is dependent on God. On
    the other hand, Christianity converts an unintelligible deism into
    a rational theism. It can explain how God became a creator in
    time, because it knows how creation has its eternal analogue in
    the uncreated nature; it was God’s nature eternally to produce, to
    communicate itself, to live.” In other words, it can explain how
    God can be eternally alive, independent, self-sufficient, since he
    is Trinity. Creation from eternity is a natural and logical
    outgrowth of Unitarian tendencies in theology. It is of a piece
    with the Stoic monism of which we read in Hatch, Hibbert Lectures,
    177—“Stoic monism conceived of the world as a self-evolution of
    God. Into such a conception the idea of a beginning does not
    necessarily enter. It is consistent with the idea of an eternal
    process of differentiation. That which is always has been under
    changed and changing forms. The theory is cosmological rather than
    cosmogonical. It rather explains the world as it is, than gives an
    account of its origin.”


4. Spontaneous generation.


This theory holds that creation is but the name for a natural process
still going on,—matter itself having in it the power, under proper
conditions, of taking on new functions, and of developing into organic
forms. This view is held by Owen and Bastian. We object that

(_a_) It is a pure hypothesis, not only unverified, but contrary to all
known facts. No credible instance of the production of living forms from
inorganic material has yet been adduced. So far as science can at present
teach us, the law of nature is “omne vivum e vivo,” or “ex ovo.”


    Owen, Comparative Anatomy of the Vertebrates, 3:814-818—on
    Monogeny or Thaumatogeny; quoted in Argyle, Reign of Law, 281—“We
    discern no evidence of a pause or intromission in the creation or
    coming-to-be of new plants and animals.” So Bastian, Modes of
    Origin of Lowest Organisms, Beginnings of Life, and articles on
    Heterogeneous Evolution of Living Things, in Nature, 2:170, 193,
    219, 410, 431. See Huxley’s Address before the British
    Association, and Reply to Bastian, in Nature, 2:400, 473; also
    Origin of Species, 69-79, and Physical Basis of Life, in Lay
    Sermons, 142. Answers to this last by Stirling, in Half-hours with
    Modern Scientists, and by Beale, Protoplasm or Life, Matter, and
    Mind, 73-75.

    In favor of Redi’s maxim, “omne vivum e vivo,” see Huxley, in
    Encyc. Britannica, art.: Biology, 689—“At the present moment there
    is not a shadow of trustworthy direct evidence that abiogenesis
    does take place or has taken place within the period during which
    the existence of the earth is recorded”; Flint, Physiology of Man,
    1:263-265—“As the only true philosophic view to take of the
    question, we shall assume in common with nearly all the modern
    writers on physiology that there is no such thing as spontaneous
    generation,—admitting that the exact mode of production of the
    infusoria lowest in the scale of life is not understood.” On the
    Philosophy of Evolution, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and
    Religion, 39-57.


(_b_) If such instances could be authenticated, they would prove nothing
as against a proper doctrine of creation,—for there would still exist an
impossibility of accounting for these vivific properties of matter, except
upon the Scriptural view of an intelligent Contriver and Originator of
matter and its laws. In short, evolution implies previous involution,—if
anything comes out of matter, it must first have been put in.


    Sully: “Every doctrine of evolution must assume some definite
    initial arrangement which is supposed to contain the possibilities
    of the order which we find to be evolved and no other
    possibility.” Bixby, Crisis of Morals, 258—“If no creative fiat
    can be believed to create something out of nothing, still less is
    evolution able to perform such a contradiction.” As we can get
    morality only out of a moral germ, so we can get vitality only out
    of a vital germ. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 14—“By brooding
    long enough on an egg that is next to nothing, you can in this way
    hatch any universe actual or possible. Is it not evident that this
    is a mere trick of imagination, concealing its thefts of causation
    by committing them little by little, and taking the heap from the
    divine storehouse grain by grain?”

    Hens come before eggs. Perfect organic forms are antecedent to all
    life-cells, whether animal or vegetable. “Omnis cellula e cellula,
    sed primaria cellula ex organismo.” God created first the tree,
    and its seed was in it when created (_Gen. 1:12_). Protoplasm is
    not _proton_, but _deuteron_; the elements are antecedent to it.
    It is not true that man was never made at all but only “growed”
    like Topsy; see Watts, New Apologetic, xvi, 312. Royce, Spirit of
    Modern Philosophy, 273—“Evolution is the attempt to comprehend the
    world of experience in terms of the fundamental idealistic
    postulates: (1) without ideas, there is no reality; (2) rational
    order requires a rational Being to introduce it; (3) beneath our
    conscious self there must be an infinite Self. The question is:
    Has the world a meaning? It is not enough to refer ideas to
    mechanism. Evolution, from the nebula to man, is only the
    unfolding of the life of a divine Self.”


(_c_) This theory, therefore, if true, only supplements the doctrine of
original, absolute, immediate creation, with another doctrine of mediate
and derivative creation, or the development of the materials and forces
originated at the beginning. This development, however, cannot proceed to
any valuable end without guidance of the same intelligence which initiated
it. The Scriptures, although they do not sanction the doctrine of
spontaneous generation, do recognize processes of development as
supplementing the divine fiat which first called the elements into being.


    There is such a thing as free will, and free will does not, like
    the deterministic will, run in a groove. If there be free will in
    man, then much more is there free will in God, and God’s will does
    not run in a groove. God is not bound by law or to law. Wisdom
    does not imply monotony or uniformity. God can do a thing once
    that is never done again. Circumstances are never twice alike.
    Here is the basis not only of creation but of new creation,
    including miracle, incarnation, resurrection, regeneration,
    redemption. Though will both in God and in man is for the most
    part automatic and acts according to law, yet the power of new
    beginnings, of creative action, resides in will, wherever it is
    free, and this free will chiefly makes God to be God and man to be
    man. Without it life would be hardly worth the living, for it
    would be only the life of the brute. All schemes of evolution
    which ignore this freedom of God are pantheistic in their
    tendencies, for they practically deny both God’s transcendence and
    his personality.

    Leibnitz declined to accept the Newtonian theory of gravitation
    because it seemed to him to substitute natural forces for God. In
    our own day many still refuse to accept the Darwinian theory of
    evolution because it seems to them to substitute natural forces
    for God; see John Fiske, Idea of God, 97-102. But law is only a
    method; it presupposes a lawgiver and requires an agent.
    Gravitation and evolution are but the habitual operations of God.
    If spontaneous generation should be proved true, it would be only
    God’s way of originating life. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology,
    91—“Spontaneous generation does not preclude the idea of a
    creative will working by natural law and secondary causes.... Of
    beginnings of life physical science knows nothing.... Of the
    processes of nature science is competent to speak and against its
    teachings respecting these there is no need that theology should
    set itself in hostility.... Even if man were derived from the
    lower animals, it would not prove that God did not create and
    order the forces employed. It may be that God bestowed upon animal
    life a plastic power.”

    Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, 1:180—“It is far truer to say
    that the universe is a life, than to say that it is a
    mechanism.... We can never get to God through a mere mechanism....
    With Leibnitz I would argue that absolute passivity or inertness
    is not a reality but a limit. 269—Mr. Spencer grants that to
    interpret spirit in terms of matter is impossible. 302—Natural
    selection without teleological factors is not adequate to account
    for biological evolution, and such teleological factors imply a
    psychical something endowed with feelings and will, _i. e._, Life
    and Mind. 2:130-135—Conation is more fundamental than cognition.
    149-151—Things and events precede space and time. There is no
    empty space or time. 252-257—Our assimilation of nature is the
    greeting of spirit by spirit. 259-267—Either nature is itself
    intelligent, or there is intelligence beyond it.
    274-276—Appearances do not veil reality. 274—The truth is not God
    _and_ mechanism, but God _only_ and no mechanism. 283—Naturalism
    and Agnosticism, in spite of themselves, lead us to a world of
    Spiritualistic Monism.” Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics,
    36—“Spontaneous generation is a fiction in ethics, as it is in
    psychology and biology. The moral cannot be derived from the
    non-moral, any more than consciousness can be derived from the
    unconscious, or life from the azoic rocks.”


IV. The Mosaic Account of Creation.


1. Its twofold nature,—as uniting the ideas of creation and of
development.


(_a_) Creation is asserted.—The Mosaic narrative avoids the error of
making the universe eternal or the result of an eternal process. The
cosmogony of Genesis, unlike the cosmogonies of the heathen, is prefaced
by the originating act of God, and is supplemented by successive
manifestations of creative power in the introduction of brute and of human
life.


    All nature-worship, whether it take the form of ancient polytheism
    or modern materialism, looks upon the universe only as a birth or
    growth. This view has a basis of truth, inasmuch as it regards
    natural forces as having a real existence. It is false in
    regarding these forces as needing no originator or upholder.
    Hesiod taught that in the beginning was formless matter. Genesis
    does not begin thus. God is not a demiurge, working on eternal
    matter. God antedates matter. He is the creator of matter at the
    first (_Gen. 1:1_—_bara_) and he subsequently created animal life
    (_Gen. 1:21_—“_and God created_”—_bara_) and the life of man
    (_Gen. 1:27_—“_and God create man_”—_bara_ again).

    Many statements of the doctrine of evolution err by regarding it
    as an eternal or self-originated process. But the process requires
    an originator, and the forces require an upholder. Each forward
    step implies increment of energy, and progress toward a rational
    end implies intelligence and foresight in the governing power.
    Schurman says well that Darwinism explains the _survival_ of the
    fittest, but cannot explain the _arrival_ of the fittest.
    Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 34—“A primitive chaos of
    star-dust which held in its womb not only the cosmos that fills
    space, not only the living creatures that teem upon it, but also
    the intellect that interprets it, the will that confronts it, and
    the conscience that transfigures it, must as certainly have God at
    the centre, as a universe mechanically arranged and periodically
    adjusted must have him at the circumference.... There is no real
    antagonism between creation and evolution. 59—Natural causation is
    the expression of a supernatural Mind in nature, and man—a being
    at once of sensibility and of rational and moral self-activity—is
    a signal and ever-present example of the interfusion of the
    natural with the supernatural in that part of universal existence
    nearest and best known to us.”

    Seebohm, quoted in J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom,
    76—“When we admit that Darwin’s argument in favor of the theory of
    evolution proves its truth, we doubt whether natural selection can
    be in any sense the _cause_ of the origin of species. It has
    probably played an important part in the history of evolution; its
    rôle has been that of increasing the rapidity with which the
    process of development has proceeded. Of itself it has probably
    been powerless to originate a species; the machinery by which
    species have been evolved has been completely independent of
    natural selection and could have produced all the results which we
    call the evolution of species without its aid; though the process
    would have been slow had there been no struggle of life to
    increase its pace.” New World, June, 1896:237-262, art. by Howison
    on the Limits of Evolution, finds limits in (1) the noumenal
    Reality; (2) the break between the organic and the inorganic; (3)
    break between physiological and logical genesis; (4) inability to
    explain the great fact on which its own movement rests; (5) the _a
    priori_ self-consciousness which is the essential being and true
    person of the mind.

    Evolution, according to Herbert Spencer, is “an integration of
    matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the
    matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a
    definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained
    motion goes through a parallel transformation.” D. W. Simon
    criticizes this definition as defective “because (1) it omits all
    mention both of energy and its differentiations; and (2) because
    it introduces into the definition of the process one of the
    phenomena thereof, namely, motion. As a matter of fact, both
    energy or force, and law, are subsequently and illicitly
    introduced as distinct factors of the process; they ought
    therefore to have found recognition in the definition or
    description.” Mark Hopkins, Life, 189—“God: what need of him? Have
    we not force, uniform force, and do not all things continue as
    they were from the beginning of the creation, if it ever had a
    beginning? Have we not the τὸ πᾶν, the universal All, the Soul of
    the universe, working itself up from unconsciousness through
    molecules and maggots and mice and marmots and monkeys to its
    highest culmination in man?”


(_b_) Development is recognized.—The Mosaic account represents the present
order of things as the result, not simply of original creation, but also
of subsequent arrangement and development. A fashioning of inorganic
materials is described, and also a use of these materials in providing the
conditions of organized existence. Life is described as reproducing
itself, after its first introduction, according to its own laws and by
virtue of its own inner energy.


    Martensen wrongly asserts that “Judaism represented the world
    exclusively as _creatura_, not _natura_; as κτίσις, not φύσις.”
    This is not true. Creation is represented as the bringing forth,
    not of something dead, but of something living and capable of
    self-development. Creation lays the foundation for cosmogony. Not
    only is there a fashioning and arrangement of the material which
    the original creative act has brought into being (see Gen. 1:2, 4,
    6, 7, 9, 16, 17; 2:2, 6, 7, 8—Spirit brooding; dividing light from
    darkness, and waters from waters; dry land appearing; setting
    apart of sun, moon, and stars; mist watering; forming man’s body;
    planting garden) but there is also an imparting and using of the
    productive powers of the things and beings created (_Gen. 1:12,
    22, 24, 28_—earth brought forth grass; trees yielding fruit whose
    seed was in itself; earth brought forth the living creatures; man
    commanded to be fruitful and multiply).

    The tendency at present among men of science is to regard the
    whole history of life upon the planet as the result of evolution,
    thus excluding creation, both at the beginning of the history and
    along its course. On the progress from the Orohippus, the lowest
    member of the equine series, an animal with four toes, to
    Anchitherium with three, then to Hipparion, and finally to our
    common horse, see Huxley, in Nature for May 11, 1873:33, 34. He
    argues that, if a complicated animal like the horse has arisen by
    gradual modification of a lower and less specialized form, there
    is no reason to think that other animals have arisen in a
    different way. Clarence King, Address at Yale College, 1877,
    regards American geology as teaching the doctrine of sudden yet
    natural modification of species. “When catastrophic change burst
    in upon the ages of uniformity and sounded in the ear of every
    living thing the words: ‘Change or die!’ plasticity became the
    sole principle of action.” Nature proceeded then by leaps, and
    corresponding to the leaps of geology we find leaps of biology.

    We grant the probability that the great majority of what we call
    species were produced in some such ways. If science should render
    it certain that all the present species of living creatures were
    derived by natural descent from a few original germs, and that
    these germs were themselves an evolution of inorganic forces and
    materials, we should not therefore regard the Mosaic account as
    proved untrue. We should only be required to revise our
    interpretation of the word _bara_ in _Gen. 1:21, 27_, and to give
    it there the meaning of mediate creation, or creation by law. Such
    a meaning might almost seem to be favored by _Gen. 1:11_—“_let the
    earth put forth grass_”; _20_—“_let the waters bring forth
    abundantly __ the moving creature that hath life_”; _2:7_—“_the
    Lord God formed man of the dust_”; _9_—“_out of the ground made
    the Lord God to grow every tree_”; _cf._ _Mark 4:28_—αὐτομάτη ἣ γή
    καρποφορεῖ—“_the earth brings forth fruit automatically_.” Goethe,
    Sprüche in Reimen: “Was wär ein Gott der nur von aussen stiesse,
    Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse? Ihm ziemt’s die Welt im
    Innern zu bewegen, Sich in Natur, Natur in sich zu hegen, So dass,
    was in Ihm lebt und webt und ist, Nie seine Kraft, nie seinen
    Geist vermisst”—“No, such a God my worship may not win, Who lets
    the world about his finger spin, A thing eternal; God must dwell
    within.”

    All the growth of a tree takes place in from four to six weeks in
    May, June and July. The addition of woody fibre between the bark
    and the trunk results, not by impartation into it of a new force
    from without, but by the awakening of the life within. Environment
    changes and growth begins. We may even speak of an immanent
    transcendence of God—an unexhausted vitality which at times makes
    great movements forward. This is what the ancients were trying to
    express when they said that trees were inhabited by dryads and so
    groaned and bled when wounded. God’s life is in all. In evolution
    we cannot say, with LeConte, that the higher form of energy is
    “derived from the lower.” Rather let us say that both the higher
    and the lower are constantly dependent for their being on the will
    of God. The lower is only God’s preparation for his higher
    self-manifestation; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 165, 166.

    Even Haeckel, Hist. Creation, 1:38, can say that in the Mosaic
    narrative “two great and fundamental ideas meet us—the idea of
    separation or differentiation, and the idea of progressive
    development or perfecting. We can bestow our just and sincere
    admiration on the Jewish lawgiver’s grand insight into nature, and
    his simple and natural hypothesis of creation, without discovering
    in it a divine revelation.” Henry Drummond, whose first book,
    Natural Law in the Spiritual World, he himself in his later days
    regretted as tending in a deterministic and materialistic
    direction, came to believe rather in “spiritual law in the natural
    world.” His Ascent of Man regards evolution and law as only the
    methods of a present Deity. Darwinism seemed at first to show that
    the past history of life upon the planet was a history of
    heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for
    its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was “red in
    tooth and claw with ravine.” But further thought has shown that
    this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts.
    Palæontological life was not only a struggle for life, but a
    struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to
    be seen in the instinct of reproduction and in the care of
    offspring. In every lion’s den and tiger’s lair, in every
    mother-eagle’s feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice
    which faintly shadows forth man’s subordination of personal
    interests to the interests of others.

    Dr. George Harris, in his Moral Evolution, has added to Drummond’s
    doctrine the further consideration that the struggle for one’s own
    life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of
    others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of
    right, righteousness, justice and law upon earth. Every creature
    owes it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an
    adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine
    warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then
    preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of
    humanity. B. P. Bowne, in the Independent, April 19, 1900—“The
    Copernican system made men dizzy for a time, and they held on to
    the Ptolemaic system to escape vertigo. In like manner the
    conception of God, as revealing himself in a great historic
    movement and process, in the consciences and lives of holy men, in
    the unfolding life of the church, makes dizzy the believer in a
    dictated book, and he longs for some fixed word that shall be sure
    and stedfast.” God is not limited to creating from without: he can
    also create from within; and development is as much a part of
    creation as is the origination of the elements. For further
    discussion of man’s origin, see section on Man a Creation of God,
    in our treatment of Anthropology.


2. Its proper interpretation.


We adopt neither (_a_) the allegorical, or mythical, (_b_) the
hyperliteral, nor (_c_) the hyperscientific interpretation of the Mosaic
narrative; but rather (_d_) the pictorial-summary interpretation,—which
holds that the account is a rough sketch of the history of creation, true
in all its essential features, but presented in a graphic form suited to
the common mind and to earlier as well as to later ages. While conveying
to primitive man as accurate an idea of God’s work as man was able to
comprehend, the revelation was yet given in pregnant language, so that it
could expand to all the ascertained results of subsequent physical
research. This general correspondence of the narrative with the teachings
of science, and its power to adapt itself to every advance in human
knowledge, differences it from every other cosmogony current among men.


    (_a_) The _allegorical_, or _mythical interpretation_, represents
    the Mosaic account as embodying, like the Indian and Greek
    cosmogonies, the poetic speculations of an early race as to the
    origin of the present system. We object to this interpretation
    upon the ground that the narrative of creation is inseparably
    connected with the succeeding history, and is therefore most
    naturally regarded as itself historical. This connection of the
    narrative of creation with the subsequent history, moreover,
    prevents us from believing it to be the description of a vision
    granted to Moses. It is more probably the record of an original
    revelation to the first man, handed down to Moses’ time, and used
    by Moses as a proper introduction to his history.

    We object also to the view of some higher critics that the book of
    Genesis contains two inconsistent stories. Marcus Dods, Book of
    Genesis, 2—“The compiler of this book ... lays side by side two
    accounts of man’s creation which no ingenuity can reconcile.”
    Charles A. Briggs: “The doctrine of creation in Genesis 1 is
    altogether different from that taught in Genesis 2.” W. N. Clarke,
    Christian Theology, 199-201—“It has been commonly assumed that the
    two are parallel, and tell one and the same story; but examination
    shows that this is not the case.... We have here the record of a
    tradition, rather than a revelation.... It cannot be taken as
    literal history, and it does not tell by divine authority how man
    was created.” To these utterances we reply that the two accounts
    are not inconsistent but complementary, the first chapter of
    Genesis describing man’s creation as the crown of God’s general
    work, the second describing man’s creation with greater
    particularity as the beginning of human history.

    Canon Rawlinson, in Aids to Faith, 275, compares the Mosaic
    account with the cosmogony of Berosus, the Chaldean. Pfleiderer,
    Philos. of Religion, 1:267-272, gives an account of heathen
    theories of the origin of the universe. Anaxagoras was the first
    who represented the chaotic first matter as formed through the
    ordering understanding (νοῦς) of God, and Aristotle for that
    reason called him “the first sober one among many drunken.”
    Schurman, Belief in God, 138—“In these cosmogonies the world and
    the gods grow up together; cosmogony is, at the same time,
    theogony.” Dr. E. G. Robinson: “The Bible writers believed and
    intended to state that the world was made in three literal days.
    But, on the principle that God may have meant more than they did,
    the doctrine of periods may not be inconsistent with their
    account.” For comparison of the Biblical with heathen cosmogonies,
    see Blackie in Theol. Eclectic, 1:77-87; Guyot, Creation, 58-63;
    Pope, Theology, 1:401, 402; Bible Commentary, 1:36, 48; McIlvaine,
    Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 1-54; J. F. Clarke, Ten Great Religions,
    2:193-221. For the theory of “prophetic vision,” see Kurtz, Hist.
    of Old Covenant, Introd., i-xxxvii, civ-cxxx; and Hugh Miller,
    Testimony of the Rocks, 179-210; Hastings, Dict. Bible, art.:
    Cosmogony; Sayce, Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia,
    372-397.

    (_b_) The _hyperliteral interpretation_ would withdraw the
    narrative from all comparison with the conclusions of science, by
    putting the ages of geological history between the first and
    second verses of _Gen. 1_, and by making the remainder of the
    chapter an account of the fitting up of the earth, or of some
    limited portion of it, in six days of twenty-four hours each.
    Among the advocates of this view, now generally discarded, are
    Chalmers, Natural Theology, Works, 1:228-258, and John Pye Smith,
    Mosaic Account of Creation, and Scripture and Geology. To this
    view we object that there is no indication, in the Mosaic
    narrative, of so vast an interval between the first and the second
    verses; that there is no indication, in the geological history, of
    any such break between the ages of preparation and the present
    time (see Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, 141-178); and that
    there are indications in the Mosaic record itself that the word
    “_day_” is not used in its literal sense; while the other
    Scriptures unquestionably employ it to designate a period of
    indefinite duration (_Gen. 1:5_—“_God called the light Day_”—a day
    before there was a sun; _8_—“_there was evening and there was
    morning, a second day_”; _2:2_—God “_rested on the seventh day_”;
    _cf._ _Heb. 4:3-10_—where God’s day of rest seems to continue, and
    his people are exhorted to enter into it; _Gen. 2:4_—“_the day
    that Jehovah made earth and heaven_”—“_day_” here covers all the
    seven days; _cf._ _Is. 2:12_—“_a day of Jehovah of hosts_”; _Zech.
    14:7_—“_it shall be one day which is known unto Jehovah; not day,
    and not night_”; _2 Pet. 3:8_—“_one day is with the Lord as __ a
    thousand years, and a thousand years as one day_”). Guyot,
    Creation, 34, objects also to this interpretation, that the
    narrative purports to give a history of the making of the heavens
    as well as of the earth (_Gen. 2:4_—“_these are the generations of
    the heaven and of the earth_”), whereas this interpretation
    confines the history to the earth. On the meaning of the word
    “_day_,” as a period of indefinite duration, see Dana, Manual of
    Geology, 744; LeConte, Religion and Science, 262.

    (_c_) The _hyperscientific interpretation_ would find in the
    narrative a minute and precise correspondence with the geological
    record. This is not to be expected, since it is foreign to the
    purpose of revelation to teach science. Although a general concord
    between the Mosaic and geological histories may be pointed out, it
    is a needless embarrassment to compel ourselves to find in every
    detail of the former an accurate statement of some scientific
    fact. Far more probable we hold to be

    (_d_) The _pictorial-summary interpretation_. Before explaining
    this in detail, we would premise that we do not hold this or any
    future scheme of reconciling Genesis and geology to be a finality.
    Such a settlement of all the questions involved would presuppose
    not only a perfected science of the physical universe, but also a
    perfected science of hermeneutics. It is enough if we can offer
    tentative solutions which represent the present state of thought
    upon the subject. Remembering, then, that any such scheme of
    reconciliation may speedily be outgrown without prejudice to the
    truth of the Scripture narrative, we present the following as an
    approximate account of the coincidences between the Mosaic and the
    geological records. The scheme here given is a combination of the
    conclusions of Dana and Guyot, and assumes the substantial truth
    of the nebular hypothesis. It is interesting to observe that
    Augustine, who knew nothing of modern science, should have
    reached, by simple study of the text, some of the same results.
    See his Confessions, 12:8—“First God created a chaotic matter,
    which was _next_ to _nothing_. This chaotic matter was made from
    nothing, before all days. Then this chaotic, amorphous matter was
    subsequently arranged, in the succeeding six days”; De Genes. ad
    Lit., 4:27—“The length of these days is not to be determined by
    the length of our week-days. There is a series in both cases, and
    that is all.” We proceed now to the scheme:

    1. The earth, if originally in the condition of a gaseous fluid,
    must have been void and formless as described in _Genesis 1:2_.
    Here the earth is not yet separated from the condensing nebula,
    and its fluid condition is indicated by the term “_waters_.”

    2. The beginning of activity in matter would manifest itself by
    the production of light, since light is a resultant of molecular
    activity. This corresponds to the statement in _verse 3_. As the
    result of condensation, the nebula becomes luminous, and this
    process from darkness to light is described as follows: “_there
    was evening and there was morning, one day_.” Here we have a day
    without a sun—a feature in the narrative quite consistent with two
    facts of science: first, that the nebula would naturally be
    self-luminous, and, secondly, that the earth proper, which reached
    its present form before the sun, would, when it was thrown off, be
    itself a self-luminous and molten mass. The day was therefore
    continuous—day without night.

    3. The development of the earth into an independent sphere and its
    separation from the fluid around it answers to the dividing of
    “_the waters under the firmament from the waters above_,” in
    _verse 7_. Here the word “_waters_” is used to designate the
    “primordial cosmic material” (Guyot, Creation, 35-37), or the
    molten mass of earth and sun united, from which the earth is
    thrown off. The term “_waters_” is the best which the Hebrew
    language affords to express this idea of a fluid mass. _Ps. 148_
    seems to have this meaning, where it speaks of the “_waters that
    are above the heavens_” (_verse 4_)—waters which are distinguished
    from the “_deeps_” below (_verse 7_), and the “_vapor_” above
    (_verse 8_).

    4. The production of the earth’s physical features by the partial
    condensation of the vapors which enveloped the igneous sphere, and
    by the consequent outlining of the continents and oceans, is next
    described in _verse 9_ as the gathering of the waters into one
    place and the appearing of the dry land.

    5. The expression of the idea of life in the lowest plants, since
    it was in type and effect the creation of the vegetable kingdom,
    is next described in _verse 11_ as a bringing into existence of
    the characteristic forms of that kingdom. This precedes all
    mention of animal life, since the vegetable kingdom is the natural
    basis of the animal. If it be said that our earliest fossils are
    animal, we reply that the earliest vegetable forms, the _algæ_,
    were easily dissolved, and might as easily disappear; that
    graphite and bog-iron ore, appearing lower down than any animal
    remains, are the result of preceding vegetation; that animal
    forms, whenever and wherever existing, must subsist upon and
    presuppose the vegetable. The Eozoön is of necessity preceded by
    the Eophyte. If it be said that fruit-trees could not have been
    created on the third day, we reply that since the creation of the
    vegetable kingdom was to be described at one stroke and no mention
    of it was to be made subsequently, this is the proper place to
    introduce it and to mention its main characteristic forms. See
    Bible Commentary, 1:36; LeConte, Elements of Geology, 136, 285.

    6. The vapors which have hitherto shrouded the planet are now
    cleared away as preliminary to the introduction of life in its
    higher animal forms. The consequent appearance of solar light is
    described in _verses 16_ and _17_ as a making of the sun, moon,
    and stars, and a giving of them as luminaries to the earth.
    Compare _Gen. 9:13_—“_I do set my bow in the cloud._” As the
    rainbow had existed in nature before, but was now appointed to
    serve a peculiar purpose, so in the record of creation sun, moon
    and stars, which existed before, were appointed as visible lights
    for the earth,—and that for the reason that the earth was no
    longer self-luminous, and the light of the sun struggling through
    the earth’s encompassing clouds was not sufficient for the higher
    forms of life which were to come.

    7. The exhibition of the four grand types of the animal kingdom
    (radiate, molluscan, articulate, vertebrate), which characterizes
    the next stage of geological progress, is represented in _verses
    20_ and _21_ as a creation of the lower animals—those that swarm
    in the waters, and the creeping and flying species of the land.
    Huxley, in his American Addresses, objects to this assigning of
    the origin of birds to the fifth day, and declares that
    terrestrial animals exist in lower strata than any form of
    bird,—birds appearing only in the Oölitic, or New Red Sandstone.
    But we reply that the fifth day is devoted to sea-productions,
    while land-productions belong to the sixth. Birds, according to
    the latest science, are sea-productions, not land-productions.
    They originated from Saurians, and were, at the first, flying
    lizards. There being but one mention of sea-productions, all
    these, birds included, are crowded into the fifth day. Thus
    Genesis anticipates the latest science. On the ancestry of birds,
    see Pop. Science Monthly, March, 1884:606; Baptist Magazine,
    1877:505.

    8. The introduction of mammals—viviparous species, which are
    eminent above all other vertebrates for a quality prophetic of a
    high moral purpose, that of suckling their young—is indicated in
    _verses 24_ and _25_ by the creation, on the sixth day, of cattle
    and beasts of prey.

    9. Man, the first being of moral and intellectual qualities, and
    the first in whom the unity of the great design has full
    expression, forms in both the Mosaic and geologic record the last
    step of progress in creation (see _verses 26-31_). With Prof.
    Dana, we may say that “in this succession we observe not merely an
    order of events like that deduced from science; there is a system
    in the arrangement, and a far-reaching prophecy, to which
    philosophy could not have attained, however instructed.” See Dana,
    Manual of Geology, 741-746, and Bib. Sac., April, 1885:201-224.
    Richard Owen: “Man from the beginning of organisms was ideally
    present upon the earth”; see Owen, Anatomy of Vertebrates, 3:796;
    Louis Agassiz: “Man is the purpose toward which the whole animal
    creation tends from the first appearance of the first palæozoic
    fish.”

    Prof. John M. Taylor: “Man is not merely a mortal but a moral
    being. If he sinks below this plane of life he misses the path
    marked out for him by all his past development. In order to
    progress, the higher vertebrate had to subordinate everything to
    mental development. In order to become human it had to develop the
    rational intelligence. In order to become higher man, present man
    must subordinate everything to moral development. This is the
    great law of animal and human development clearly revealed in the
    sequence of physical and psychical functions.” W. E. Gladstone in
    S. S. Times, April 26, 1890, calls the Mosaic days “chapters in
    the history of creation.” He objects to calling them epochs or
    periods, because they are not of equal length, and they sometimes
    overlap. But he defends the general correspondence of the Mosaic
    narrative with the latest conclusions of science, and remarks:
    “Any man whose labor and duty for several scores of years has
    included as their central point the study of the means of making
    himself intelligible to the mass of men, is in a far better
    position to judge what would be the forms and methods of speech
    proper for the Mosaic writer to adopt, than the most perfect
    Hebraist as such, or the most consummate votary of physical
    science as such.”

    On the whole subject, see Guyot, Creation; Review of Guyot, in N.
    Eng., July, 1884:591-594; Tayler Lewis, Six Days of Creation;
    Thompson, Man in Genesis and in Geology; Agassiz, in Atlantic
    Monthly, Jan. 1874; Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 82, and in
    Expositor, Apl. 1886; LeConte, Science and Religion, 264; Hill, in
    Bib. Sac., April, 1875; Peirce, Ideality in the Physical Sciences,
    38-72; Boardman, The Creative Week; Godet, Bib. Studies of O. T.,
    65-138; Bell, in Nature, Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 1882; W. E.
    Gladstone, in Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1885:685-707, Jan. 1886:1,
    176; reply by Huxley, in Nineteenth Century, Dec. 1885, and Feb.
    1886; Schmid, Theories of Darwin; Bartlett, Sources of History in
    the Pentateuch, 1-35; Cotterill, Does Science Aid Faith in Regard
    to Creation? Cox, Miracles, 1-39—chapter 1, on the Original
    Miracle—that of Creation; Zöckler, Theologie und
    Naturwissenschaft, and Urgeschichte, 1-77; Reusch, Bib.
    Schöpfungsgeschichte. On difficulties of the nebular hypothesis,
    see Stallo, Modern Physics, 277-293.


V. God’s End in Creation.


Infinite wisdom must, in creating, propose to itself the most
comprehensive and the most valuable of ends,—the end most worthy of God,
and the end most fruitful in good. Only in the light of the end proposed
can we properly judge of God’s work, or of God’s character as revealed
therein.


    It would seem that Scripture should give us an answer to the
    question: Why did God create? The great Architect can best tell
    his own design. Ambrose: “To whom shall I give greater credit
    concerning God than to God himself?” George A. Gordon, New Epoch
    for Faith, 15—“God is necessarily a being of ends. Teleology is
    the warp and woof of humanity; it must be in the warp and woof of
    Deity. Evolutionary science has but strengthened this view.
    Natural science is but a mean disguise for ignorance if it does
    not imply cosmical purpose. The movement of life from lower to
    higher is a movement upon ends. Will is the last account of the
    universe, and will is the faculty for ends. The moment one
    concludes that God is, it appears certain that he is a being of
    ends. The universe is alive with desire and movement.
    Fundamentally it is throughout an expression of will. And it
    follows, that the ultimate end of God in human history must be
    worthy of himself.”


In determining this end, we turn first to:


1. The testimony of Scripture.


This may be summed up in four statements. God finds his end (_a_) in
himself; (_b_) in his own will and pleasure; (_c_) in his own glory; (_d_)
in the making known of his power, his wisdom, his holy name. All these
statements may be combined in the following, namely, that God’s supreme
end in creation is nothing outside of himself, but is his own glory—in the
revelation, in and through creatures, of the infinite perfection of his
own being.


    (_a_) _Rom. 11:36_—“_unto him are all things_”; _Col. 1:16_—“_all
    things have been created ... unto him_” (Christ); compare _Is.
    48:11_—“_for mine own sake, even for mine own sake, will I do it
    ... and my glory will I not give to another_”; and _1 Cor.
    15:28_—“_subject all things unto him, that God may be all in
    all._” _Proverbs 16:4_—not “The Lord hath made all things for
    himself” (A. V.) but “_Jehovah hath made everything for its own
    end_” (Rev. Vers.).

    (_b_) _Eph. 1:5, 6, 9_—“_having foreordained us ... according to
    the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of the glory of his
    grace ... mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure
    which he purposed in him_”; _Rev. 4:11_—“_thou didst create all
    things, and because of thy will they were, and were created._”

    (_c_) _Is. 43:7_—“_whom I have created for my glory_”; _60:21_ and
    _61:3_—the righteousness and blessedness of the redeemed are
    secured, that “_he may be glorified_”; _Luke 2:14_—the angels’
    song at the birth of Christ expressed the design of the work of
    salvation: “_Glory to God in the highest_,” and only through, and
    for its sake, “_on earth peace among men in whom he is well
    pleased_.”

    (_d_) _Ps. 143:11_—“_In thy righteousness bring my soul out of
    trouble_”; _Ez. 36:21, 22_—“_I do not this for your sake ... but
    for mine holy name_”; _39:7_—“_my holy name will I make known_”;
    _Rom. 9:17_—to Pharaoh: “_For this very purpose did I raise thee
    up, that I might show in thee my power, and that my name might be
    published abroad in all the earth_”; _22, 23_—“_riches of his
    glory_” made known in vessels of wrath, and in vessels of mercy;
    _Eph. 3:9, 10_—“_created all things; to the intent that now unto
    the principalities and the powers in the heavenly places might be
    made known through the church the manifold wisdom of God._” See
    Godet, on Ultimate Design of Man; “God in man and man in God,” in
    Princeton Rev., Nov. 1880; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:436, 535, 565,
    568. _Per contra_, see Miller, Fetich in Theology, 19, 39-45,
    88-98, 143-146.


Since holiness is the fundamental attribute in God, to make himself, his
own pleasure, his own glory, his own manifestation, to be his end in
creation, is to find his chief end in his own holiness, its maintenance,
expression, and communication. To make this his chief end, however, is not
to exclude certain subordinate ends, such as the revelation of his wisdom,
power, and love, and the consequent happiness of innumerable creatures to
whom this revelation is made.


    God’s glory is that which makes him glorious. It is not something
    without, like the praise and esteem of men, but something within,
    like the dignity and value of his own attributes. To a noble man,
    praise is very distasteful unless he is conscious of something in
    himself that justifies it. We must be like God to be
    self-respecting. Pythagoras said well: “Man’s end is to be like
    God.” And so God must look within, and find his honor and his end
    in himself. Robert Browning, Hohenstiel-Schwangau: “This is the
    glory, that in all conceived Or felt or known, I recognize a Mind,
    Not mine but like mine,—for the double joy Making all things for
    me, and me for Him.” Schurman, Belief in God, 214-216—“God
    glorifies himself in communicating himself.” The object of his
    love is the exercise of his holiness. Self-affirmation conditions
    self-communication.

    E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 94, 196—“Law and gospel are
    only two sides of the one object, the highest glory of God in the
    highest good of man.... Nor is it unworthy of God to make himself
    his own end: (_a_) It is both unworthy and criminal for a finite
    being to make himself his own end, because it is an end that can
    be reached only by degrading self and wronging others; but (_b_)
    For an infinite Creator not to make himself his own end would be
    to dishonor himself and wrong his creatures; since, thereby, (_c_)
    he must either act without an end, which is irrational, or from an
    end which is impossible without wronging his creatures; because
    (_d_) the highest welfare of his creatures, and consequently their
    happiness, is impossible except through the subordination and
    conformity of their wills to that of their infinitely perfect
    Ruler; and (_e_) without this highest welfare and happiness of his
    creatures God’s own end itself becomes impossible, for he is
    glorified only as his character is reflected in, and recognized
    by, his intelligent creatures.” Creation can add nothing to the
    essential wealth or worthiness of God. If the end were outside
    himself, it would make him dependent and a servant. The old
    theologians therefore spoke of God’s “declarative glory,” rather
    than God’s “essential glory,” as resulting from man’s obedience
    and salvation.


2. The testimony of reason.


That his own glory, in the sense just mentioned, is God’s supreme end in
creation, is evident from the following considerations:

(_a_) God’s own glory is the only end actually and perfectly attained in
the universe. Wisdom and omnipotence cannot choose an end which is
destined to be forever unattained; for _“__what his soul desireth, even
that he doeth__”__ (Job 23:13)_. God’s supreme end cannot be the happiness
of creatures, since many are miserable here and will be miserable forever.
God’s supreme end cannot be the holiness of creatures, for many are unholy
here and will be unholy forever. But while neither the holiness nor the
happiness of creatures is actually and perfectly attained, God’s glory is
made known and will be made known in both the saved and the lost. This
then must be God’s supreme end in creation.


    This doctrine teaches us that none can frustrate God’s plan. God
    will get glory out of every human life. Man may glorify God
    voluntarily by love and obedience, but if he will not do this he
    will be compelled to glorify God by his rejection and punishment.
    Better be the molten iron that runs freely into the mold prepared
    by the great Designer, than be the hard and cold iron that must be
    hammered into shape. Cleanthes, quoted by Seneca: “Ducunt volentem
    fata, nolentem trahunt.” W. C. Wilkinson, Epic of Saul, 271—“But
    some are tools, and others ministers, Of God, who works his holy
    will with all.” Christ baptizes _“__in the Holy Spirit and in
    fire__”__ (Mat. 3:11)_. Alexander McLaren: “There are two fires,
    to one or other of which we must be delivered. Either we shall
    gladly accept the purifying fire of the Spirit which burns sin out
    of us, or we shall have to meet the punitive fire which burns up
    us and our sins together. To be cleansed by the one or to be
    consumed by the other is the choice before each one of us.” Hare,
    Mission of the Comforter, on _John 16:8_, shows that the Holy
    Spirit either _convinces_ those who yield to his influence, or
    _convicts_ those who resist—the word ἐλέγχω having this double
    significance.


(_b_) God’s glory is the end intrinsically most valuable. The good of
creatures is of insignificant importance compared with this. Wisdom
dictates that the greater interest should have precedence of the less.
Because God can choose no greater end, he must choose for his end himself.
But this is to choose his holiness, and his glory in the manifestation of
that holiness.


    _Is. 40:15, 16_—“_Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket,
    and are counted as the small dust of the balance_”—like the drop
    that falls unobserved from the bucket, like the fine dust of the
    scales which the tradesman takes no notice of in weighing, so are
    all the combined millions of earth and heaven before God. He
    created, and he can in an instant destroy. The universe is but a
    drop of dew upon the fringe of his garment. It is more important
    that God should be glorified than that the universe should be
    happy. As we read in _Heb. 6:13_—“_since he could swear by none
    greater, he sware by himself_”—so here we may say: Because he
    could choose no greater end in creating, he chose himself. But to
    swear by himself is to swear by his holiness (_Ps. 89:35_). We
    infer that to find his end in himself is to find that end in his
    holiness. See Martineau on Malebranche, in Types, 177.

    The stick or the stone does not exist for itself, but for some
    consciousness. The soul of man exists in part for itself. But it
    is conscious that in a more important sense it exists for God.
    “Modern thought,” it is said, “worships and serves the creature
    more than the Creator; indeed, the chief end of the Creator seems
    to be to glorify man and to enjoy him forever.” So the small boy
    said his Catechism: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to
    annoy him forever.” Prof. Clifford: “The kingdom of God is
    obsolete; the kingdom of man has now come.” All this is the
    insanity of sin. _Per contra_, see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 329,
    330—“Two things are plain in Edwards’s doctrine: first, that God
    cannot love anything other than himself: he is so great, so
    preponderating an amount of being, that what is left is hardly
    worth considering; secondly, so far as God has any love for the
    creature, it is because he is himself diffused therein: the
    fulness of his own essence has overflowed into an outer world, and
    that which he loves in created beings is his essence imparted to
    them.” But we would add that Edwards does not say they are
    themselves of the essence of God; see his Works, 2:210, 211.


(_c_) His own glory is the only end which consists with God’s independence
and sovereignty. Every being is dependent upon whomsoever or whatsoever he
makes his ultimate end. If anything in the creature is the last end of
God, God is dependent upon the creature. But since God is dependent only
on himself, he must find in himself his end.


    To create is not to increase his blessedness, but only to reveal
    it. There is no need or deficiency which creation supplies. The
    creatures who derive all from him can add nothing to him. All our
    worship is only the rendering back to him of that which is his
    own. He notices us only for his own sake and not because our
    little rivulets of praise add anything to the ocean-like fulness
    of his joy. For his own sake, and not because of our misery or our
    prayers, he redeems and exalts us. To make our pleasure and
    welfare his ultimate end would be to abdicate his throne. He
    creates, therefore, only for his own sake and for the sake of his
    glory. To this reasoning the London Spectator replies: “The glory
    of God is the splendor of a manifestation, not the intrinsic
    splendor manifested. The splendor of a manifestation, however,
    consists in the effect of the manifestation on those to whom it is
    given. Precisely because the manifestation of God’s goodness can
    be useful to us and cannot be useful to him, must its
    manifestation be intended for our sake and not for his sake. We
    gain everything by it—he nothing, except so far as it is his own
    will that we should gain what he desires to bestow upon us.” In
    this last clause we find the acknowledgment of weakness in the
    theory that God’s supreme end is the good of his creatures. God
    does gain the fulfilment of his plan, the doing of his will, the
    manifestation of himself. The great painter loves his picture less
    than he loves his ideal. He paints in order to express himself.
    God loves each soul which he creates, but he loves yet more the
    expression of his own perfections in it. And this self-expression
    is his end. Robert Browning, Paracelsus, 54—“God is the perfect
    Poet, Who in creation acts his own conceptions.” Shedd, Dogm.
    Theol., 1:357, 358; Shairp, Province of Poetry, 11, 12.

    God’s love makes him a self-expressing being. Self-expression is
    an inborn impulse in his creatures. All genius partakes of this
    characteristic of God. Sin substitutes concealment for outflow,
    and stops this self-communication which would make the good of
    each the good of all. Yet even sin cannot completely prevent it.
    The wicked man is impelled to confess. By natural law the secrets
    of all hearts will be made manifest at the judgment. Regeneration
    restores the freedom and joy of self-manifestation. Christianity
    and confession of Christ are inseparable. The preacher is simply a
    Christian further advanced in this divine privilege. We need
    utterance. Prayer is the most complete self-expression, and God’s
    presence is the only land of perfectly free speech.

    The great poet comes nearest, in the realm of secular things, to
    realizing this privilege of the Christian. No great poet ever
    wrote his best work for money, or for fame, or even for the sake
    of doing good. Hawthorne was half-humorous and only partially
    sincere, when he said he would never have written a page except
    for pay. The hope of pay may have set his pen a-going, but only
    love for his work could have made that work what it is. Motley
    more truly declared that it was all up with a writer when he began
    to consider the money he was to receive. But Hawthorne needed the
    money to live on, while Motley had a rich father and uncle to back
    him. The great writer certainly absorbs himself in his work. With
    him necessity and freedom combine. He sings as the bird sings,
    without dogmatic intent. Yet he is great in proportion as he is
    moral and religious at heart. “Arma virumque cano” is the only
    first person singular in the Æneid in which the author himself
    speaks, yet the whole Æneid is a revelation of Virgil. So we know
    little of Shakespeare’s life, but much of Shakespeare’s genius.

    Nothing is added to the tree when it blossoms and bears fruit; it
    only reveals its own inner nature. But we must distinguish in man
    his true nature from his false nature. Not his private
    peculiarities, but that in him which is permanent and universal,
    is the real treasure upon which the great poet draws. Longfellow:
    “He is the greatest artist then, Whether of pencil or of pen, Who
    follows nature. Never man, as artist or as artizan, Pursuing his
    own fantasies, Can touch the human heart or please, Or satisfy our
    nobler needs.” Tennyson, after observing the subaqueous life of a
    brook, exclaimed: “What an imagination God has!” Caird, Philos.
    Religion, 245—“The world of finite intelligences, though distinct
    from God, is still in its ideal nature one with him. That which
    God creates, and by which he reveals the hidden treasures of his
    wisdom and love, is still not foreign to his own infinite life,
    but one with it. In the knowledge of the minds that know him, in
    the self-surrender of the hearts that love him, it is no paradox
    to affirm that he knows and loves himself.”


(_d_) His own glory is an end which comprehends and secures, as a
subordinate end, every interest of the universe. The interests of the
universe are bound up in the interests of God. There is no holiness or
happiness for creatures except as God is absolute sovereign, and is
recognized as such. It is therefore not selfishness, but benevolence, for
God to make his own glory the supreme object of creation. Glory is not
vain-glory, and in expressing his ideal, that is, in expressing himself,
in his creation, he communicates to his creatures the utmost possible
good.


    This self-expression is not selfishness but benevolence. As the
    true poet forgets himself in his work, so God does not manifest
    himself for the sake of what he can make by it. Self-manifestation
    is an end in itself. But God’s self-manifestation comprises all
    good to his creatures. We are bound to love ourselves and our own
    interests just in proportion to the value of those interests. The
    monarch of a realm or the general of an army must be careful of
    his life, because the sacrifice of it may involve the loss of
    thousands of lives of soldiers or subjects. So God is the heart of
    the great system. Only by being tributary to the heart can the
    members be supplied with streams of holiness and happiness. And so
    for only one Being in the universe is it safe to live for himself.
    Man should not live for himself, because there is a higher end.
    But there is no higher end for God. “Only one being in the
    universe is excepted from the duty of subordination. Man must be
    subject to the ‘_higher powers_’ (_Rom. 13:1_). But there are no
    higher powers to God.” See Park, Discourses, 181-209.

    Bismarck’s motto: “Ohne Kaiser, kein Reich”—“Without an emperor,
    there can be no empire”—applies to God, as Von Moltke’s motto:
    “Erst wägen, dann wagen”—“First weigh, then dare”—applies to man.
    Edwards, Works, 2:215—“Selfishness is no otherwise vicious or
    unbecoming than as one is less than a multitude. The public weal
    is of greater value than his particular interest. It is fit and
    suitable that God should value himself infinitely more than his
    creatures.” Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:3—“The single and peculiar life
    is bound With all the strength and armor of the mind To keep
    itself from noyance; but much more That spirit upon whose weal
    depends and rests The lives of many. The cease of majesty Dies not
    alone, but like a gulf doth draw What’s near it with it: it is a
    massy wheel Fixed on the summit of the highest mount, To whose
    huge spokes ten thousand lesser things Are mortis’d and adjoined;
    which, when it falls, Each small annexment, petty consequence,
    Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone did the king sigh, But
    with a general groan.”


(_e_) God’s glory is the end which in a right moral system is proposed to
creatures. This must therefore be the end which he in whose image they are
made proposes to himself. He who constitutes the centre and end of all his
creatures must find his centre and end in himself. This principle of moral
philosophy, and the conclusion drawn from it, are both explicitly and
implicitly taught in Scripture.


    The beginning of all religion is the choosing of God’s end as our
    end—the giving up of our preference of happiness, and the entrance
    upon a life devoted to God. That happiness is not the ground of
    moral obligation, is plain from the fact that there is no
    happiness in seeking happiness. That the holiness of God is the
    ground of moral obligation, is plain from the fact that the search
    after holiness is not only successful in itself, but brings
    happiness also in its train. Archbishop Leighton, Works, 695—“It
    is a wonderful instance of wisdom and goodness that God has so
    connected his own glory with our happiness, that we cannot
    properly intend the one, but that the other must follow as a
    matter of course, and our own felicity is at last resolved into
    his eternal glory.” That God will certainly secure the end for
    which he created, his own glory, and that his end is our end, is
    the true source of comfort in affliction, of strength in labor, of
    encouragement in prayer. See _Psalm 25:11_—“_For thy name’s
    sake.... Pardon mine iniquity, for it is great_”; _115:1_—“_Not
    unto us, O Jehovah, not unto us, But unto thy name give glory_”;
    _Mat. 6:33_—“_Seek ye first his kingdom, and his righteousness;
    and all these things shall be added unto you_”; _1 Cor.
    10:31_—“_Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do,
    do all to the glory of God_”; _1 Pet. 2:9_—“_ye are an elect race
    ... that ye may show forth the excellencies of him who called you
    out of darkness into his marvelous light_”; _4:11_—speaking,
    ministering, “_that in all things God may be glorified through
    Jesus Christ, whose is the glory and the dominion for ever and
    ever. Amen._” On the whole subject, see Edwards, Works, 2:193-257;
    Janet, Final Causes, 443-455; Princeton Theol. Essays, 2:15-32;
    Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 358-362.

    It is a duty to make the most of ourselves, but only for God’s
    sake. _Jer. 45:5_—“_seekest thou great things for thyself? seek
    them not!_” But it is nowhere forbidden us to seek great things
    for God. Rather we are to “_desire earnestly the greater gifts_”
    (_1 Cor. 12:31_). Self-realization as well as self-expression is
    native to humanity. Kant: “Man, and with him every rational
    creature, is an end in himself.” But this seeking of his own good
    is to be subordinated to the higher motive of God’s glory. The
    difference between the regenerate and the unregenerate may consist
    wholly in motive. The latter lives for self, the former for God.
    Illustrate by the young man in Yale College who began to learn his
    lessons for God instead of for self, leaving his salvation in
    Christ’s hands. God requires self-renunciation, taking up the
    cross, and following Christ, because the first need of the sinner
    is to change his centre. To be self-centered is to be a savage.
    The struggle for the life of others is better. But there is
    something higher still. Life has dignity according to the worth of
    the object we install in place of self. Follow Christ, make God
    the center of your life,—so shall you achieve the best; see
    Colestock, Changing Viewpoint, 113-123.

    George A. Gordon, The New Epoch for Faith, 11-13—“The ultimate
    view of the universe is the religious view. Its worth is
    ultimately worth for the supreme Being. Here is the note of
    permanent value in Edwards’s great essay on The End of Creation.
    The final value of creation is its value for God.... Men are men
    in and through society—here is the truth which Aristotle
    teaches—but Aristotle fails to see that society attains its end
    only in and through God.” Hovey, Studies, 65—“To manifest the
    glory or perfection of God is therefore the chief end of our
    existence. To live in such a manner that his life is reflected in
    ours; that his character shall reappear, at least faintly, in
    ours; that his holiness and love shall be recognized and declared
    by us, is to do that for which we are made. And so, in requiring
    us to glorify himself, God simply requires us to do what is
    absolutely right, and what is at the same time indispensable to
    our highest welfare. Any lower aim could not have been placed
    before us, without making us content with a character unlike that
    of the First Good and the First Fair.” See statement and criticism
    of Edwards’s view in Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 227-238.


VI. Relation of the Doctrine of Creation to other Doctrines.


1. To the holiness and benevolence of God.


Creation, as the work of God, manifests of necessity God’s moral
attributes. But the existence of physical and moral evil in the universe
appears, at first sight, to impugn these attributes, and to contradict the
Scripture declaration that the work of God’s hand was “very good” (Gen.
1:31). This difficulty may be in great part removed by considering that:

(_a_) At its first creation, the world was good in two senses: first, as
free from moral evil,—sin being a later addition, the work, not of God,
but of created spirits; secondly, as adapted to beneficent ends,—for
example, the revelation of God’s perfection, and the probation and
happiness of intelligent and obedient creatures.

(_b_) Physical pain and imperfection, so far as they existed before the
introduction of moral evil, are to be regarded: first, as congruous parts
of a system of which sin was foreseen to be an incident; and secondly, as
constituting, in part, the means of future discipline and redemption for
the fallen.


    The coprolites of Saurians contain the scales and bones of fish
    which they have devoured. _Rom. 8:20-22_—“_For the creation was
    subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of him who
    subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also shall be
    delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the
    glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation_
    [the irrational creation] _groaneth and travaileth in pain
    together until now_”; _23_—our mortal body, as a part of nature,
    participates in the same groaning. _2 Cor. 4:17_—“_our light
    affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more
    exceedingly an eternal weight of glory._” Bowne, Philosophy of
    Theism, 224-240—“How explain our rather shabby universe? Pessimism
    assumes that perfect wisdom is compatible only with a perfect
    work, and that we know the universe to be truly worthless and
    insignificant.” John Stuart Mill, Essays on Religion, 29, brings
    in a fearful indictment of nature, her storms, lightnings,
    earthquakes, blight, decay, and death. Christianity however
    regards these as due to man, not to God; as incidents of sin; as
    the groans of creation, crying out for relief and liberty. Man’s
    body, as a part of nature, waits for the adoption, and
    resurrection of the body is to accompany the renewal of the world.

    It was Darwin’s judgment that in the world of nature and of man,
    on the whole, “happiness decidedly prevails.” Wallace, Darwinism,
    36-40—“Animals enjoy all the happiness of which they are capable.”
    Drummond, Ascent of Man, 203 _sq._—“In the struggle for life there
    is no hate—only hunger.” Martineau, Study, 1:330—“Waste of life is
    simply nature’s exuberance.” Newman Smyth, Place of Death in
    Evolution, 44-56—“Death simply buries the useless waste. Death has
    entered for life’s sake.” These utterances, however, come far
    short of a proper estimate of the evils of the world, and they
    ignore the Scriptural teaching with regard to the connection
    between death and sin. A future world into which sin and death do
    not enter shows that the present world is abnormal, and that
    morality is the only cure for mortality. Nor can the imperfections
    of the universe be explained by saying that they furnish
    opportunity for struggle and for virtue. Robert Browning, Ring and
    Book, Pope, 1875—“I can believe this dread machinery Of sin and
    sorrow, would confound me else, Devised,—all pain, at most
    expenditure Of pain by Who devised pain,—to evolve, By new
    machinery in counterpart, The moral qualities of man—how else?—To
    make him love in turn and be beloved, Creative and
    self-sacrificing too, And thus eventually godlike.” This seems
    like doing evil that good may come. We can explain mortality only
    by immorality, and that not in God but in man. Fairbairn:
    “Suffering is God’s protest against sin.”

    Wallace’s theory of the survival of the fittest was suggested by
    the prodigal destructiveness of nature. Tennyson: “Finding that of
    fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear.” William James: “Our
    dogs are _in_ our human life, but not _of_ it. The dog, under the
    knife of vivisection, cannot understand the purpose of his
    suffering. For him it is only pain. So we may lie soaking in a
    spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of Being which we have at
    present no organ for apprehending. If we knew the purpose of our
    life, all that is heroic in us would religiously acquiesce.”
    Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 72—“Love is prepared to take deeper
    and sterner measures than benevolence, which is by itself a
    shallow thing.” The Lakes of Killarny in Ireland show what a
    paradise this world might be if war had not desolated it, and if
    man had properly cared for it. Our moral sense cannot justify the
    evil in creation except upon the hypothesis that this has some
    cause and reason in the misconduct of man.

    This is not a perfect world. It was not perfect even when
    originally constituted. Its imperfection is due to sin. God made
    it with reference to the Fall,—the stage was arranged for the
    great drama of sin and redemption which was to be enacted thereon.
    We accept Bushnell’s idea of “anticipative consequences,” and
    would illustrate it by the building of a hospital-room while yet
    no member of the family is sick, and by the salvation of the
    patriarchs through a Christ yet to come. If the earliest
    vertebrates of geological history were types of man and
    preparations for his coming, then pain and death among those same
    vertebrates may equally have been a type of man’s sin and its
    results of misery. If sin had not been an incident, foreseen and
    provided for, the world might have been a paradise. As a matter of
    fact, it will become a paradise only at the completion of the
    redemptive work of Christ. Kreibig, Versöhnung, 369—“The death of
    Christ was accompanied by startling occurrences in the outward
    world, to show that the effects of his sacrifice reached even into
    nature.” Perowne refers _Ps. 96:10_—“_The world also is
    established that it cannot be moved_”—to the restoration of the
    inanimate creation; _cf._ _Heb. 12:27_—“_And this word, Yet once
    more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as
    of things that have been made, that those things which are not
    shaken may remain_”; _Rev. 21:1, 5_—“_a new heaven and a new earth
    ... Behold, I make all things new._”

    Much sport has been made of this doctrine of anticipative
    consequences. James D. Dana: “It is funny that the sin of Adam
    should have killed those old trilobites! The blunderbuss must have
    kicked back into time at a tremendous rate to have hit those poor
    innocents!” Yet every insurance policy, every taking out of an
    umbrella, every buying of a wedding ring, is an anticipative
    consequence. To deny that God made the world what it is in view of
    the events that were to take place in it, is to concede to him
    less wisdom than we attribute to our fellow-man. The most rational
    explanation of physical evil in the universe is that of _Rom.
    8:20, 21_—“_the creation was subjected to vanity ... by reason of
    him who subjected it_”—_i. e._, by reason of the first man’s
    sin—“_in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered_.”

    Martineau, Types, 2:151—“What meaning could Pity have in a world
    where suffering was not meant to be?” Hicks, Critique of Design
    Arguments, 386—“The very badness of the world convinces us that
    God is good.” And Sir Henry Taylor’s words: “Pain in man Bears the
    high mission of the flail and fan; In brutes ’tis surely
    piteous”—receive their answer: The brute is but an appendage to
    man, and like inanimate nature it suffers from man’s fall—suffers
    not wholly in vain, for even pain in brutes serves to illustrate
    the malign influence of sin and to suggest motives for resisting
    it. Pascal: “Whatever virtue can be bought with pain is cheaply
    bought.” The pain and imperfection of the world are God’s frown
    upon sin and his warning against it. See Bushnell, chapter on
    Anticipative Consequences, in Nature and the Supernatural,
    194-219. Also McCosh, Divine Government, 26-35, 249-261; Farrar,
    Science and Theology, 82-105; Johnson, in Bap. Rev., 6:141-154;
    Fairbairn, Philos. Christ. Religion, 94-168.


2. To the wisdom and free-will of God.


No plan whatever of a finite creation can fully express the infinite
perfection of God. Since God, however, is immutable, he must always have
had a plan of the universe; since he is perfect, he must have had the best
possible plan. As wise, God cannot choose a plan less good, instead of one
more good. As rational, he cannot between plans equally good make a merely
arbitrary choice. Here is no necessity, but only the certainty that
infinite wisdom will act wisely. As no compulsion from without, so no
necessity from within, moves God to create the actual universe. Creation
is both wise and free.


    As God is both rational and wise, his having a plan of the
    universe must be better than his not having a plan would be. But
    the universe once was not; yet without a universe God was blessed
    and sufficient to himself. God’s perfection therefore requires,
    not that he have a universe, but that he have a plan of the
    universe. Again, since God is both rational and wise, his actual
    creation cannot be the worst possible, nor one arbitrarily chosen
    from two or more equally good. It must be, all things considered,
    the best possible. We are optimists rather than pessimists.

    But we reject that form of optimism which regards evil as the
    indispensable condition of the good, and sin as the direct product
    of God’s will. We hold that other form of optimism which regards
    sin as naturally destructive, but as made, in spite of itself, by
    an overruling providence, to contribute to the highest good. For
    the optimism which makes evil the necessary condition of finite
    being, see Leibnitz, Opera Philosophica, 468, 624; Hedge, Ways of
    the Spirit, 241; and Pope’s Essay on Man. For the better form of
    optimism, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Schöpfung, 13:651-653;
    Chalmers, Works, 2:286; Mark Hopkins, in Andover Rev., March,
    1885:197-210; Luthardt, Lehre des freien Willens, 9, 10—“Calvin’s
    _Quia voluit_ is not the last answer. We could have no heart for
    such a God, for he would himself have no heart. Formal will alone
    has no heart. In God real freedom controls formal, as in fallen
    man, formal controls real.”

    Janet, in his Final Causes, 429 sq. and 490-503, claims that
    optimism subjects God to fate. We have shown that this objection
    mistakes the certainty which is consistent with freedom for the
    necessity which is inconsistent with freedom. The opposite
    doctrine attributes an irrational arbitrariness to God. We are
    warranted in saying that the universe at present existing,
    considered as a partial realization of God’s developing plan, is
    the best possible for this particular point of time,—in short,
    that all is for the best,—see _Rom. 8:28_—“_to them that love God
    all things work together for good_”; _1 Cor. 3:21_—“_all things
    are yours._”

    For denial of optimism in any form, see Watson, Theol. Institutes,
    1:419; Hovey, God with Us, 206-208; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:419,
    432, 566, and 2:145; Lipsius, Dogmatik, 234-255; Flint, Theism,
    227-256; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 397-409, and esp. 405—“A wisdom
    the resources of which have been so expended that it cannot equal
    its past achievements is a finite capacity, and not the boundless
    depth of the infinite God.” But we reply that a wisdom which does
    not do that which is best is not wisdom. The limit is not in God’s
    abstract power, but in his other attributes of truth, love, and
    holiness. Hence God can say in _Is. 5:4_—“_what could have been
    done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it?_”

    The perfect antithesis to an ethical and theistic optimism is
    found in the non-moral and atheistic pessimism of Schopenhauer
    (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) and Hartmann (Philosophie des
    Unbewussten). “All life is summed up in effort, and effort is
    painful; therefore life is pain.” But we might retort: “Life is
    active, and action is always accompanied with pleasure; therefore
    life is pleasure.” See Frances Power Cobbe, Peak in Darien,
    95-134, for a graphic account of Schopenhauer’s heartlessness,
    cowardice and arrogance. Pessimism is natural to a mind soured by
    disappointment and forgetful of God: _Eccl. 2:11_—“_all was vanity
    and a striving after wind._” Homer: “There is nothing whatever
    more wretched than man.” Seneca praises death as the best
    invention of nature. Byron: “Count o’er the joys thine hours have
    seen, Count o’er thy days from anguish free, And know, whatever
    thou hast been, ’Tis something better not to be.” But it has been
    left to Schopenhauer and Hartmann to define will as unsatisfied
    yearning, to regard life itself as a huge blunder, and to urge
    upon the human race, as the only measure of permanent relief, a
    united and universal act of suicide.

    G. H. Beard, in Andover Rev., March, 1892—“Schopenhauer utters one
    New Testament truth: the utter delusiveness of self-indulgence.
    Life which is dominated by the desires, and devoted to mere
    getting, is a pendulum swinging between pain and ennui.” Bowne,
    Philos. of Theism, 124—“For Schopenhauer the world-ground is pure
    will, without intellect or personality. But pure will is nothing.
    Will itself, except as a function of a conscious and intelligent
    spirit, is nothing.” Royce, Spirit of Mod. Philos.,
    253-280—“Schopenhauer united Kant’s thought, ‘The inmost life of
    all things is one,’ with the Hindoo insight, ‘The life of all
    these things, That art Thou.’ To him music shows best what the
    will is: passionate, struggling, wandering, restless, ever
    returning to itself, full of longing, vigor, majesty, caprice.
    Schopenhauer condemns individual suicide, and counsels
    resignation. That I must ever desire yet never fully attain, leads
    Hegel to the conception of the absolutely active and triumphant
    spirit. Schopenhauer finds in it proof of the totally evil nature
    of things. Thus while Hegel is an optimist, Schopenhauer is a
    pessimist.”

    Winwood Reade, in the title of his book, The Martyrdom of Man,
    intends to describe human history. O. W. Holmes says that Bunyan’s
    Pilgrim’s Progress “represents the universe as a trap which
    catches most of the human vermin that have its bait dangled before
    them.” Strauss: “If the prophets of pessimism prove that man had
    better never have lived, they thereby prove that themselves had
    better never have prophesied.” Hawthorne, Note-book: “Curious to
    imagine what mournings and discontent would be excited, if any of
    the great so-called calamities of human beings were to be
    abolished,—as, for instance, death.”

    On both the optimism of Leibnitz and the pessimism of
    Schopenhauer, see Bowen, Modern Philosophy; Tulloch, Modern
    Theories, 169-221; Thompson, on Modern Pessimism, in Present Day
    Tracts, 6: no. 34; Wright, on Ecclesiastes, 141-216; Barlow,
    Ultimatum of Pessimism: Culture tends to misery; God is the most
    miserable of beings; creation is a plaster for the sore. See also
    Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:197—“Disorder and
    misery are so mingled with order and beneficence, that both
    optimism and pessimism are possible.” Yet it is evident that there
    must be more construction than destruction, or the world would not
    be existing. Buddhism, with its Nirvana-refuge, is essentially
    pessimistic.


3. To Christ as the Revealer of God.


Since Christ is the Revealer of God in creation as well as in redemption,
the remedy for pessimism is (1) the recognition of God’s transcendence—the
universe at present not fully expressing his power, his holiness or his
love, and nature being a scheme of progressive evolution which we
imperfectly comprehend and in which there is much to follow; (2) the
recognition of sin as the free act of the creature, by which all sorrow
and pain have been caused, so that God is in no proper sense its author;
(3) the recognition of Christ _for_ us on the Cross and Christ _in_ us by
his Spirit, as revealing the age-long sorrow and suffering of God’s heart
on account of human transgression, and as manifested, in self-sacrificing
love, to deliver men from the manifold evils in which their sins have
involved them; and (4) the recognition of present probation and future
judgment, so that provision is made for removing the scandal now resting
upon the divine government and for justifying the ways of God to men.


    Christ’s Cross is the proof that God suffers more than man from
    human sin, and Christ’s judgment will show that the wicked cannot
    always prosper. In Christ alone we find the key to the dark
    problems of history and the guarantee of human progress. _Rom.
    3:25_—“_whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in
    his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over
    of the sins done aforetime in the forbearance of God_”;
    _8:32_—“_He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for
    us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all
    things?_” _Heb. 2:8, 9_—“_we see not yet all things subjected to
    him. But we behold ... Jesus ... crowned with glory and honor_”;
    _Acts 17:31_—“_he hath appointed a day in which he will judge the
    earth in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained._” See
    Hill, Psychology, 283; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems,
    240, 241; Bruce, Providential Order, 71-88; J. M. Whiton, in Am.
    Jour. Theology, April, 1901:318.

    G. A. Gordon, New Epoch of Faith, 199—“The book of Job is called
    by Huxley the classic of pessimism.” Dean Swift, on the successive
    anniversaries of his own birth, was accustomed to read the third
    chapter of Job, which begins with the terrible “_Let the day
    perish wherein I was born_” (_3:3_). But predestination and
    election are not arbitrary. Wisdom has chosen the best possible
    plan, has ordained the salvation of all who could wisely have been
    saved, has permitted the least evil that it was wise to permit.
    _Rev. 4:11_—“_Thou didst create all things, and because of thy
    will they were, and were created._” Mason, Faith of the Gospel,
    79—“All things were present to God’s mind because of his will, and
    then, when it pleased him, had being given to them.” Pfleiderer,
    Grundriss, 36, advocates a realistic idealism. Christianity, he
    says, is not abstract optimism, for it recognizes the evil of the
    actual and regards conflict with it as the task of the world’s
    history; it is not pessimism, for it regards the evil as not
    unconquerable, but regards the good as the end and the power of
    the world.

    Jones, Robert Browning, 109, 311—“Pantheistic optimism asserts
    that all things _are_ good; Christian optimism asserts that all
    things are _working together_ for good. Reverie in Asolando: ‘From
    the first Power was—I knew. Life has made clear to me That, strive
    but for closer view, Love were as plain to see.’ Balaustion’s
    Adventure: ‘Gladness be with thee, Helper of the world! I think
    this is the authentic sign and seal Of Godship, that it ever waxes
    glad, And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts Into a rage
    to suffer for mankind And recommence at sorrow.’ Browning
    endeavored to find God in man, and still to leave man free. His
    optimistic faith sought reconciliation with morality. He abhorred
    the doctrine that the evils of the world are due to merely
    arbitrary sovereignty, and this doctrine he has satirized in the
    monologue of Caliban on Setebos: ‘Loving not, hating not, just
    choosing so.’ Pippa Passes: ‘God’s in his heaven—All’s right with
    the world.’ But how is this consistent with the guilt of the
    sinner? Browning does not say. He leaves the antinomy unsolved,
    only striving to hold both truths in their fulness. Love demands
    distinction between God and man, yet love unites God and man.
    Saul: ‘All’s love, but all’s law.’ Carlyle forms a striking
    contrast to Browning. Carlyle was a pessimist. He would renounce
    happiness for duty, and as a means to this end would suppress, not
    idle speech alone, but thought itself. The battle is fought
    moreover in a foreign cause. God’s cause is not ours. Duty is a
    menace, like the duty of a slave. The moral law is not a
    beneficent revelation, reconciling God and man. All is fear, and
    there is no love.” Carlyle took Emerson through the London slums
    at midnight and asked him: “Do you believe in a devil now?” But
    Emerson replied: “I am more and more convinced of the greatness
    and goodness of the English people.” On Browning and Carlyle, see
    A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 373-447.

    Henry Ward Beecher, when asked whether life was worth living,
    replied that that depended very much upon the liver. Optimism and
    pessimism are largely matters of digestion. President Mark Hopkins
    asked a bright student if he did not believe this the best
    possible system. When the student replied in the negative, the
    President asked him how he could improve upon it. He answered: “I
    would kill off all the bed-bugs, mosquitoes and fleas, and make
    oranges and bananas grow further north.” The lady who was bitten
    by a mosquito asked whether it would be proper to speak of the
    creature as “a depraved little insect.” She was told that this
    would be improper, because depravity always implies a previous
    state of innocence, whereas the mosquito has always been as bad as
    he now is. Dr. Lyman Beecher, however, seems to have held the
    contrary view. When he had captured the mosquito who had bitten
    him, he crushed the insect, saying: “There! I’ll show you that
    there is a God in Israel!” He identified the mosquito with all the
    corporate evil of the world. Allen, Religious Progress,
    22—“Wordsworth hoped still, although the French Revolution
    depressed him; Macaulay, after reading Ranke’s History of the
    Popes, denied all religious progress.” On Huxley’s account of
    evil, see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 265 _sq._

    Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:301, 302—“The Greeks of Homer’s
    time had a naïve and youthful optimism. But they changed from an
    optimistic to a pessimistic view. This change resulted from their
    increasing contemplation of the moral disorder of the world.” On
    the melancholy of the Greeks, see Butcher, Aspects of Greek
    Genius, 130-165. Butcher holds that the great difference between
    Greeks and Hebrews was that the former had no hope or ideal of
    progress. A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 74-102—“The voluptuous
    poets are pessimistic, because sensual pleasure quickly passes,
    and leaves lassitude and enervation behind. Pessimism is the basis
    of Stoicism also. It is inevitable where there is no faith in God
    and in a future life. The life of a seed underground is not
    inspiring, except in prospect of sun and flowers and fruit.”
    Bradley, Appearance and Reality, xiv, sums up the optimistic view
    as follows: “The world is the best of all possible worlds, and
    everything in it is a necessary evil.” He should have added that
    pain is the exception in the world, and finite free will is the
    cause of the trouble. Pain is made the means of developing
    character, and, when it has accomplished its purpose, pain will
    pass away.

    Jackson, James Martineau, 390—“All is well, says an American
    preacher, for if there is anything that is not well, it is well
    that it is not well. It is well that falsity and hate are not
    well, that malice and envy and cruelty are not well. What hope for
    the world or what trust in God, if they were well?” _Live_ spells
    _Evil_, only when we read it the wrong way. James Russell Lowell,
    Letters, 2:51—“The more I learn ... the more my confidence in the
    general good sense and honest intentions of mankind increases....
    The signs of the times cease to alarm me, and seem as natural as
    to a mother the teething of her seventh baby. I take great comfort
    in God. I think that he is considerably amused with us sometimes,
    and that he likes us on the whole, and would not let us get at the
    matchbox so carelessly as he does, unless he knew that the frame
    of his universe was fireproof.”

    Compare with all this the hopeless pessimism of Omar Kháyyám,
    Rubáiyát, stanza 99—“Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire To
    grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, Would not we shatter it
    to bits—and then Remould it nearer to the heart’s desire?” Royce,
    Studies of Good and Evil, 14, in discussing the Problem of Job,
    suggests the following solution: “When you suffer, your sufferings
    are God’s sufferings, not his external work, not his external
    penalty, not the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own
    personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and
    has all your concern in overcoming this grief.” F. H. Johnson,
    What is Reality, 349, 505—“The Christian ideal is not
    maintainable, if we assume that God could as easily develop his
    creation without conflict.... Happiness is only one of his ends;
    the evolution of moral character is another.” A. E. Waffle, Uses
    of Moral Evil: “(1) It aids development of holy character by
    opposition; (2) affords opportunity for ministering; (3) makes
    known to us some of the chief attributes of God; (4) enhances the
    blessedness of heaven.”


4. To Providence and Redemption.


Christianity is essentially a scheme of supernatural love and power. It
conceives of God as above the world, as well as in it,—able to manifest
himself, and actually manifesting himself, in ways unknown to mere nature.

But this absolute sovereignty and transcendence, which are manifested in
providence and redemption, are inseparable from creatorship. If the world
be eternal, like God, it must be an efflux from the substance of God and
must be absolutely equal with God. Only a proper doctrine of creation can
secure God’s absolute distinctness from the world and his sovereignty over
it.

The logical alternative of creation is therefore a system of pantheism, in
which God is an impersonal and necessary force. Hence the pantheistic
_dicta_ of Fichte: “The assumption of a creation is the fundamental error
of all false metaphysics and false theology”; of Hegel: “God evolves the
world out of himself, in order to take it back into himself again in the
Spirit”; and of Strauss: “Trinity and creation, speculatively viewed, are
one and the same,—only the one is viewed absolutely, the other
empirically.”


    Sterrett, Studies, 155, 156—“Hegel held that it belongs to God’s
    nature to create. Creation is God’s positing an _other_ which is
    not an _other_. The creation is _his_, belongs to his being or
    essence. This involves the finite as his own self-posited object
    and self-revelation. It is necessary for God to create. Love,
    Hegel says, is only another expression of the eternally Triune
    God. Love must create and love _another_. But in loving this
    _other_, God is only loving himself.” We have already, in our
    discussion of the theory of creation from eternity, shown the
    insufficiency of creation to satisfy either the love or the power
    of God. A proper doctrine of the Trinity renders the hypothesis of
    an eternal creation unnecessary and irrational. That hypothesis is
    pantheistic in tendency.

    Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 97—“Dualism might be called a
    logical alternative of creation, but for the fact that its notion
    of two gods in self-contradictory, and leads to the lowering of
    the idea of the Godhead, so that the impersonal god of pantheism
    takes its place.” Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:11—“The world
    cannot be necessitated in order to satisfy either want or
    over-fulness in God.... The doctrine of absolute creation prevents
    the _confounding_ of God with the world. The declaration that the
    Spirit brooded over the formless elements, and that life was
    developed under the continuous operation of God’s laws and
    presence, prevents the _separation_ of God from the world. Thus
    pantheism and deism are both avoided.” See Kant and Spinoza
    contrasted in Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:468, 469. The unusually full
    treatment of the doctrine of creation in this chapter is due to a
    conviction that the doctrine constitutes an antidote to most of
    the false philosophy of our time.


5. To the Observance of the Sabbath.


We perceive from this point of view, moreover, the importance and value of
the Sabbath, as commemorating God’s act of creation, and thus God’s
personality, sovereignty, and transcendence.

(_a_) The Sabbath is of perpetual obligation as God’s appointed memorial
of his creating activity. The Sabbath requisition antedates the decalogue
and forms a part of the moral law. Made at the creation, it applies to man
as man, everywhere and always, in his present state of being.


    _Gen. 2:3_—“_And God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it;
    because that in it he rested from all his work which God had
    created and made._” Our rest is to be a miniature representation
    of God’s rest. As God worked six divine days and rested one divine
    day, so are we in imitation of him to work six human days and to
    rest one human day. In the Old Testament there are indications of
    an observance of the Sabbath day before the Mosaic legislation:
    _Gen. 4:3_—“_And in process of time_ [lit. “_at the end of days_”]
    _it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an
    offering unto Jehovah_”; _Gen. 8:10, 12_—Noah twice waited seven
    days before sending forth the dove from the ark; _Gen. 29:27,
    28_—“_fulfil the week_”; _cf._ _Judges 14:12_—“_the seven days of
    the feast_”; _Ex. 16:5_—double portion of manna promised on the
    sixth day, that none be gathered on the Sabbath (_cf._ _verses 20,
    30_). This division of days into weeks is best explained by the
    original institution of the Sabbath at man’s creation. Moses in
    the fourth commandment therefore speaks of it as already known and
    observed: _Ex. 20:8_—“_Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy._”

    The Sabbath is recognized in Assyrian accounts of the Creation;
    see Trans. Soc. Bib. Arch., 5:427, 428; Schrader, Keilinschriften,
    ed. 1883:18-22. Professor Sayce: “Seven was a sacred number
    descended to the Semites from their Accadian predecessors. Seven
    by seven had the magic knots to be tied by the witch; seven times
    had the body of the sick man to be anointed by the purifying oil.
    As the Sabbath of rest fell on each seventh day of the week, so
    the planets, like the demon-messengers of Anu, were seven in
    number, and the gods of the number seven received a particular
    honor.” But now the discovery of a calendar tablet in Mesopotamia
    shows us the week of seven days and the Sabbath in full sway in
    ancient Babylon long before the days of Moses. In this tablet the
    seventh, the fourteenth, the twenty-first and the twenty-eighth
    days are called Sabbaths, the very word used by Moses, and
    following it are the words: “A day of rest.” The restrictions are
    quite as rigid in this tablet as those in the law of Moses. This
    institution must have gone back to the Accadian period, before the
    days of Abraham. In one of the recent discoveries this day is
    called “the day of rest for the heart,” but of the gods, on
    account of the propitiation offered on that day, their heart being
    put at rest. See Jastrow, in Am. Jour. Theol., April, 1898.

    S. S. Times, Jan. 1892, art. by Dr. Jensen of the University of
    Strassburg on the Biblical and Babylonian Week: “_Subattu_ in
    Babylonia means day of propitiation, implying a religious purpose.
    A week of seven days is implied in the Babylonian Flood-Story, the
    rain continuing six days and ceasing on the seventh, and another
    period of seven days intervening between the cessation of the
    storm and the disembarking of Noah, the dove, swallow and raven
    being sent out again on the seventh day. Sabbaths are called days
    of rest for the heart, days of the completion of labor.” Hutton,
    Essays, 2:229—“Because there is in God’s mind a spring of eternal
    rest as well as of creative energy, we are enjoined to respect the
    law of rest as well as the law of labor.” We may question, indeed,
    whether this doctrine of God’s rest does not of itself refute the
    theory of eternal, continuous, and necessary creation.


(_b_) Neither our Lord nor his apostles abrogated the Sabbath of the
decalogue. The new dispensation does away with the Mosaic prescriptions as
to the method of keeping the Sabbath, but at the same time declares its
observance to be of divine origin and to be a necessity of human nature.


    Not everything in the Mosaic law is abrogated in Christ. Worship
    and reverence, regard for life and purity and property, are
    binding still. Christ did not nail to his cross every commandment
    of the decalogue. Jesus does not defend himself from the charge of
    Sabbath-breaking by saying that the Sabbath is abrogated, but by
    asserting the true idea of the Sabbath as fulfilling a fundamental
    human need. _Mark 2:27_—“_The Sabbath was made_ [by God] _for man,
    and not man for the Sabbath._” The Puritan restrictions are not
    essential to the Sabbath, nor do they correspond even with the
    methods of later Old Testament observance. The Jewish Sabbath was
    more like the New England Thanksgiving than like the New England
    Fast-day. _Nehemiah 8:12, 18_—“_And all the people went their way
    to eat, and to drink, and to send portions, and to make great
    mirth.... And they kept the feast seven days; and on the eighth
    day was a solemn assembly, according unto the ordinance_”—seems to
    include the Sabbath day as a day of gladness.

    Origen, in Homily 23 on _Numbers_ (Migne, II:358): “Leaving
    therefore the Jewish observances of the Sabbath, let us see what
    ought to be for a Christian the observance of the Sabbath. On the
    Sabbath day nothing of all the actions of the world ought to be
    done.” Christ walks through the cornfield, heals a paralytic, and
    dines with a Pharisee, all on the Sabbath day. John Milton, in his
    Christian Doctrine, is an extreme anti-sabbatarian, maintaining
    that the decalogue was abolished with the Mosaic law. He thinks it
    uncertain whether “the Lord’s day” was weekly or annual. The
    observance of the Sabbath, to his mind, is a matter not of
    authority, but of convenience. Archbishop Paley: “In my opinion
    St. Paul considered the Sabbath a sort of Jewish ritual, and not
    obligatory on Christians. A cessation on that day from labor
    beyond the time of attending public worship is not intimated in
    any part of the New Testament. The notion that Jesus and his
    apostles meant to retain the Jewish Sabbath, only shifting the day
    from the seventh to the first, prevails without sufficient
    reason.”

    According to Guizot, Calvin was so pleased with a play to be acted
    in Geneva on Sunday, that he not only attended but deferred his
    sermon so that his congregation might attend. When John Knox
    visited Calvin, he found him playing a game of bowls on Sunday.
    Martin Luther said: “Keep the day holy for its use’s sake, both to
    body and soul. But if anywhere the day is made holy for the mere
    day’s sake, if any one set up its observance on a Jewish
    foundation, then I order you to work on it, to ride on it, to
    dance on it, to do anything that shall reprove this encroachment
    on the Christian spirit and liberty.” But the most liberal and
    even radical writers of our time recognize the economic and
    patriotic uses of the Sabbath. R. W. Emerson said that its
    observance is “the core of our civilization.” Charles Sumner: “If
    we would perpetuate our Republic, we must sanctify it as well as
    fortify it, and make it at once a temple and a citadel.” Oliver
    Wendell Holmes: “He who ordained the Sabbath loved the poor.” In
    Pennsylvania they bring up from the mines every Sunday the mules
    that have been working the whole week in darkness,—otherwise they
    would become blind. So men’s spiritual sight will fail them if
    they do not weekly come up into God’s light.


(_c_) The Sabbath law binds us to set apart a seventh portion of our time
for rest and worship. It does not enjoin the simultaneous observance by
all the world of a fixed portion of absolute time, nor is such observance
possible. Christ’s example and apostolic sanction have transferred the
Sabbath from the seventh day to the first, for the reason that this last
is the day of Christ’s resurrection, and so the day when God’s spiritual
creation became in Christ complete.


    No exact portion of absolute time can be simultaneously observed
    by men in different longitudes. The day in Berlin begins six hours
    before the day in New York, so that a whole quarter of what is
    Sunday in Berlin is still Saturday in New York. Crossing the 180th
    degree of longitude from West to East we gain a day, and a
    seventh-day Sabbatarian who circumnavigated the globe might thus
    return to his starting point observing the same Sabbath with his
    fellow Christians. A. S. Carman, in the Examiner, Jan. 4, 1894,
    asserts that Heb. 4:5-9 alludes to the change of day from the
    seventh to the first, in the references to “_a Sabbath rest_” that
    “_remaineth_,” and to “_another day_” taking the place of the
    original promised day of rest. Teaching of the Twelve Apostles:
    “On the Lord’s Day assemble ye together, and give thanks, and
    break bread.”

    The change from the seventh day to the first seems to have been
    due to the resurrection of Christ upon “_the first day of the
    week_” (_Mat. 28:1_), to his meeting with the disciples upon that
    day and upon the succeeding Sunday (_John 20:26_), and to the
    pouring out of the Spirit upon the Pentecostal Sunday seven weeks
    after (_Acts 2:1_—see Bap. Quar. Rev., 185:229-232). Thus by
    Christ’s own example and by apostolic sanction the first day
    became “_the Lord’s day_” (_Rev. 1:10_), on which believers met
    regularly each week with their Lord (_Acts 20:7_—“_the first day
    of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread_”) and
    brought together their benevolent contributions (_1 Cor. 16:1,
    2_—“_Now concerning the collection for the saints ... Upon the
    first day of the week let each one of you lay by him in store, as
    he may prosper, that no collections be made when I come_”).
    Eusebius, Com. on _Ps. 92_ (Migne, V:1191, C): “Wherefore those
    things [the Levitical regulations] having been already rejected,
    the Logos through the new Covenant transferred and changed the
    festival of the Sabbath to the rising of the sun ... the Lord’s
    day ... holy and spiritual Sabbaths.”

    Justin Martyr, First Apology: “On the day called Sunday all who
    live in city or country gather together in one place, and the
    memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are
    read.... Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common
    assembly, because it is the first day on which God made the world
    and Jesus our Savior on the same day rose from the dead. For he
    was crucified on the day before, that of Saturn (Saturday); and on
    the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun
    (Sunday), having appeared to his apostles and disciples he taught
    them these things which we have submitted to you for your
    consideration.” This seems to intimate that Jesus between his
    resurrection and ascension gave command respecting the observance
    of the first day of the week. He was “_received up_” only after
    “_he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit unto the
    apostles whom he had chosen_” (_Acts 1:2_).

    The Christian Sabbath, then, is the day of Christ’s resurrection.
    The Jewish Sabbath commemorated only the beginning of the world;
    the Christian Sabbath commemorates also the new creation of the
    world in Christ, in which God’s work in humanity first becomes
    complete. C. H. M. on _Gen. 2_: “If I celebrate the seventh day it
    marks me as an earthly man, inasmuch as that day is clearly the
    rest of earth—creation-rest; if I intelligently celebrate the
    first day of the week, I am marked as a heavenly man, believing in
    the new creation in Christ.” (_Gal. 4:10, 11_—“_Ye observe days,
    and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid of you, least by
    any means I have bestowed labor upon you in vain_”; _Col.
    2:16,17_—“_Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or
    in respect of a feast day or a new moon or a sabbath day: which
    are a shadow of the things to come; but the body is Christ’s._”)
    See George S. Gray, Eight Studies on the Lord’s Day; Hessey,
    Bampton Lectures on the Sunday; Gilfillan, The Sabbath; Wood,
    Sabbath Essays; Bacon, Sabbath Observance; Hadley, Essays
    Philological and Critical, 325-345; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 3:
    321-348; Lotz, Quæstiones de Historia Sabbati; Maurice, Sermons on
    the Sabbath; Prize Essays on the Sabbath; Crafts, The Sabbath for
    Man; A. E. Waffle, The Lord’s Day; Alvah Hovey, Studies in Ethics
    and Religion, 271-320; Guirey, The Hallowed Day; Gamble, Sunday
    and the Sabbath; Driver, art.: Sabbath, in Hastings’ Bible
    Dictionary; Broadus, Am. Com. on _Mat. 12:3_. For the seventh-day
    view, see T. B. Brown, The Sabbath; J. N. Andrews, History of the
    Sabbath. _Per contra_, see Prof. A. Rauschenbusch, Saturday or
    Sunday?



Section II.—Preservation.


I. Definition of Preservation.


Preservation is that continuous agency of God by which he maintains in
existence the things he has created, together with the properties and
powers with which he has endowed them. As the doctrine of creation is our
attempt to explain the existence of the universe, so the doctrine of
Preservation is our attempt to explain its continuance.

In explanation we remark:

(_a_) Preservation is not creation, for preservation presupposes creation.
That which is preserved must already exist, and must have come into
existence by the creative act of God.

(_b_) Preservation is not a mere negation of action, or a refraining to
destroy, on the part of God. It is a positive agency by which, at every
moment, he sustains the persons and the forces of the universe.

(_c_) Preservation implies a natural concurrence of God in all operations
of matter and of mind. Though personal beings exist and God’s will is not
the sole force, it is still true that, without his concurrence, no person
or force can continue to exist or to act.


    Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:40-42—“Creation and preservation
    cannot be the same thing, for then man would be only the product
    of natural forces supervised by God,—whereas, man is above nature
    and is inexplicable from nature. Nature is not the whole of the
    universe, but only the preliminary basis of it.... The _rest_ of
    God is not cessation of activity, but is a new exercise of power.”
    Nor is God “the soul of the universe.” This phrase is pantheistic,
    and implies that God is the only agent.

    It is a wonder that physical life continues. The pumping of blood
    through the heart, whether we sleep or wake, requires an
    expenditure of energy far beyond our ordinary estimates. The
    muscle of the heart never rests except between the beats. All the
    blood in the body passes through the heart in each half-minute.
    The grip of the heart is greater than that of the fist. The two
    ventricles of the heart hold on the average ten ounces or
    five-eighths of a pound, and this amount is pumped out at each
    beat. At 72 per minute, this is 45 pounds per minute, 2,700 pounds
    per hour, and 64,800 pounds or 32 and four tenths tons per day.
    Encyclopædia Britannica, 11:554—“The heart does about one-fifth of
    the whole mechanical work of the body—a work equivalent to raising
    its own weight over 13,000 feet an hour. It takes its rest only in
    short snatches, as it were, its action as a whole being
    continuous. It must necessarily be the earliest sufferer from any
    improvidence as regards nutrition, mental emotion being in this
    respect quite as potential a cause of constitutional bankruptcy as
    the most violent muscular exertion.”

    Before the days of the guillotine in France, when the criminal to
    be executed sat in a chair and was decapitated by one blow of the
    sharp sword, an observer declared that the blood spouted up
    several feet into the air. Yet this great force is exerted by the
    heart so noiselessly that we are for the most part unconscious of
    it. The power at work is the power of God, and we call that
    exercise of power by the name of preservation. Crane, Religion of
    To-morrow, 130—“We do not get bread because God instituted certain
    laws of growing wheat or of baking dough, he leaving these laws to
    run of themselves. But God, personally present in the wheat, makes
    it grow, and in the dough turns it into bread. He does not make
    gravitation or cohesion, but these are phases of his present
    action. Spirit is the reality, matter and law are the modes of its
    expression. So in redemption it is not by the working of some
    perfect plan that God saves. He is the immanent God, and all of
    his benefits are but phases of his person and immediate
    influence.”


II. Proof of the Doctrine of Preservation.


1. From Scripture.


In a number of Scripture passages, preservation is expressly distinguished
from creation. Though God rested from his work of creation and established
an order of natural forces, a special and continuous divine activity is
declared to be put forth in the upholding of the universe and its powers.
This divine activity, moreover, is declared to be the activity of Christ;
as he is the mediating agent in creation, so he is the mediating agent in
preservation.


    _Nehemiah 9:6_—“_Thou art Jehovah, even thou alone; thou hast made
    heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and
    all things that are thereon, the seas and all that is in them, and
    thou preservest them all_”; _Job 7:20_—“_O thou watcher_ [marg.
    “preserver”] _of men!_”; _Ps. 36:6_—“_thou preservest man and
    beast_”; _104:29, 30_—“_Thou takest away their breath, they die,
    And return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are
    created, And thou renewest the face of the ground._” See Perowne
    on _Ps. 104_—“A psalm to the God who is in and with nature for
    good.” Humboldt, Cosmos, 2:413—“Psalm 104 presents an image of the
    whole Cosmos.” _Acts 17:28_—“_in him we live, and move, and have
    our being_”; _Col. 1:17_—“_in him all things consist_”; _Heb. 1:2,
    3_—“_upholding all things by the word of his power._” _John
    5:17_—“_My Father worketh even until now, and I work_”—refers most
    naturally to preservation, since creation is a work completed;
    compare _Gen. 2:2_—“_on the seventh day God finished his work
    which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his
    work which he had made._” God is the upholder of physical life;
    see _Ps. 66:8, 9_—“_O bless our God ... who holdeth our soul in
    life._” God is also the upholder of spiritual life; see _1 Tim.
    6:13_—“_I charge thee in the sight of God who preserveth all
    things alive_” (ζωογονοῦντος τὰ πάντα)—the great Preserver enables
    us to persist in our Christian course. _Mat. 4:4_—“_Man shall not
    live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the
    mouth of God_”—though originally referring to physical nourishment
    is equally true of spiritual sustentation. In _Ps. 104:26_—“_There
    go the ships,_” Dawson, Mod. Ideas of Evolution, thinks the
    reference is not to man’s works but to God’s, as the parallelism:
    “There is leviathan” would indicate, and that by “ships” are meant
    “floaters” like the nautilus, which is a “little ship.” The 104th
    Psalm is a long hymn to the preserving power of God, who keeps
    alive all the creatures of the deep, both small and great.


2. From Reason.


We may argue the preserving agency of God from the following
considerations:

(_a_) Matter and mind are not self-existent. Since they have not the cause
of their being in themselves, their continuance as well as their origin
must be due to a superior power.


    Dorner, Glaubenslehre: “Were the world self-existent, it would be
    God, not world, and no religion would be possible.... The world
    has receptivity for new creations; but these, once introduced, are
    subject, like the rest, to the law of preservation”—_i. e._, are
    dependent for their continued existence upon God.


(_b_) Force implies a will of which it is the direct or indirect
expression. We know of force only through the exercise of our own wills.
Since will is the only cause of which we have direct knowledge, second
causes in nature may be regarded as only secondary, regular, and automatic
workings of the great first Cause.


    For modern theories identifying force with divine will, see
    Herschel, Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, 460; Murphy,
    Scientific Bases, 13-15, 29-36, 42-52; Duke of Argyll, Reign of
    Law, 121-127; Wallace, Natural Selection, 363-371; Bowen,
    Metaphysics and Ethics, 146-162; Martineau, Essays, 1:63, 265, and
    Study, 1:244—“Second causes in nature bear the same relation to
    the First Cause as the automatic movement of the muscles in
    walking bears to the first decision of the will that initiated the
    walk.” It is often objected that we cannot thus identify force
    with will, because in many cases the effort of our will is
    fruitless for the reason that nervous and muscular force is
    lacking. But this proves only that force cannot be identified with
    human will, not that it cannot be identified with the divine will.
    To the divine will no force is lacking; in God will and force are
    one.

    We therefore adopt the view of Maine de Biran, that causation
    pertains only to spirit. Porter, Human Intellect, 582-588, objects
    to this view as follows: “This implies, first, that the conception
    of a material cause is self-contradictory. But the mind recognizes
    in itself spiritual energies that are not voluntary; because we
    derive our notion of cause from will, it does not follow that the
    causal relation always involves will; it would follow that the
    universe, so far as it is not intelligent, is impossible. It
    implies, secondly, that there is but one agent in the universe,
    and that the phenomena of matter and mind are but manifestations
    of one single force—the Creator’s.” We reply to this reasoning by
    asserting that no dead thing can act, and that what we call
    involuntary spiritual energies are really unconscious or
    unremembered activities of the will.

    From our present point of view we would also criticize Hodge,
    Systematic Theology, 1:596—“Because we get our idea of force from
    mind, it does not follow that mind is the only force. That mind is
    a cause is no proof that electricity may not be a cause. If matter
    is force and nothing but force, then matter is nothing, and the
    external world is simply God. In spite of such argument, men will
    believe that the external world is a reality—that matter is, and
    that it is the cause of the effects we attribute to its agency.”
    New Englander, Sept. 1883:552—“Man in early time used second
    causes, _i. e._, machines, very little to accomplish his purposes.
    His usual mode of action was by the direct use of his hands, or
    his voice, and he naturally ascribed to the gods the same method
    as his own. His own use of second causes has led man to higher
    conceptions of the divine action.” Dorner: “If the world had no
    independence, it would not reflect God, nor would creation mean
    anything.” But this independence is not absolute. Even man lives,
    moves and has his being in God (_Acts 17:28_), and whatever has
    come into being, whether material or spiritual, has life only in
    Christ (_John 1:3, 4_, marginal reading).

    Preservation is God’s continuous willing. Bowne, Introd. to Psych.
    Theory, 305, speaks of “a kind of wholesale willing.” Augustine:
    “Dei voluntas est rerum natura.” Principal Fairbairn: “Nature is
    spirit.” Tennyson, The Ancient Sage: “Force is from the heights.”
    Lord Gifford, quoted in Max Müller, Anthropological Religion,
    392—“The human soul is neither self-derived nor self-subsisting.
    It would vanish if it had not a substance, and its substance is
    God.” Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 284, 285—“Matter is simply spirit
    in its lowest form of manifestation. The absolute Cause must be
    that deeper Self which we find at the heart of our own
    self-consciousness. By self-differentiation God creates both
    matter and mind.”


(_c_) God’s sovereignty requires a belief in his special preserving
agency; since this sovereignty would not be absolute, if anything occurred
or existed independent of his will.


    James Martineau, Seat of Authority, 29, 30—“All cosmic force is
    will.... This identification of nature with God’s will _would_ be
    pantheistic only _if_ we turned the proposition round and
    identified God with _no more_ than the life of the universe. But
    we do not deny transcendency. Natural forces are God’s will, but
    God’s will _is_ more than they. He is not the equivalent of the
    All, but its directing Mind. God is not the rage of the wild
    beast, nor the sin of man. There are things and beings objective
    to him.... He puts his power into that which is _other than
    himself_, and he parts with _other use of it_ by preëngagement to
    an end. Yet he is the continuous source and supply of power to the
    system.”

    Natural forces are generic volitions of God. But human wills, with
    their power of alternative, are the product of God’s
    self-limitation, even more than nature is, for human wills do not
    always obey the divine will,—they may even oppose it. Nothing
    finite is only finite. In it is the Infinite, not only as
    immanent, but also as transcendent, and in the case of sin, as
    opposing the sinner and as punishing him. This continuous willing
    of God has its analogy in our own subconscious willing. J. M.
    Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theol., Apl. 1901:320—“Our own will, when we
    walk, does not put forth a separate volition for every step, but
    depends on the automatic action of the lower nerve-centres, which
    it both sets in motion and keeps to their work. So the divine Will
    does not work in innumerable separate acts of volition.” A. R.
    Wallace: “The whole universe is not merely dependent on, but
    actually _is_, the will of higher intelligences or of one supreme
    intelligence.... Man’s free will is only a larger artery for the
    controlling current of the universal Will, whose time-long
    evolutionary flow constitutes the self-revelation of the Infinite
    One.” This latter statement of Wallace merges the finite will far
    too completely in the will of God. It is true of nature and of all
    holy beings, but it is untrue of the wicked. These are indeed
    upheld by God in their being, but opposed by God in their conduct.
    Preservation leaves room for human freedom, responsibility, sin,
    and guilt.

    All natural forces and all personal beings therefore give
    testimony to the will of God which originated them and which
    continually sustains them. The physical universe, indeed, is in no
    sense independent of God, for its forces are only the constant
    willing of God, and its laws are only the habits of God. Only in
    the free will of intelligent beings has God disjoined from himself
    any portion of force and made it capable of contradicting his holy
    will. But even in free agents God does not cease to uphold. The
    being that sins can maintain its existence only through the
    preserving agency of God. The doctrine of preservation therefore
    holds a middle ground between two extremes. It holds that finite
    personal beings have a real existence and a relative independence.
    On the other hand it holds that these persons retain their being
    and their powers only as they are upheld by God.

    God is the soul, but not the sum, of things. Christianity holds to
    God’s transcendence as well as to God’s immanence. Immanence alone
    is God imprisoned, as transcendence alone is God banished. Gore,
    Incarnation, 136 _sq._—“Christian theology is the harmony of
    pantheism and deism.” It maintains transcendence, and so has all
    the good of pantheism without its limitations. It maintains
    immanence, and so has all the good of deism without its inability
    to show how God could be blessed without creation. Diman, Theistic
    Argument, 367—“The dynamical theory of nature as a plastic
    organism, pervaded by a system of forces uniting at last in one
    supreme Force, is altogether more in harmony with the spirit and
    teaching of the Gospel than the mechanical conceptions which
    prevailed a century ago, which insisted on viewing nature as an
    intricate machine, fashioned by a great Artificer who stood wholly
    apart from it.” On the persistency of force, _super cuncta_,
    _subter cuncta_, see Bib. Sac., Jan. 1881:1-24; Cocker, Theistic
    Conception of the World, 172-243, esp. 236. The doctrine of
    preservation therefore holds to a God both in nature and beyond
    nature. According as the one or the other of these elements is
    exclusively regarded, we have the error of Deism, or the error of
    Continuous Creation—theories which we now proceed to consider.


III. Theories which virtually deny the doctrine of Preservation.


1. Deism.


This view represents the universe as a self-sustained mechanism, from
which God withdrew as soon as he had created it, and which he left to a
process of self-development. It was held in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries by the English Herbert, Collins, Tindal, and Bolingbroke.


    Lord Herbert of Cherbury was one of the first who formed deism
    into a system. His book _De Veritate_ was published in 1624. He
    argues against the probability of God’s revealing his will to only
    a portion of the earth. This he calls “particular religion.” Yet
    he sought, and according to his own account he received, a
    revelation from heaven to encourage the publication of his work in
    disproof of revelation. He “asked for a sign,” and was answered by
    a “loud though gentle noise from the heavens.” He had the vanity
    to think his book of such importance to the cause of truth as to
    extort a declaration of the divine will, when the interests of
    half mankind could not secure any revelation at all; what God
    would not do for a nation, he would do for an individual. See
    Leslie and Leland, Method with the Deists. Deism is the
    exaggeration of the truth of God’s transcendence. See Christlieb,
    Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, 190-209. Melanchthon
    illustrates by the shipbuilder: “Ut faber discedit a navi
    exstructa et relinquit eam nautis.” God is the maker, not the
    keeper, of the watch. In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle makes
    Teufelsdröckh speak of “An absentee God, sitting idle ever since
    the first Sabbath at the outside of the universe, and seeing it
    go.” Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theology, art.: Deism.

    “Deism emphasized the inviolability of natural law, and held to a
    mechanical view of the world” (Ten Broeke). Its God is a sort of
    Hindu Brahma, “as idle as a painted ship upon a painted
    ocean”—mere being, without content or movement. Bruce,
    Apologetics, 115-131—“God made the world so good at the first that
    the best he can do is to let it alone. Prayer is inadmissible.
    Deism implies a Pelagian view of human nature. Death redeems us by
    separating us from the body. There is natural immortality, but no
    resurrection. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the brother of the poet
    George Herbert of Bemerton, represents the rise of Deism; Lord
    Bolingbroke its decline. Blount assailed the divine Person of the
    founder of the faith; Collins its foundation in prophecy; Woolston
    its miraculous attestation; Toland its canonical literature.
    Tindal took more general ground, and sought to show that a special
    revelation was unnecessary, impossible, unverifiable, the religion
    of nature being sufficient and superior to all religions of
    positive institution.”


We object to this view that:

(_a_) It rests upon a false analogy.—Man is able to construct a
self-moving watch only because he employs preëxisting forces, such as
gravity, elasticity, cohesion. But in a theory which likens the universe
to a machine, these forces are the very things to be accounted for.


    Deism regards the universe as a “perpetual motion.” Modern views
    of the dissipation of energy have served to discredit it. Will is
    the only explanation of the forces in nature. But according to
    deism, God builds a house, shuts himself out, locks the door, and
    then ties his own hands in order to make sure of never using the
    key. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 114-138—“A made
    mind, a spiritual nature created by an external omnipotence, is an
    impossible and self-contradictory notion.... The human contriver
    or artist deals with materials prepared to his hand. Deism reduces
    God to a finite anthropomorphic personality, as pantheism annuls
    the finite world or absorbs it in the Infinite.” Hence Spinoza,
    the pantheist, was the great antagonist of 16th century deism. See
    Woods, Works, 2:40.


(_b_) It is a system of anthropomorphism, while it professes to exclude
anthropomorphism.—Because the upholding of all things would involve a
multiplicity of minute cares if man were the agent, it conceives of the
upholding of the universe as involving such burdens in the case of God.
Thus it saves the dignity of God by virtually denying his omnipresence,
omniscience, and omnipotence.


    The infinity of God turns into sources of delight all that would
    seem care to man. To God’s inexhaustible fulness of life there are
    no burdens involved in the upholding of the universe he has
    created. Since God, moreover, is a perpetual observer, we may
    alter the poet’s verse and say: “There’s not a flower that’s born
    to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” God
    does not expose his children as soon as they are born. They are
    not only his offspring; they also live, move and have their being
    in him, and are partakers of his divine nature. Gordon, Christ of
    To-day, 200—“The worst person in all history is something to God,
    if he be nothing to the world.” See Chalmers, Astronomical
    Discourses, in Works, 7:68. Kurtz, The Bible and Astronomy, in
    Introd. to History of Old Covenant, lxxxii-xcviii.


(_c_) It cannot be maintained without denying all providential
interference, in the history of creation and the subsequent history of the
world.—But the introduction of life, the creation of man, incarnation,
regeneration, the communion of intelligent creatures with a present God,
and interpositions of God in secular history, are matters of fact.


    Deism therefore continually tends to atheism. Upton, Hibbert
    Lectures, 287—“The defect of deism is that, on the human side, it
    treats all men as isolated individuals, forgetful of the immanent
    divine nature which interrelates them and in a measure unifies
    them; and that, on the divine side, it separates men from God and
    makes the relation between them a purely external one.” Ruskin:
    “The divine mind is as visible in its full energy of operation on
    every lowly bank and mouldering stone as in the lifting of the
    pillars of heaven and settling the foundations of the earth; and
    to the rightly perceiving mind there is the same majesty, the same
    power, the same unity, and the same perfection manifested in the
    casting of the clay as in the scattering of the cloud, in the
    mouldering of dust as in the kindling of the day-star.” See
    Pearson, Infidelity, 87; Hanne, Idee der absoluten Persönlichkeit,
    76.


2. Continuous Creation.


This view regards the universe as from moment to moment the result of a
new creation. It was held by the New England theologians Edwards, Hopkins,
and Emmons, and more recently in Germany by Rothe.


    Edwards, Works, 2:486-490, quotes and defends Dr. Taylor’s
    utterance: “God is the original of all being, and the only cause
    of all natural effects.” Edwards himself says: “God’s upholding
    created substance, or causing its existence in each successive
    moment, is altogether equivalent to an immediate production out of
    nothing at each moment.” He argues that the past existence of a
    thing cannot be the cause of its present existence, because a
    thing cannot act at a time and place where it is not. “This is
    equivalent to saying that God cannot produce an effect which shall
    last for one moment beyond the direct exercise of his creative
    power. What man can do, God, it seems, cannot” (A. S. Carman).
    Hopkins, Works, 1:164-167—Preservation “is really continued
    creation.” Emmons, Works, 4:363-389, esp. 381—“Since all men are
    dependent agents, all their motions, exercises, or actions must
    originate in a divine efficiency.” 2:683—“There is but one true
    and satisfactory answer to the question which has been agitated
    for centuries: ‘Whence came evil?’ and that is: It came from the
    first great Cause of all things.... It is as consistent with the
    moral rectitude of the Deity to produce sinful as holy exercises
    in the minds of men. He puts forth a positive influence to make
    moral agents act, in every instance of their conduct, as he
    pleases.” God therefore creates all the volitions of the soul, as
    he effects by his almighty power all the changes of the material
    world. Rothe also held this view. To his mind external expression
    is necessary to God. His maxim was: “Kein Gott ohne Welt”—“There
    can be no God without an accompanying world.” See Rothe, Dogmatik,
    1:126-160, esp. 150, and Theol. Ethik, 1:186-190; also in Bib.
    Sac., Jan. 1875:144. See also Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 81-94.

    The element of truth in Continuous Creation is its assumption that
    all force is will. Its error is in maintaining that all force is
    _divine_ will, and divine will in _direct_ exercise. But the human
    will is a force as well as the divine will, and the forces of
    nature are secondary and automatic, not primary and immediate,
    workings of God. These remarks may enable us to estimate the grain
    of truth in the following utterances which need important
    qualification and limitation. Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 202,
    likens the universe to the musical note, which exists only on
    condition of being incessantly reproduced. Herbert Spencer says
    that “ideas are like the successive chords and cadences brought
    out from a piano, which successively die away as others are
    produced.” Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, quotes this passage, but
    asks quite pertinently: “What about the performer, in the case of
    the piano and in the case of the brain, respectively? Where in the
    brain is the equivalent of the harmonic conceptions in the
    performer’s mind?” Professor Fitzgerald: “All nature is living
    thought—the language of One in whom we live and move and have our
    being.” Dr. Oliver Lodge, to the British Association in 1891: “The
    barrier between matter and mind may melt away, as so many others
    have done.”


To this we object, upon the following grounds:

(_a_) It contradicts the testimony of consciousness that regular and
executive activity is not the mere repetition of an initial decision, but
is an exercise of the will entirely different in kind.


    Ladd, in his Philosophy of Mind, 144, indicates the error in
    Continuous Creation as follows: “The whole world of things is
    momently quenched and then replaced by a similar world of actually
    new realities.” The words of the poet would then be literally
    true: “Every fresh and new creation, A divine improvisation, From
    the heart of God proceeds.” Ovid, Metaph., 1:16—“Instabilis
    tellus, innabilis unda.” Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, 60,
    says that, to Fichte, “the world was thus perpetually created anew
    in each finite spirit,—revelation to intelligence being the only
    admissible meaning of that much abused term, creation.” A. L.
    Moore, Science and the Faith, 184, 185—“A theory of occasional
    intervention implies, as its correlate, a theory of ordinary
    absence.... For Christians the facts of nature are the acts of
    God. Religion relates these facts to God as their author; science
    relates them to one another as parts of a visible order. Religion
    does not tell of this interrelation; science cannot tell of their
    relation to God.”

    Continuous creation is an erroneous theory because it applies to
    human wills a principle which is true only of irrational nature
    and which is only partially true of that. I know that I am not God
    acting. My will is proof that not all force is divine will. Even
    on the monistic view, moreover, we may speak of second causes in
    nature, since God’s regular and habitual action is a second and
    subsequent thing, while his act of initiation and organization is
    the first. Neither the universe nor any part of it is to be
    identified with God, any more than my thoughts and acts are to be
    identified with me. Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, April,
    1895:559—“What is _nature_, but the promise of God’s pledged and
    habitual causality? And what is _spirit_, but the province of his
    free causality responding to needs and affections of his free
    children?... God is not a retired architect who may now and then
    be called in for repairs. Nature is not self-active, and God’s
    agency is not intrusive.” William Watson, Poems, 88—“If nature be
    a phantasm, as thou say’st, A splendid fiction and prodigious
    dream, To reach the real and true I’ll make no haste, More than
    content with worlds that only seem.”


(_b_) It exaggerates God’s power only by sacrificing his truth, love, and
holiness;—for if finite personalities are not what they seem—namely,
objective existences—God’s veracity is impugned; if the human soul has no
real freedom and life, God’s love has made no self-communication to
creatures; if God’s will is the only force in the universe, God’s holiness
can no longer be asserted, for the divine will must in that case be
regarded as the author of human sin.


    Upon this view personal identity is inexplicable. Edwards bases
    identity upon the arbitrary decree of God. God can therefore, by
    so decreeing, make Adam’s posterity one with their first father
    and responsible for his sin. Edwards’s theory of continuous
    creation, indeed, was devised as an explanation of the problem of
    original sin. The divinely appointed union of acts and exercises
    with Adam was held sufficient, without union of substance, or
    natural generation from him, to explain our being born corrupt and
    guilty. This view would have been impossible, if Edwards had not
    been an idealist, making far too much of acts and exercises and
    far too little of substance.

    It is difficult to explain the origin of Jonathan Edwards’s
    idealism. It has sometimes been attributed to the reading of
    Berkeley. Dr. Samuel Johnson, afterwards President of King’s
    College in New York City, a personal friend of Bishop Berkeley and
    an ardent follower of his teaching, was a tutor in Yale College
    while Edwards was a student. But Edwards was in Weathersfield
    while Johnson remained in New Haven, and was among those
    disaffected towards Johnson as a tutor. Yet Edwards, Original Sin,
    479, seems to allude to the Berkeleyan philosophy when he says:
    “The course of nature is demonstrated by recent improvements in
    philosophy to be indeed ... nothing but the established order and
    operation of the Author of nature” (see Allen, Jonathan Edwards,
    16, 308, 309). President McCracken, in Philos. Rev., Jan.
    1892:26-42, holds that Arthur Collier’s Clavis Universalis is the
    source of Edwards’s idealism. It is more probable that his
    idealism was the result of his own independent thinking,
    occasioned perhaps by mere hints from Locke, Newton, Cudworth, and
    Norris, with whose writings he certainly was acquainted. See E. C.
    Smyth, in Am. Jour. Theol., Oct. 1897:956; Prof. Gardiner, in
    Philos. Rev., Nov. 1900:573-596.

    How thorough-going this idealism of Edwards was may be learned
    from Noah Porter’s Discourse on Bishop George Berkeley, 71, and
    quotations from Edwards, in Journ. Spec. Philos., Oct.
    1883:401-420—“Nothing else has a proper being but spirits, and
    bodies are but the shadow of being.... Seeing the brain exists
    only mentally, I therefore acknowledge that I speak improperly
    when I say that the soul is in the brain only, as to its
    operations. For, to speak yet more strictly and abstractedly, ’tis
    nothing but the connection of the soul with these and those modes
    of its own ideas, or those mental acts of the Deity, seeing the
    brain exists only in idea.... That which truly is the substance of
    all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly
    stable idea in God’s mind, together with his stable will that the
    same shall be gradually communicated to us and to other minds
    according to certain fixed and established methods and laws; or,
    in somewhat different language, the infinitely exact and precise
    divine idea, together with an answerable, perfectly exact,
    precise, and stable will, with respect to correspondent
    communications to created minds and effects on those minds.” It is
    easy to see how, from this view of Edwards, the “Exercise-system”
    of Hopkins and Emmons naturally developed itself. On Edwards’s
    Idealism, see Frazer’s Berkeley (Blackwood’s Philos. Classics),
    139, 140. On personal identity, see Bp. Butler, Works (Bohn’s
    ed.), 327-334.


(_c_) As deism tends to atheism, so the doctrine of continuous creation
tends to pantheism.—Arguing that, because we get our notion of force from
the action of our own wills, therefore all force must be will, and divine
will, it is compelled to merge the human will in this all-comprehending
will of God. Mind and matter alike become phenomena of one force, which
has the attributes of both; and, with the distinct existence and
personality of the human soul, we lose the distinct existence and
personality of God, as well as the freedom and accountability of man.


    Lotze tries to escape from _material_ causes and yet hold to
    _second_ causes, by intimating that these second causes may be
    spirits. But though we can see how there can be a sort of spirit
    in the brute and in the vegetable, it is hard to see how what we
    call insensate matter can have spirit in it. It must be a very
    peculiar sort of spirit—a deaf and dumb spirit, if any—and such a
    one does not help our thinking. On this theory the body of a dog
    would need to be much more highly endowed than its soul. James
    Seth, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1894:73—“This principle of unity is a
    veritable lion’s den,—all the footprints are in one direction.
    Either it is a bare unity—the One annuls the many; or it is simply
    the All,—the ununified totality of existence.” Dorner well remarks
    that “Preservation is empowering of the creature and maintenance
    of its activity, not new bringing it into being.” On the whole
    subject, see Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:220-225; Philippi,
    Glaubenslehre, 2:258-272; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 50; Hodge, Syst.
    Theol., 1:577-581, 595; Dabney, Theology, 338, 339.


IV. Remarks upon the Divine Concurrence.


(_a_) The divine efficiency interpenetrates that of man without destroying
or absorbing it. The influx of God’s sustaining energy is such that men
retain their natural faculties and powers. God does not work all, but all
in all.


    Preservation, then, is midway between the two errors of denying
    the first cause (deism or atheism) and denying the second causes
    (continuous creation or pantheism). _1 Cor. 12:6_—“_there are
    diversities of workings, but the same God, who worketh all things
    in all_”; _cf._ _Eph. 1:23_—the church, “_which is his body, the
    fulness of him that filleth all in all_.” God’s action is no
    _actio in distans_, or action where he is not. It is rather action
    in and through free agents, in the case of intelligent and moral
    beings, while it is his own continuous willing in the case of
    nature. Men are second causes in a sense in which nature is not.
    God works through these human second causes, but he does not
    supersede them. We cannot see the line between the two—the action
    of the first cause and the action of second causes; yet both are
    real, and each is distinct from the other, though the method of
    God’s concurrence is inscrutable. As the pen and the hand together
    produce the writing, so God’s working causes natural powers to
    work with him. The natural growth indicated by the words “_wherein
    is the seed thereof_” (_Gen. 1:11_) has its counterpart in the
    spiritual growth described in the words “_his seed abideth in
    him_” (_1 John 3:9_). Paul considers himself a reproductive agency
    in the hands of God: he begets children in the gospel (_1 Cor.
    4:15_); yet the New Testament speaks of this begetting as the work
    of God (_1 Pet. 1:3_). We are bidden to work out our own salvation
    with fear and trembling, upon the very ground that it is God who
    works in us both to will and to work (_Phil. 2:12, 13_).


(_b_) Though God preserves mind and body in their working, we are ever to
remember that God concurs with the evil acts of his creatures only as they
are natural acts, and not as they are evil.


    In holy action God gives the natural powers, and by his word and
    Spirit influences the soul to use these powers aright. But in evil
    action God gives only the natural powers; the evil direction of
    these powers is caused only by man. _Jer. 44:4_—“_Oh, do not this
    abominable thing that I hate_”; _Hab. 1:13_—“_Thou that art of
    purer eyes than to behold evil, and that canst not look on
    perverseness, wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal
    treacherously, and holdest thy peace when the wicked swalloweth up
    the man that is more righteous than he?_” _James 1:13, 14_—“_Let
    no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God; for God cannot
    be tempted with evil, and he himself tempteth no man: but each man
    is tempted, when he is drawn away by his own lust, and enticed._”
    Aaron excused himself for making an Egyptian idol by saying that
    the fire did it; he asked the people for gold; “_so they gave it
    me; and I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf_”
    (_Ex. 32:24_). Aaron leaves out one important point—his own
    personal agency in it all. In like manner we lay the blame of our
    sins upon nature and upon God. Pym said of Strafford that God had
    given him great talents, of which the devil had given the
    application. But it is more true to say of the wicked man that he
    himself gives the application of his God-given powers. We are
    electric cars for which God furnishes the motive-power, but to
    which we the conductors give the direction. We are organs; the
    wind or breath of the organ is God’s; but the fingering of the
    keys is ours. Since the maker of the organ is also present at
    every moment as its preserver, the shameful abuse of his
    instrument and the dreadful music that is played are a continual
    grief and suffering to his soul. Since it is Christ who upholds
    all things by the word of his power, preservation involves the
    suffering of Christ, and this suffering is his atonement, of which
    the culmination and demonstration are seen in the cross of Calvary
    (_Heb. 1:3_). On the importance of the idea of preservation in
    Christian doctrine, see Calvin, Institutes, 1:182 (chapter 16).



Section III.—Providence.


I. Definition of Providence.


Providence is that continuous agency of God by which he makes all the
events of the physical and moral universe fulfill the original design with
which he created it.

As Creation explains the existence of the universe, and as Preservation
explains its continuance, so Providence explains its evolution and
progress.

In explanation notice:

(_a_) Providence is not to be taken merely in its etymological sense of
_fore_seeing. It is _for_seeing also, or a positive agency in connection
with all the events of history.

(_b_) Providence is to be distinguished from preservation. While
preservation is a maintenance of the existence and powers of created
things, providence is an actual care and control of them.

(_c_) Since the original plan of God is all-comprehending, the providence
which executes the plan is all-comprehending also, embracing within its
scope things small and great, and exercising care over individuals as well
as over classes.

(_d_) In respect to the good acts of men, providence embraces all those
natural influences of birth and surroundings which prepare men for the
operation of God’s word and Spirit, and which constitute motives to
obedience.

(_e_) In respect to the evil acts of men, providence is never the
efficient cause of sin, but is by turns preventive, permissive, directive,
and determinative.

(_f_) Since Christ is the only revealer of God, and he is the medium of
every divine activity, providence is to be regarded as the work of Christ;
see 1 Cor. 8:6—“one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things”;
_cf._ John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work.”


    The Germans have the word _Fürsehung_, forseeing, looking out for,
    as well as the word _Vorsehung_, foreseeing, seeing beforehand.
    Our word “providence” embraces the meanings of both these words.
    On the general subject of providence, see Philippi, Glaubenslehre,
    2:272-284; Calvin, Institutes, 1:182-219; Dick, Theology,
    1:416-446; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:581-616; Bib. Sac., 12:179;
    21:584; 26:315; 30:593; N. W. Taylor, Moral Government, 2:294-326.

    Providence is God’s attention concentrated everywhere. His care is
    microscopic as well as telescopic. Robert Browning, Pippa Passes,
    _ad finem_: “All service is the same with God—With God, whose
    puppets, best and worst, Are we: there is no last nor first.”
    Canon Farrar: “In one chapter of the Koran is the story how
    Gabriel, as he waited by the gates of gold, was sent by God to
    earth to do two things. One was to prevent king Solomon from the
    sin of forgetting the hour of prayer in exultation over his royal
    steeds; the other to help a little yellow ant on the slope of
    Ararat, which had grown weary in getting food for its nest, and
    which would otherwise perish in the rain. To Gabriel the one
    behest seemed just as kingly as the other, since God had ordered
    it. ‘Silently he left The Presence, and prevented the king’s sin,
    And holp the little ant at entering in.’ ‘Nothing is too high or
    low, Too mean or mighty, if God wills it so.’ ” Yet a preacher
    began his sermon on Mat. 10:30—“The very hairs of your head are
    are all numbered”—by saying: “Why, some of you, my hearers, do not
    believe that even your heads are all numbered!”

    A modern prophet of unbelief in God’s providence is William
    Watson. In his poem entitled The Unknown God, we read: “When
    overarched by gorgeous night, I wave my trivial self away; When
    all I was to all men’s sight Shares the erasure of the day: Then
    do I cast my cumbering load, Then do I gain a sense of God.” Then
    he likens the God of the Old Testament to Odin and Zeus, and
    continues: “O streaming worlds, O crowded sky, O life, and mine
    own soul’s abyss, Myself am scarce so small that I Should bow to
    Deity like this! This my Begetter? This was what Man in his
    violent youth begot. The God I know of I shall ne’er Know, though
    he dwells exceeding nigh. Raise thou the stone and find me there.
    Cleave thou the wood and there am I. Yea, in my flesh his Spirit
    doth flow, Too near, too far, for me to know. Whate’er my deeds, I
    am not sure That I can pleasure him or vex: I, that must use a
    speech so poor It narrows the Supreme with sex. Notes he the good
    or ill in man? To hope he cares is all I can. I hope with fear.
    For did I trust This vision granted me at birth, The sire of
    heaven would seem less just Than many a faulty son of earth. And
    so he seems indeed! But then, I trust it not, this bounded ken.
    And dreaming much, I never dare To dream that in my prisoned soul
    The flutter of a trembling prayer Can move the Mind that is the
    Whole. Though kneeling nations watch and yearn, Does the primeval
    Purpose turn? Best by remembering God, say some. We keep our high
    imperial lot. Fortune, I fear, hath oftenest come When we
    forgot—when we forgot! A lovelier faith their happier crown, But
    history laughs and weeps it down: Know they not well how seven
    times seven, Wronging our mighty arms with rust, We dared not do
    the work of heaven, Lest heaven should hurl us in the dust? The
    work of heaven! ’Tis waiting still The sanction of the heavenly
    will. Unmeet to be profaned by praise Is he whose coils the world
    enfold; The God on whom I ever gaze, The God I never once behold:
    Above the cloud, above the clod, The unknown God, the unknown
    God.”

    In pleasing contrast to William Watson’s Unknown God, is the God
    of Rudyard Kipling’s Recessional: “God of our fathers, known of
    old—Lord of our far-flung battle-line—Beneath whose awful hand we
    hold Dominion over palm and pine—Lord God of hosts, be with us
    yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! The tumult and the shouting
    dies—The captains and the kings depart—Still stands thine ancient
    Sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of hosts, be
    with us yet. Lest we forget—lest we forget! Far-called our navies
    melt away—On dune and headland sinks the fire—So, all our pomp of
    yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the nations,
    spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! If, drunk with sight
    of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not thee in awe—Such
    boasting as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the
    Law—Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we
    forget! For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and
    iron shard—All valiant dust that builds on dust, And guarding
    calls not thee to guard—For frantic boast and foolish word, Thy
    mercy on thy people, Lord!”

    These problems of God’s providential dealings are intelligible
    only when we consider that Christ is the revealer of God, and that
    his suffering for sin opens to us the heart of God. All history is
    the progressive manifestation of Christ’s holiness and love, and
    in the cross we have the key that unlocks the secret of the
    universe. With the cross in view, we can believe that Love rules
    over all, and that “_all things work together for good to them
    that love God._” (_Rom. 8:28_).


II. Proof of the Doctrine of Providence.


1. Scriptural Proof.


The Scripture witnesses to

A. A general providential government and control (_a_) over the universe
at large; (_b_) over the physical world; (_c_) over the brute creation;
(_d_) over the affairs of nations; (_e_) over man’s birth and lot in life;
(_f_) over the outward successes and failures of men’s lives; (_g_) over
things seemingly accidental or insignificant; (_h_) in the protection of
the righteous; (_i_) in the supply of the wants of God’s people; (_j_) in
the arrangement of answers to prayer; (_k_) in the exposure and punishment
of the wicked.


    (_a_) _Ps. 103:19_—“_his kingdom ruleth over all_”; _Dan.
    4:35_—“_doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and
    among the inhabitants of the earth_”; _Eph. 1:11_—“_worketh all
    things after the counsel of his will._”

    (_b_) _Job 37:5, 10_—“_God thundereth ... By the breath of God ice
    is given_”; _Ps. 104:14_—“_causeth the grass to grow for the
    cattle_”; _135:6, 7_—“_Whatsoever Jehovah pleased, that hath he
    done, In heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps ...
    vapors ... lightnings ... wind_”; _Mat. 5:45_—“_maketh his sun to
    rise ... sendeth rain_”; _Ps. 104:16_—“_The trees of Jehovah are
    filled_”—are planted and tended by God as carefully as those which
    come under human cultivation; _cf._ _Mat. 6:30_—“_if God so clothe
    the grass of the field._”

    (_c_) _Ps. 104:21, 28_—“_young lions roar ... seek their food from
    God ... that thou givest them they gather_”; _Mat. 6:26_—“_birds
    of the heaven ... your heavenly Father feedeth them_”;
    _10:29_—“_two sparrows ... not one of them shall fall on the
    ground without your Father._”

    (_d_) _Job 12:23_—“_He increaseth the nations, and he destroyeth
    them: He enlargeth the nations, and he leadeth them captive_”;
    _Ps. 22:28_—“_the kingdom is Jehovah’s; And he is the ruler over
    the nations_”; _66:7_—“_He ruleth by his might for ever; His eyes
    observe the nations_”; _Acts 17:26_—“_made of one every nation of
    men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their
    appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation_” (instance
    Palestine, Greece, England).

    (_e_) _1 Sam. 16:1_—“_fill thy horn with oil, and go: I will send
    thee to Jesse the Bethlehemite; for I have provided me a king
    among his sons_”; _Ps. 139:16_—“_Thine eyes did see mine unformed
    substance, And in thy book were all my members written_”; _Is.
    45:5_—“_I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me_”; _Jer.
    1:5_—“_Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee ...
    sanctified thee ... appointed thee_”; _Gal. 1:15, 16_—“_God, who
    separated me, even from my mother’s womb, and called me through
    his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among
    the Gentiles._”

    (_f_) _Ps. 75:6, 7_—“_neither from the east, nor from the west,
    Nor yet from the south cometh lifting up. But God is the judge, He
    putteth down one, and lifteth up another_”; _Luke 1:52_—“_He hath
    put down princes from their thrones, And hath exalted them of low
    degree._”

    (_g_) _Prov. 16:33_—“_The lot is cast into the lap; But the whole
    disposing thereof is of Jehovah_”; _Mat. 10:30_—“_the very hairs
    of your head are all numbered._”

    (_h_) _Ps. 4:8_—“_In peace will I both lay me down and sleep; For
    thou, Jehovah, alone makest me dwell in safety_”; _5:12_—“_thou
    wilt compass him with favor as with a shield_”; _63:8_—“_Thy right
    hand upholdeth me_”; _121:3_—“_He that keepeth thee will not
    slumber_”; _Rom. 8:28_—“_to them that love God all things work
    together for good._”

    (_i_) _Gen. 22:8, 14_—“_God will provide himself the lamb ...
    Jehovah-jireh_” (marg.: that is, “Jehovah will see,” or
    “provide”); _Deut. 8:3_—“_man doth not live by bread only, but by
    every thing that proceedeth out of the mouth of Jehovah doth man
    live_”; _Phil. 4:19_—“_my God shall supply every need of yours._”

    (_j_) _Ps. 68:10_—“_Thou, O God, didst prepare of thy goodness for
    the poor_”; _Is. 64:4_—“_neither hath the eye seen a God besides
    thee, who worketh for him that waiteth for him_”; _Mat.
    6:8_—“_your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye
    ask him_”; _32, 33_—“_all these things shall be added unto you._”

    (_k_) _Ps. 7:12, 13_—“_If a man turn not, he will whet his sword;
    He hath bent his bow and made it ready; He hath also prepared for
    him the instruments of death; He maketh his arrows fiery shafts_”;
    _11:6_—“_Upon the wicked he will rain snares; Fire and brimstone
    and burning wind shall be the portion of their cup._”


The statements of Scripture with regard to God’s providence are strikingly
confirmed by recent studies in physiography. In the early stages of human
development man was almost wholly subject to nature, and environment was a
determining factor in his progress. This is the element of truth in
Buckle’s view. But Buckle ignored the fact that, as civilization advanced,
ideas, at least at times, played a greater part than environment.
Thermopylæ cannot be explained by climate. In the later stages of human
development, nature is largely subject to man, and environment counts for
comparatively little. “There shall be no Alps!” says Napoleon. Charles
Kingsley: “The spirit of ancient tragedy was man conquered by
circumstance; the spirit of modern tragedy is man conquering
circumstance.” Yet many national characteristics can be attributed to
physical surroundings, and so far as this is the case they are due to the
ordering of God’s providence. Man’s need of fresh water leads him to
rivers,—hence the original location of London. Commerce requires
seaports,—hence New York. The need of defense leads man to bluffs and
hills,—hence Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Edinburgh. These places of defense
became also places of worship and of appeal to God.

Goldwin Smith, in his Lectures and Essays, maintains that national
characteristics are not congenital, but are the result of environment. The
greatness of Rome and the greatness of England have been due to position.
The Romans owed their successes to being at first less warlike than their
neighbors. They were traders in the centre of the Italian seacoast, and
had to depend on discipline to make headway against marauders on the
surrounding hills. Only when drawn into foreign conquest did the
ascendency of the military spirit become complete, and then the military
spirit brought despotism as its natural penalty. Brought into contact with
varied races, Rome was led to the founding of colonies. She adopted and
assimilated the nations which she conquered, and in governing them learned
organization and law. _Parcere subjectis_ was her rule, as well as
_debellare superbos_. In a similiar manner Goldwin Smith maintains that
the greatness of England is due to position. Britain being an island, only
a bold and enterprising race could settle it. Maritime migration
strengthened freedom. Insular position gave freedom from invasion.
Isolation however gave rise to arrogance and self-assertion. The island
became a natural centre of commerce. There is a steadiness of political
progress which would have been impossible upon the continent. Yet
consolidation was tardy, owing to the fact that Great Britain consists of
_several_ islands. Scotland was always liberal, and Ireland foredoomed to
subjection.

Isaac Taylor, Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, has a valuable chapter on Palestine
as the providential theatre of divine revelation. A little land, yet a
sample-land of all lands, and a thoroughfare between the greatest lands of
antiquity, it was fitted by God to receive and to communicate his truth.
George Adam Smith’s Historical Geography of the Holy Land is a repertory
of information on this subject. Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:269-271,
treats of Greek landscape and history. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature,
sees such difference between Greek curiosity and search for causes on the
one hand, and Roman indifference to scientific explanation of facts on the
other, that he cannot think of the Greeks and the Romans as cognate
peoples. He believes that Italy was first peopled by Etrurians, a Semitic
race from Africa, and that from them the Romans descended. The Romans had
as little of the spirit of the naturalist as had the Hebrews. The Jews and
the Romans originated and propagated Christianity, but they had no
interest in science.

On God’s pre-arrangement of the physical conditions of national life,
striking suggestions may be found in Shaler, Nature and Man in America.
Instance the settlement of Massachusetts Bay between 1629 and 1639, the
only decade in which such men as John Winthrop could be found and the only
one in which they actually emigrated from England. After 1639 there was
too much to do at home, and with Charles II the spirit which animated the
Pilgrims no longer existed in England. The colonists builded better than
they knew, for though they sought a place to worship God themselves, they
had no idea of giving this same religious liberty to others. R. E.
Thompson, The Hand of God in American History, holds that the American
Republic would long since have broken in pieces by its own weight and
bulk, if the invention of steam-boat in 1807, railroad locomotive in 1829,
telegraph in 1837, and telephone in 1877, had not bound the remote parts
of the country together. A woman invented the reaper by combining the
action of a row of scissors in cutting. This was as early as 1835. Only in
1855 the competition on the Emperor’s farm at Compiègne gave supremacy to
the reaper. Without it farming would have been impossible during our civil
war, when our men were in the field and women and boys had to gather in
the crops.

B. A government and control extending to the free actions of men—(_a_) to
men’s free acts in general; (_b_) to the sinful acts of men also.


    (a) _Ex. 12:36_—“_Jehovah gave the people favor in the sight of
    the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. And
    they despoiled the Egyptians_”; _1 Sam. 24:18_—“_Jehovah had
    delivered me up into thy hand_” (Saul to David); _Ps. 33:14,
    15_—“_He looketh forth Upon all the inhabitants of the earth, He
    that fashioneth the hearts of them all_” (_i. e._, equally, one as
    well as another); _Prov. 16:1_—“_The plans of the heart belong to
    man; But the answer of the tongue is from Jehovah_”;
    _19:21_—“_There are many devices in a man’s heart; But the counsel
    of Jehovah, __ that shall stand_”; _20:24_—“_A man’s goings are of
    Jehovah; How then can man understand his way?_” _21:1_—“_The
    king’s heart is in the hand of Jehovah as the watercourses: He
    turneth it whithersoever he will_” (_i. e._, as easily as the
    rivulets of the eastern fields are turned by the slightest motion
    of the hand or the foot of the husbandman); _Jer. 10:23_—“_O
    Jehovah, I know that the way of man is not in himself; it is not
    in man that walketh to direct his steps_”; _Phil. 2:13_—“_it is
    God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good
    pleasure_”; _Eph. 2:10_—“_we are his workmanship, created in
    Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we
    should walk in them_”; _James 4:13-15_—“_If the Lord will, we
    shall both live, and do this or that._”

    (_b_) _2 Sam. 16:10_—“_because Jehovah hath said unto him_
    [Shimei]: _Curse David_”; _24:1_—“_the anger of Jehovah was
    kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them, saying,
    Go, number Israel and Judah_”; _Rom. 11:32_—“_God hath shut up all
    unto disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all_”; _2 Thess.
    2:11, 12_—“_God sendeth them a working of error, that they should
    believe a lie: that they all might be judged who believed not the
    truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness._”

    Henry Ward Beecher: “There seems to be no order in the movements
    of the bees of a hive, but the honey-comb shows that there was a
    plan in them all.” John Hunter compared his own brain to a hive in
    which there was a great deal of buzzing and apparent disorder,
    while yet a real order underlay it all. “As bees gather their
    stores of sweets against a time of need, but are colonized by
    man’s superior intelligence for his own purposes, so men plan and
    work yet are overruled by infinite Wisdom for his own glory.” Dr.
    Deems: “The world is wide In Time and Tide, And God is guide: Then
    do not hurry. That man is blest Who does his best And leaves the
    rest: Then do not worry.” See Bruce, Providential Order, 183
    _sq._; Providence in the Individual Life, 231 _sq._


God’s providence with respect to men’s evil acts is described in Scripture
as of four sorts:

(_a_) Preventive,—God by his providence prevents sin which would otherwise
be committed. That he thus prevents sin is to be regarded as matter, not
of obligation, but of grace.


    _Gen. 20:6_—Of Abimelech: “_I also withheld thee from sinning
    against me_”; _31:24_—“_And God came to Laban the Syrian in a
    dream of the night, and said unto him, Take heed to thyself that
    thou speak not to Jacob either good or bad_”; _Psalm 19:13_—“_Keep
    back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; Let them not have
    dominion over me_”; _Hosea 2:6_—“_Behold, I will hedge up thy way
    with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, that she shall
    not find her paths_”—here the “_thorns_” and the “_wall_” may
    represent the restraints and sufferings by which God mercifully
    checks the fatal pursuit of sin (see Annotated Par. Bible _in
    loco_). Parents, government, church, traditions, customs, laws,
    age, disease, death, are all of them preventive influences. Man
    sometimes finds himself on the brink of a precipice of sin, and
    strong temptation hurries him on to make the fatal leap. Suddenly
    every nerve relaxes, all desire for the evil thing is gone, and he
    recoils from the fearful brink over which he was just now going to
    plunge. God has interfered by the voice of conscience and the
    Spirit. This too is a part of his preventive providence. Men at
    sixty years of age are eight times less likely to commit crime
    than at the age of twenty-five. Passion has subsided; fear of
    punishment has increased. The manager of a great department store,
    when asked what could prevent its absorbing all the trade of the
    city, replied: “Death!” Death certainly limits aggregations of
    property, and so constitutes a means of God’s preventive
    providence. In the life of John G. Paton, the rain sent by God
    prevented the natives from murdering him and taking his goods.


(_b_) Permissive,—God permits men to cherish and to manifest the evil
dispositions of their hearts. God’s permissive providence is simply the
negative act of withholding impediments from the path of the sinner,
instead of preventing his sin by the exercise of divine power. It implies
no ignorance, passivity, or indulgence, but consists with hatred of the
sin and determination to punish it.


    _2 Chron. 32:31_—“_God left him_ [Hezekiah], _to try him, that he
    might know all that was in his heart_”; _cf._ _Deut. 8:2_—“_that
    he might humble thee, to prove thee, to know what was in thine
    heart._” _Ps. 17:13, 14_—“_Deliver my soul from the wicked, who is
    thy sword, from men who are thy hand, O Jehovah_”; _Ps. 81:12,
    13_—“_So I let them go after the stubbornness of their heart, That
    they might walk in their own counsels. Oh that my people would
    hearken unto me!_” _Is. 53:4, 10_—“_Surely he hath borne our
    griefs.... Yet it pleased Jehovah to bruise him._” _Hosea
    4:17_—“_Ephraim __ Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone_”;
    _Acts 14:16_—“_who in the generations gone by suffered all the
    nations to walk in their own ways_”; _Rom. 1:24, 28_—“_God gave
    them up in the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness... God gave
    them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not
    fitting_”; _3:25_—“_to show his righteousness, because of the
    passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of
    God._” To this head of permissive providence is possibly to be
    referred _1 Sam. 18:10_—“_an evil spirit from God came mightily
    upon Saul._” As the Hebrew writers saw in second causes the
    operation of the great first Cause, and said: “_The God of glory
    thundereth_” (_Ps. 29:3_), so, because even the acts of the wicked
    entered into God’s plan, the Hebrew writers sometimes represented
    God as doing what he merely permitted finite spirits to do. In _2
    Sam. 24:1_, God moves David to number Israel, but in _1 Chron.
    21:1_ the same thing is referred to Satan. God’s providence in
    these cases, however, may be directive as well as permissive.

    Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism: “God is law, say the wise; O Soul,
    and let us rejoice, For if he thunder by law the thunder is yet
    his voice.” Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 56—“The clear
    separation of God’s efficiency from God’s permissive act was
    reserved to a later day. All emphasis was in the Old Testament
    laid upon the sovereign power of God.” Coleridge, in his
    Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, letter II, speaks of “the
    habit, universal with the Hebrew doctors, of referring all
    excellent or extraordinary things to the great first Cause,
    without mention of the proximate and instrumental causes—a
    striking illustration of which may be found by comparing the
    narratives of the same events in the Psalms and in the historical
    books.... The distinction between the providential and the
    miraculous did not enter into their forms of thinking—at any rate,
    not into their mode of conveying their thoughts.” The woman who
    had been slandered rebelled when told that God had permitted it
    for her good; she maintained that Satan had inspired her accuser;
    she needed to learn that God had permitted the work of Satan.


(_c_) Directive,—God directs the evil acts of men to ends unforeseen and
unintended by the agents. When evil is in the heart and will certainly
come out, God orders its flow in one direction rather than in another, so
that its course can be best controlled and least harm may result. This is
sometimes called overruling providence.


    _Gen. 50:20_—“_as for you, ye meant evil against me; but God meant
    it for good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much
    people alive_”; _Ps. 76:10_—“_the wrath of man shall praise thee:
    The residue of wrath shalt thou gird upon thee_”—put on as an
    ornament—clothe thyself with it for thine own glory; _Is.
    10:5_—“_Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, and the staff in whose
    hand is mine indignation_”; _John 13:27_—“_What thou doest, do
    quickly_”—do in a particular way what is actually being done
    (Westcott, Bib. Com., _in loco_); _Acts 4:27, 28_—“_against thy
    holy Servant Jesus, whom thou didst anoint, both Herod and Pontius
    Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, were gathered
    together, to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel fore-ordained
    to come to pass._”

    To this head of directive providence should probably be referred
    the passages with regard to Pharaoh in _Ex. 4:21_—“_I will harden
    his heart, and he will not let the people go_”; _7:13_—“_and
    Pharaoh’s heart was hardened_”; _8:15_—“_he hardened his
    heart_”—_i. e._, Pharaoh hardened his own heart. Here the
    controlling agency of God did not interfere with the liberty of
    Pharaoh or oblige him to sin; but in judgment for his previous
    cruelty and impiety God withdrew the external restraints which had
    hitherto kept his sin within bounds, and placed him in
    circumstances which would have influenced to right action a
    well-disposed mind, but which God foresaw would lead a disposition
    like Pharaoh’s to the peculiar course of wickedness which he
    actually pursued.

    God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, then, first, by permitting him to
    harden his own heart, God being the author of his sin only in the
    sense that he is the author of a free being who is himself the
    direct author of his sin; secondly, by giving to him the means of
    enlightenment, Pharaoh’s very opportunities being perverted by him
    into occasions of more virulent wickedness, and good resisted
    being thus made to result in greater evil; thirdly, by judicially
    forsaking Pharaoh, when it became manifest that he would not do
    God’s will, and thus making it morally certain, though not
    necessary, that he would do evil; and fourthly, by so directing
    Pharaoh’s surroundings that his sin would manifest itself in one
    way rather than in another. Sin is like the lava of the volcano,
    which will certainly come out, but which God directs in its course
    down the mountain-side so that it will do least harm. The
    gravitation downward is due to man’s evil will; the direction to
    this side or to that is due to God’s providence. See _Rom. 9:17,
    18_—“_For this very purpose did I raise thee up, that I might show
    in thee my power, and that my name might be published abroad in
    all the earth. So then he hath mercy on whom he will, and whom he
    will he hardeneth._” Thus the very passions which excite men to
    rebel against God are made completely subservient to his purposes:
    see Annotated Paragraph Bible, on _Ps. 76:10_.

    God hardens Pharaoh’s heart only after all the earlier plagues
    have been sent. Pharaoh had hardened his own heart before. God
    hardens no man’s heart who has not first hardened it himself.
    Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 140—“Jehovah is never said to harden
    the heart of a good man, or of one who is set to do righteousness.
    It is always those who are bent on evil whom God hardens. Pharaoh
    hardens his own heart before the Lord is said to harden it. Nature
    is God, and it is the nature of human beings to harden when they
    resist softening influences.” The Watchman, Dec. 5, 1901:11—“God
    decreed to Pharaoh what Pharaoh had chosen for himself.
    Persistence in certain inclinations and volitions awakens within
    the body and soul forces which are not under the control of the
    will, and which drive the man on in the way he has chosen. After a
    time nature hardens the hearts of men to do evil.”


(_d_) Determinative,—God determines the bounds reached by the evil
passions of his creatures, and the measure of their effects. Since moral
evil is a germ capable of indefinite expansion, God’s determining the
measure of its growth does not alter its character or involve God’s
complicity with the perverse wills which cherish it.

_Job 1:12_—“_And Jehovah said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in
thy power; only upon himself put not forth thy hand_”; _2:6_—“_Behold, he
is in thy hand; only spare his life_”; _Ps. 124:2_—“_If it had not been
Jehovah who was on our side, when men rose up against us; Then had they
swallowed us up alive_”; _1 Cor. 10:13_—“_will not suffer you to be
tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation make also the
way of escape, that ye may be able to endure it_”; _2 Thess. 2:7_—“_For
the mystery of lawlessness doth already work; only there is one that
restraineth now, until he be taken out of the way_”; _Rev. 20:2, 3_—“_And
he laid hold on the dragon, the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan,
and bound him for a thousand years._”

Pepper, Outlines of Syst. Theol., 76—The union of God’s will and man’s
will is “such that, while in one view all can be ascribed to God, in
another all can be ascribed to the creature. But how God and the creature
are united in operation is doubtless known and knowable only to God. A
very dim analogy is furnished in the union of the soul and body in men.
The hand retains its own physical laws, yet is obedient to the human will.
This theory recognizes the veracity of consciousness in its witness to
personal freedom, and yet the completeness of God’s control of both the
bad and the good. Free beings are ruled, but are ruled as free and in
their freedom. The freedom is not sacrificed to the control. The two
coëxist, each in its integrity. Any doctrine which does not allow this is
false to Scripture and destructive of religion.”


2. Rational proof.


A. Arguments _a priori_ from the divine attributes. (_a_) From the
immutability of God. This makes it certain that he will execute his
eternal plan of the universe and its history. But the execution of this
plan involves not only creation and preservation, but also providence.
(_b_) From the benevolence of God. This renders it certain that he will
care for the intelligent universe he has created. What it was worth his
while to create, it is worth his while to care for. But this care is
providence. (_c_) From the justice of God. As the source of moral law, God
must assure the vindication of law by administering justice in the
universe and punishing the rebellious. But this administration of justice
is providence.


    For heathen ideas of providence, see Cicero, De Natura Deorum,
    11:30, where Balbus speaks of the existence of the gods as that,
    “quo concesso, confitendum est eorum consilio mundum
    administrari.” Epictetus, sec. 41—“The principal and most
    important duty in religion is to possess your mind with just and
    becoming notions of the gods—to believe that there are such
    supreme beings, and that they govern and dispose of all the
    affairs of the world with a just and good providence.” Marcus
    Antoninus: “If there are no gods, or if they have no regard for
    human affairs, why should I desire to live in a world without gods
    and without a providence? But gods undoubtedly there are, and they
    regard human affairs.” See also Bib. Sac., 16:374. As we shall
    see, however, many of the heathen writers believed in a general,
    rather than in a particular, providence.

    On the argument for providence derived from God’s benevolence, see
    Appleton, Works, 1:146—“Is indolence more consistent with God’s
    majesty than action would be? The happiness of creatures is a
    good. Does it honor God to say that he is indifferent to that
    which he knows to be good and valuable? Even if the world had come
    into existence without his agency, it would become God’s moral
    character to pay some attention to creatures so numerous and so
    susceptible to pleasure and pain, especially when he might have so
    great and favorable an influence on their moral condition.” _John
    5:17_—“_My Father worketh even until now, and I work_”—is as
    applicable to providence as to preservation.

    The complexity of God’s providential arrangements may be
    illustrated by Tyndall’s explanation of the fact that heartsease
    does not grow in the neighborhood of English villages: 1. In
    English villages dogs run loose. 2. Where dogs run loose, cats
    must stay at home. 3. Where cats stay at home, field mice abound.
    4. Where field mice abound, the nests of bumble-bees are
    destroyed. 5. Where bumble-bees’ nests are destroyed, there is no
    fertilization of pollen. Therefore, where dogs go loose, no
    heartsease grows.


B. Arguments _a posteriori_ from the facts of nature and of history. (_a_)
The outward lot of individuals and nations is not wholly in their own
hands, but is in many acknowledged respects subject to the disposal of a
higher power. (_b_) The observed moral order of the world, although
imperfect, cannot be accounted for without recognition of a divine
providence. Vice is discouraged and virtue rewarded, in ways which are
beyond the power of mere nature. There must be a governing mind and will,
and this mind and will must be the mind and will of God.


    The birthplace of individuals and of nations, the natural powers
    with which they are endowed, the opportunities and immunities they
    enjoy, are beyond their own control. A man’s destiny for time and
    for eternity may be practically decided for him by his birth in a
    Christian home, rather than in a tenement-house at the Five
    Points, or in a kraal of the Hottentots. Progress largely depends
    upon “variety of environment” (H. Spencer). But this variety of
    environment is in great part independent of our own efforts.

    “There’s a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew them how we
    will.” Shakespeare here expounds human consciousness. “Man
    proposes and God disposes” has become a proverb. Experience
    teaches that success and failure are not wholly due to us. Men
    often labor and lose; they consult and nothing ensues; they
    “embattle and are broken.” Providence is not always on the side of
    the heaviest battalions. Not arms but ideas have decided the fate
    of the world—as Xerxes found at Thermopylæ, and Napoleon at
    Waterloo. Great movements are generally begun without
    consciousness of their greatness. _Cf._ _Is. 42:16_—“_I will bring
    the blind by a way that they know not_”; _1 Cor. 5:37, 38_—“_thou
    sowest ... a bare grain ... but God giveth it a body even as it
    pleased him._”

    The deed returns to the doer, and character shapes destiny. This
    is true in the long run. Eternity will show the truth of the
    maxim. But here in time a sufficient number of apparent exceptions
    are permitted to render possible a moral probation. If evil were
    always immediately followed by penalty, righteousness would have a
    compelling power upon the will and the highest virtue would be
    impossible. Job’s friends accuse Job of acting upon this
    principle. The Hebrew children deny its truth, when they say:
    “_But if not_”—even if God does not deliver us—“_we will not serve
    thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up_”
    (_Dan. 3:18._)

    Martineau, Seat of Authority, 298—“Through some misdirection or
    infirmity, most of the larger agencies in history have failed to
    reach their own ideal, yet have accomplished revolutions greater
    and more beneficent; the conquests of Alexander, the empire of
    Rome, the Crusades, the ecclesiastical persecutions, the monastic
    asceticisms, the missionary zeal of Christendom, have all played a
    momentous part in the drama of the world, yet a part which is a
    surprise to each. All this shows the controlling presence of a
    Reason and a Will transcendent and divine.” Kidd, Social
    Evolution, 99, declares that the progress of the race has taken
    place only under conditions which have had no sanction from the
    reason of the great proportion of the individuals who submit to
    them. He concludes that a rational religion is a scientific
    impossibility, and that the function of religion is to provide a
    super-rational sanction for social progress. We prefer to say that
    Providence pushes the race forward even against its will.

    James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51, suggests that God’s calm
    control of the forces of the universe, both physical and mental,
    should give us confidence when evil seems impending: “How many
    times have I seen the fire-engines of church and state clanging
    and lumbering along to put out—a false alarm! And when the heavens
    are cloudy, what a glare can be cast by a burning shanty!” See
    Sermon on Providence in Political Revolutions, in Farrar’s Science
    and Theology, 228. On the moral order of the world,
    notwithstanding its imperfections, see Butler, Analogy, Bohn’s
    ed., 98; King, in Baptist Review, 1884:202-222.


III. Theories opposing the Doctrine of Providence.


1. Fatalism.


Fatalism maintains the certainty, but denies the freedom, of human
self-determination,—thus substituting fate for providence.

To this view we object that (_a_) it contradicts consciousness, which
testifies that we are free; (_b_) it exalts the divine power at the
expense of God’s truth, wisdom, holiness, love; (_c_) it destroys all
evidence of the personality and freedom of God; (_d_) it practically makes
necessity the only God, and leaves the imperatives of our moral nature
without present validity or future vindication.


    The Mohammedans have frequently been called fatalists, and the
    practical effect of the teachings of the Koran upon the masses is
    to make them so. The ordinary Mohammedan will have no physician or
    medicine, because everything happens as God has before appointed.
    Smith, however, in his Mohammed and Mohammedanism, denies that
    fatalism is essential to the system. _Islam_ = “submission,” and
    the participle _Moslem_ = “submitted,” _i. e._, to God. Turkish
    proverb: “A man cannot escape what is written on his forehead.”
    The Mohammedan thinks of God’s dominant attribute as being
    greatness rather than righteousness, power rather than purity. God
    is the personification of arbitrary will, not the God and Father
    of our Lord Jesus Christ. But there is in the system an absence of
    sacerdotalism, a jealousy for the honor of God, a brotherhood of
    believers, a reverence for what is considered the word of God, and
    a bold and habitual devotion of its adherents to their faith.

    Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:489, refers to the Mussulman
    tradition existing in Egypt that the fate of Islam requires that
    it should at last be superseded by Christianity. F. W. Sanders
    denies that the Koran is peculiarly _sensual_. “The Christian and
    Jewish religions,” he says, “have their paradise also. The Koran
    makes this the reward, but not the ideal, of conduct; ‘Grace from
    thy Lord—that is the grand bliss.’ The emphasis of the Koran is
    upon right living. The Koran does not teach the propagation of
    religion by _force_. It declares that there shall be no compulsion
    in religion. The practice of converting by the sword is to be
    distinguished from the teaching of Mohammed, just as the
    Inquisition and the slave-trade in Christendom do not prove that
    Jesus taught them. The Koran did not institute _polygamy_. It
    found unlimited polygamy, divorce, and infanticide. The last it
    prohibited; the two former it restricted and ameliorated, just as
    Moses found polygamy, but brought it within bounds. The Koran is
    not hostile to _secular learning_. Learning flourished under the
    Bagdad and Spanish Caliphates. When Moslems oppose learning, they
    do so without authority from the Koran. The Roman Catholic church
    has opposed schools, but we do not attribute this to the gospel.”
    See Zwemer, Moslem Doctrine of God.

    Calvinists can assert freedom, since man’s will finds its highest
    freedom only in submission to God. Islam also cultivates
    submission, but it is the submission not of love but of fear. The
    essential difference between Mohammedanism and Christianity is
    found in the revelation which the latter gives of the love of God
    in Christ—a revelation which secures from free moral agents the
    submission of love; see page 186. On fatalism, see McCosh,
    Intuitions, 266; Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, 52-74, 98-108; Mill,
    Autobiography, 168-170, and System of Logic, 521-526; Hamilton,
    Metaphysics, 692; Stewart, Active and Moral Powers of Man, ed.
    Walker, 268-324.


2. Casualism.


Casualism transfers the freedom of mind to nature, as fatalism transfers
the fixity of nature to mind. It thus exchanges providence for chance.
Upon this view we remark:

(_a_) If chance be only another name for human ignorance, a name for the
fact that there are trivial occurrences in life which have no meaning or
relation to us,—we may acknowledge this, and still hold that providence
arranges every so-called chance, for purposes beyond our knowledge.
Chance, in this sense, is providential coincidence which we cannot
understand, and do not need to trouble ourselves about.


    Not all chances are of equal importance. The casual meeting of a
    stranger in the street need not bring God’s providence before me,
    although I know that God arranges it. Yet I can conceive of that
    meeting as leading to religious conversation and to the stranger’s
    conversion. When we are prepared for them, we shall see many
    opportunities which are now as unmeaning to us as the gold in the
    river-beds was to the early Indians in California. I should be an
    ingrate, if I escaped a lightning-stroke, and did not thank God;
    yet Dr. Arnold’s saying that every school boy should put on his
    hat for God’s glory, and with a high moral purpose, seems morbid.
    There is a certain room for the play of arbitrariness. We must not
    afflict ourselves or the church of God by requiring a Pharisaic
    punctiliousness in minutiæ. Life is too short to debate the
    question which shoe we shall put on first. “Love God and do what
    you will,” said Augustine; that is, Love God, and act out that
    love in a simple and natural way. Be free in your service, yet be
    always on the watch for indications of God’s will.


(_b_) If chance be taken in the sense of utter absence of all causal
connections in the phenomena of matter and mind,—we oppose to this notion
the fact that the causal judgment is formed in accordance with a
fundamental and necessary law of human thought, and that no science or
knowledge is possible without the assumption of its validity.


    In _Luke 10:31_, our Savior says: “_By chance a certain priest was
    going down that way_.” Janet: “Chance is not a cause, but a
    coincidence of causes.” Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge,
    197—“By chance is not meant lack of causation, but the coincidence
    in an event of mutually independent series of causation. Thus the
    unpurposed meeting of two persons is spoken of as a chance one,
    when the movement of neither implies that of the other. Here the
    antithesis of chance is purpose.”


(_c_) If chance be used in the sense of undesigning cause,—it is evidently
insufficient to explain the regular and uniform sequences of nature, or
the moral progress of the human race. These things argue a superintending
and designing mind—in other words, a providence. Since reason demands not
only a cause, but a sufficient cause, for the order of the physical and
moral world, casualism must be ruled out.


    The observer at the signal station was asked what was the climate
    of Rochester. “Climate?” he replied; “Rochester has no
    climate,—only weather!” So Chauncey Wright spoke of the ups and
    downs of human affairs as simply “cosmical weather.” But our
    intuition of design compels us to see mind and purpose in
    individual and national history, as well as in the physical
    universe. The same argument which proves the existence of God
    proves also the existence of a providence. See Farrar, Life of
    Christ, 1:155, note.


3. Theory of a merely general providence.


Many who acknowledge God’s control over the movements of planets and the
destinies of nations deny any divine arrangement of particular events.
Most of the arguments against deism are equally valid against the theory
of a merely general providence. This view is indeed only a form of deism,
which holds that God has not wholly withdrawn himself from the universe,
but that his activity within it is limited to the maintenance of general
laws.


    This appears to have been the view of most of the heathen
    philosophers. Cicero: “Magna dii curant; parva negligunt.” “Even
    in kingdoms among men,” he says, “kings do not trouble themselves
    with insignificant affairs.” Fullerton, Conceptions of the
    Infinite, 9—“Plutarch thought there could not be an infinity of
    worlds,—Providence could not possibly take charge of so many.
    ‘Troublesome and boundless infinity’ could be grasped by no
    consciousness.” The ancient Cretans made an image of Jove without
    ears, for they said: “It is a shame to believe that God would hear
    the talk of men.” So Jerome, the church Father, thought it absurd
    that God should know just how many gnats and cockroaches there
    were in the world. David Harum is wiser when he expresses the
    belief that there is nothing wholly bad or useless in the world:
    “A reasonable amount of fleas is good for a dog,—they keep him
    from broodin’ on bein’ a dog.” This has been paraphrased: “A
    reasonable number of beaux are good for a girl,—they keep her from
    brooding over her being a girl.”


In addition to the arguments above alluded to, we may urge against this
theory that:

(_a_) General control over the course of nature and of history is
impossible without control over the smallest particulars which affect the
course of nature and of history. Incidents so slight as well-nigh to
escape observation at the time of their occurrence are frequently found to
determine the whole future of a human life, and through that life the
fortunes of a whole empire and of a whole age.


    “Nothing great has great beginnings.” “Take care of the pence, and
    the pounds will take care of themselves.” “Care for the chain is
    care for the links of the chain.” Instances in point are the
    sleeplessness of King Ahasuerus (_Esther 6:1_), and the seeming
    chance that led to the reading of the record of Mordecai’s service
    and to the salvation of the Jews in Persia; the spider’s web spun
    across the entrance to the cave in which Mohammed had taken
    refuge, which so deceived his pursuers that they passed on In a
    bootless chase, leaving to the world the religion and the empire
    of the Moslems; the preaching of Peter the Hermit, which
    occasioned the first Crusade; the chance shot of an archer, which
    pierced the right eye of Harold, the last of the purely English
    kings, gained the battle of Hastings for William the Conqueror,
    and secured the throne of England for the Normans; the flight of
    pigeons to the south-west, which changed the course of Columbus,
    hitherto directed towards Virginia, to the West Indies, and so
    prevented the dominion of Spain over North America; the storm that
    dispersed the Spanish Armada and saved England from the Papacy,
    and the storm that dispersed the French fleet gathered for the
    conquest of New England—the latter on a day of fasting and prayer
    appointed by the Puritans to avert the calamity; the settling of
    New England by the Puritans, rather than by French Jesuits; the
    order of Council restraining Cromwell and his friends from sailing
    to America; Major André’s lack of self-possession in presence of
    his captors, which led him to ask an improper question instead of
    showing his passport, and which saved the American cause; the
    unusually early commencement of cold weather, which frustrated the
    plans of Napoleon and destroyed his army in Russia; the fatal shot
    at Fort Sumter, which precipitated the war of secession and
    resulted in the abolition of American slavery. Nature is linked to
    history; the breeze warps the course of the bullet; the worm
    perforates the plank of the ship. God must care for the least, or
    he cannot care for the greatest.

    “Large doors swing on small hinges.” The barking of a dog
    determined F. W. Robertson to be a preacher rather than a soldier.
    Robert Browning, Mr. Sludge the Medium: “We find great things are
    made of little things, And little things go lessening till at last
    Comes God behind them.” E. G. Robinson: “We cannot suppose only a
    general outline to have been in the mind of God, while the
    filling-up is left to be done in some other way. The general
    includes the special.” Dr. Lloyd, one of the Oxford Professors,
    said to Pusey, “I wish you would learn something about those
    German critics.” “In the obedient spirit of those times,” writes
    Pusey, “I set myself at once to learn German, and I went to
    Göttingen, to study at once the language and the theology. My life
    turned on that hint of Dr. Lloyd’s.”

    Goldwin Smith: “Had a bullet entered the brain of Cromwell or of
    William III in his first battle, or had Gustavus not fallen at
    Lützen, the course of history apparently would have been changed.
    The course even of science would have been changed, if there had
    not been a Newton and a Darwin.” The annexation of Corsica to
    France gave to France a Napoleon, and to Europe a conqueror.
    Martineau, Seat of Authority, 101—“Had the monastery at Erfurt
    deputed another than young Luther on its errand to paganized Rome,
    or had Leo X sent a less scandalous agent than Tetzel on his
    business to Germany, the seeds of the Reformation might have
    fallen by the wayside where they had no deepness of earth, and the
    Western revolt of the human mind might have taken another date and
    another form.” See Appleton, Works, 1:149 _sq._; Lecky, England in
    the Eighteenth Century, chap. I.


(_b_) The love of God which prompts a general care for the universe must
also prompt a particular care for the smallest events which affect the
happiness of his creatures. It belongs to love to regard nothing as
trifling or beneath its notice which has to do with the interests of the
object of its affection. Infinite love may therefore be expected to
provide for all, even the minutest things in the creation. Without belief
in this particular care, men cannot long believe in God’s general care.
Faith in a particular providence is indispensable to the very existence of
practical religion; for men will not worship or recognize a God who has no
direct relation to them.


    Man’s care for his own body involves care for the least important
    members of it. A lover’s devotion is known by his interest in the
    minutest concerns of his beloved. So all our affairs are matters
    of interest to God. Pope’s Essay on Man: “All nature is but art
    unknown to thee; All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
    All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal
    good.” If harvests may be labored for and lost without any agency
    of God; if rain or sun may act like fate, sweeping away the
    results of years, and God have no hand in it all; if wind and
    storm may wreck the ship and drown our dearest friends, and God
    not care for us or for our loss, then all possibility of general
    trust in God will disappear also.

    God’s care is shown in the least things as well as in the
    greatest. In Gethsemane Christ says: “_Let these go their way:
    that the word might be fulfilled which he spake, Of those whom
    thou hast given me I lost not one_” (_John 18:8, 9_). It is the
    same spirit as that of his intercessory prayer: “_I guarded them,
    and not one of them perished, but the son of perdition_” (_John
    17:12_). Christ gives himself as a prisoner that his disciples may
    go free, even as he redeems us from the curse of the law by being
    made a curse for us (_Gal. 3:13_). The dewdrop is moulded by the
    same law that rounds the planets into spheres. Gen. Grant said he
    had never but once sought a place for himself, and in that place
    he was a comparative failure; he had been an instrument in God’s
    hand for the accomplishing of God’s purposes, apart from any plan
    or thought or hope of his own.

    Of his journey through the dark continent in search of David
    Livingston, Henry M. Stanley wrote in Scribner’s Monthly for June,
    1890: “Constrained at the darkest hour humbly to confess that
    without God’s help I was helpless, I vowed a vow in the forest
    solitudes that I would confess his aid before men. Silence as of
    death was around me; it was midnight; I was weakened by illness,
    prostrated with fatigue, and wan with anxiety for my white and
    black companions, whose fate was a mystery. In this physical and
    mental distress I besought God to give me back my people. Nine
    hours later we were exulting with a rapturous joy. In full view of
    all was the crimson flag with the crescent, and beneath its waving
    folds was the long-lost rear column.... My own designs were
    frustrated constantly by unhappy circumstances. I endeavored to
    steer my course as direct as possible, but there was an
    unaccountable influence at the helm.... I have been conscious that
    the issues of every effort were in other hands.... Divinity seems
    to have hedged us while we journeyed, impelling us whither it
    would, effecting its own will, but constantly guiding and
    protecting us.” He refuses to believe that it is all the result of
    “luck”, and he closes with a doxology which we should expect from
    Livingston but not from him: “Thanks be to God, forever and ever!”


(_c_) In times of personal danger, and in remarkable conjunctures of
public affairs, men instinctively attribute to God a control of the events
which take place around them. The prayers which such startling emergencies
force from men’s lips are proof that God is present and active in human
affairs. This testimony of our mental constitution must be regarded as
virtually the testimony of him who framed this constitution.


    No advance of science can rid us of this conviction, since it
    comes from a deeper source than mere reasoning. The intuition of
    design is awakened by the connection of events in our daily life,
    as much as by the useful adaptations which we see in nature. _Ps.
    107:23-28_—“_They that go down to the sea in ships ... mount up to
    the heavens, they go down again to the depths ... And are at their
    wits’ end. Then they cry unto Jehovah in their trouble._” A narrow
    escape from death shows us a present God and Deliverer. Instance
    the general feeling throughout the land, expressed by the press as
    well as by the pulpit, at the breaking out of our rebellion and at
    the President’s subsequent Proclamation of Emancipation.

    “Est deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo.” For contrast
    between Nansen’s ignoring of God in his polar journey and Dr.
    Jacob Chamberlain’s calling upon God in his strait in India, see
    Missionary Review, May, 1898. Sunday School Times, March 4,
    1893—“Benjamin Franklin became a deist at the age of fifteen.
    Before the Revolutionary War he was merely a shrewd and pushing
    business man. He had public spirit, and he made one happy
    discovery in science. But ‘Poor Richard’s’ sayings express his
    mind at that time. The perils and anxieties of the great war gave
    him a deeper insight. He and others entered upon it ‘with a rope
    around their necks.’ As he told the Constitutional Convention of
    1787, when he proposed that its daily sessions be opened with
    prayer, the experiences of that war showed him that ‘God verily
    rules in the affairs of men.’ And when the designs for an American
    coinage were under discussion, Franklin proposed to stamp on them,
    not ‘A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned,’ or any other piece of
    worldly prudence, but ‘The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of
    Wisdom.’ ”


(_d_) Christian experience confirms the declarations of Scripture that
particular events are brought about by God with special reference to the
good or ill of the individual. Such events occur at times in such direct
connection with the Christian’s prayers that no doubt remains with regard
to the providential arrangement of them. The possibility of such divine
agency in natural events cannot be questioned by one who, like the
Christian, has had experience of the greater wonders of regeneration and
daily intercourse with God, and who believes in the reality of creation,
incarnation, and miracles.


    Providence prepares the way for men’s conversion, sometimes by
    their own partial reformation, sometimes by the sudden death of
    others near them. Instance Luther and Judson. The Christian learns
    that the same Providence that led him before his conversion is
    busy after his conversion in directing his steps and in supplying
    his wants. Daniel Defoe: “I have been fed more by miracle than
    Elijah when the angels were his purveyors.” In _Psalm 32_, David
    celebrates not only God’s pardoning mercy but his subsequent
    providential leading: “_I will counsel thee with mine eye upon
    thee_” (_verse 8_). It may be objected that we often mistake the
    meaning of events. We answer that, as in nature, so in providence,
    we are compelled to believe, not that we _know_ the design, but
    that there _is_ a design. Instance Shelley’s drowning, and Jacob
    Knapp’s prayer that his opponent might be stricken dumb. Lyman
    Beecher’s attributing the burning of the Unitarian church to God’s
    judgment upon false doctrine was invalidated a little later by the
    burning of his own church.

    _Job 23:10_—“_He knoweth the way that is mine,_” or “_the way that
    is with me,_” _i. e._, my inmost way, life, character; “_When he
    hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold._” _1 Cor. 19:4_—“_and
    the rock was Christ_”—Christ was the ever present source of their
    refreshment and life, both physical and spiritual. God’s
    providence is all exercised through Christ. _2 Cor. 2:14_—“_But
    thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ_”;
    not, as in A. V., “_causeth us to triumph_.” Paul glories, not in
    conquering, but in being conquered. Let Christ triumph, not Paul.
    “Great King of grace, my heart subdue; I would be led in triumph
    too. A willing captive to my Lord, To own the conquests of his
    word.” Therefore Paul can call himself “_the prisoner of Christ
    Jesus_” (_Eph. 3:1_). It was Christ who had shut him up two years
    in Cæsarea, and then two succeeding years in Rome.


IV. Relations of the Doctrine of Providence.


1. To miracles and works of grace.


Particular providence is the agency of God in what seem to us the minor
affairs of nature and human life. Special providence is only an instance
of God’s particular providence which has special relation to us or makes
peculiar impression upon us. It is special, not as respects the means
which God makes use of, but as respects the effect produced upon us. In
special providence we have only a more impressive manifestation of God’s
universal control.

Miracles and works of grace like regeneration are not to be regarded as
belonging to a different order of things from God’s special providences.
They too, like special providences, may have their natural connections and
antecedents, although they more readily suggest their divine authorship.
Nature and God are not mutually exclusive,—nature is rather God’s method
of working. Since nature is only the manifestation of God, special
providence, miracle, and regeneration are simply different degrees of
extraordinary nature. Certain of the wonders of Scripture, such as the
destruction of Sennacherib’s army and the dividing of the Red Sea, the
plagues of Egypt, the flight of quails, and the draught of fishes, can be
counted as exaggerations of natural forces, while at the same time they
are operations of the wonder-working God.


    The falling of snow from a roof is an example of ordinary (or
    particular) providence. But if a man is killed by it, it becomes a
    special providence to him and to others who are thereby taught the
    insecurity of life. So the providing of coal for fuel in the
    geologic ages may be regarded by different persons in the light
    either of a general or of a special providence. In all the
    operations of nature and all the events of life God’s providence
    is exhibited. That providence becomes special, when it manifestly
    suggests some care of God for us or some duty of ours to God.
    Savage, Life beyond Death, 285—“Mary A. Livermore’s life was saved
    during her travels in the West by her hearing and instantly
    obeying what seemed to her a voice. She did not know where it came
    from; but she leaped, as the voice ordered, from one side of a car
    to the other, and instantly the side where she had been sitting
    was crushed in and utterly demolished.” In a similar way, the life
    of Dr. Oncken was saved in the railroad disaster at Norwalk.

    Trench gives the name of “providential miracles” to those
    Scripture wonders which may be explained as wrought through the
    agency of natural laws (see Trench, Miracles, 19). Mozley also
    (Miracles, 117-120) calls these wonders miracles, because of the
    predictive word of God which accompanied them. He says that the
    difference in effect between miracles and special providences is
    that the latter give _some_ warrant, while the former give _full_
    warrant, for believing that they are wrought by God. He calls
    special providences “invisible miracles.” Bp. of Southampton,
    Place of Miracles, 12, 13—“The art of Bezaleel in constructing the
    tabernacle, and the plans of generals like Moses and Joshua,
    Gideon, Barak, and David, are in the Old Testament ascribed to the
    direct inspiration of God. A less religious writer would have
    ascribed them to the instinct of military skill. No miracle is
    necessarily involved, when, in devising the system of ceremonial
    law it is said: _‘__Jehovah spake unto Moses__’__ (Num. 5:1)_. God
    is everywhere present in the history of Israel, but miracles are
    strikingly rare.” We prefer to say that the line between the
    natural and the supernatural, between special providence and
    miracle, is an arbitrary one, and that the same event may often be
    regarded either as special providence or as miracle, according as
    we look at it from the point of view of its relation to other
    events or from the point of view of its relation to God.

    E. G. Robinson: “If Vesuvius should send up ashes and lava, and a
    strong wind should scatter them, it could be said to rain fire and
    brimstone, as at Sodom and Gomorrha.” There is abundant evident of
    volcanic action at the Dead Sea. See article on the Physical
    Preparation for Israel in Palestine, by G. Frederick Wright, in
    Bib. Sac., April, 1901:364. The three great miracles—the
    destruction of Sodom and Gomorrha, the parting of the waters of
    the Jordan, the falling down of the walls of Jericho—are described
    as effect of volcanic eruption, elevation of the bed of the river
    by a landslide, and earthquake-shock overthrowing the walls. Salt
    slime thrown up may have enveloped Lot’s wife and turned her into
    “_a mound of salt_” (_Gen. 19:26_). In like manner, some of Jesus’
    works of healing, as for instance those wrought upon paralytics
    and epileptics, may be susceptible of natural explanation, while
    yet they show that Christ is absolute Lord of nature. For the
    naturalistic view, see Tyndall on Miracles and Special
    Providences, in Fragments of Science, 45, 418. _Per contra_, see
    Farrar, on Divine Providence and General Laws, in Science and
    Theology, 54-80; Row, Bampton Lect. on Christian Evidences,
    109-115; Godet, Defence of Christian Faith, Chap. 2; Bowne, The
    Immanence of God, 56-65.


2. To prayer and its answer.


What has been said with regard to God’s connection with nature suggests
the question, how God can answer prayer consistently with the fixity of
natural law.


    Tyndall (see reference above), while repelling the charge of
    denying that God can answer prayer at all, yet does deny that he
    can answer it without a miracle. He says expressly “that without a
    disturbance of natural law quite as serious as the stoppage of an
    eclipse, or the rolling of the St. Lawrence up the falls of
    Niagara, no act of humiliation, individual or national, could call
    one shower from heaven or deflect toward us a single beam of the
    sun.” In reply we would remark:


A. Negatively, that the true solution is not to be reached:

(_a_) By making the sole effect of prayer to be its reflex influence upon
the petitioner.—Prayer presupposes a God who hears and answers. It will
not be offered, unless it is believed to accomplish objective as well as
subjective results.


    According to the first view mentioned above, prayer is a mere
    spiritual gymnastics—an effort to lift ourselves from the ground
    by tugging at our own boot-straps. David Hume said well, after
    hearing a sermon by Dr. Leechman: “We can make use of no
    expression or even thought in prayers and entreaties which does
    not imply that these prayers have an influence.” See Tyndall on
    Prayer and Natural Law, in Fragments of Science, 35. Will men pray
    to a God who is both deaf and dumb? Will the sailor on the
    bowsprit whistle to the wind for the sake of improving his voice?
    Horace Bushnell called this perversion of prayer a “mere dumb-bell
    exercise.” Baron Munchausen pulled himself out of the bog in China
    by tugging away at his own pigtail.

    Hyde, God’s Education of Man, 154, 155—“Prayer is not the reflex
    action of my will upon itself, but rather the communion of two
    wills, in which the finite comes into connection with the
    Infinite, and, like the trolley, appropriates its purpose and
    power.” Harnack, Wesen des Christenthums, 42, apparently follows
    Schleiermacher in unduly limiting prayer to general petitions
    which receive only a subjective answer. He tells us that “Jesus
    taught his disciples the Lord’s Prayer in response to a request
    for directions how to pray. Yet we look in vain therein for
    requests for special gifts of grace, or for particular good
    things, even though they are spiritual. The name, the will, the
    kingdom of God—these are the things which are the objects of
    petition.” Harnack forgets that the same Christ said also: “_All
    things whatsoever ye pray and ask for, believe that ye receive
    them, and ye shall have them_” (_Mark 11:24_).


(_b_) Nor by holding that God answers prayer simply by spiritual means,
such as the action of the Holy Spirit upon the spirit of man.—The realm of
spirit is no less subject to law than the realm of matter. Scripture and
experience, moreover, alike testify that in answer to prayer events take
place in the outward world which would not have taken place if prayer had
not gone before.


    According to this second theory, God feeds the starving Elijah,
    not by a distinct message from heaven but by giving a
    compassionate disposition to the widow of Zarephath so that she is
    moved to help the prophet. _1 K. 17:9_—“_behold, I have commanded
    a widow there to sustain thee._” But God could also feed Elijah by
    the ravens and the angel (_1 K. 17:4; 19:15_), and the pouring
    rain that followed Elijah’s prayer (_1 K. 18:42-45_) cannot be
    explained as a subjective spiritual phenomenon. Diman, Theistic
    Argument, 268—“Our charts map out not only the solid shore but the
    windings of the ocean currents, and we look into the morning
    papers to ascertain the gathering of storms on the slopes of the
    Rocky Mountains.” But law rules in the realm of spirit as well as
    in the realm of nature. See Baden Powell, in Essays and Reviews,
    106-162; Knight, Studies in Philosophy and Literature, 340-404;
    George I. Chace, discourse before the Porter Rhet. Soc. of
    Andover, August, 1854. Governor Rice in Washington is moved to
    send money to a starving family in New York, and to secure
    employment for them. Though he has had no information with regard
    to their need, they have knelt in prayer for help just before the
    coming of the aid.


(_c_) Nor by maintaining that God suspends or breaks in upon the order of
nature, in answering every prayer that is offered.—This view does not take
account of natural laws as having objective existence, and as revealing
the order of God’s being. Omnipotence might thus suspend natural law, but
wisdom, so far as we can see, would not.


    This third theory might well be held by those who see in nature no
    force but the all-working will of God. But the properties and
    powers of matter are revelations of the divine will, and the human
    will has only a relative independence in the universe. To desire
    that God would answer all our prayers is to desire omnipotence
    without omniscience. All true prayer is therefore an expression of
    the one petition: “_Thy will be done_” (_Mat. 6:10_). E. G.
    Robinson: “It takes much common sense to pray, and many prayers
    are destitute of this quality. Man needs to pray audibly even in
    his private prayers, to get the full benefit of them. One of the
    chief benefits of the English liturgy is that the individual
    minister is lost sight of. Protestantism makes you work; in
    Romanism the church will do it all for you.”


(_d_) Nor by considering prayer as a physical force, linked in each case
to its answer, as physical cause is linked to physical effect.—Prayer is
not a force acting directly upon nature; else there would be no discretion
as to its answer. It can accomplish results in nature, only as it
influences God.


    We educate our children in two ways: first, by training them to do
    for themselves what they can do; and, secondly, by encouraging
    them to seek our help in matters beyond their power. So God
    educates us, first, by impersonal law, and, secondly, by personal
    dependence. He teaches us both to work and to ask. Notice the
    “perfect unwisdom of modern scientists who place themselves under
    the training of impersonal law, to the exclusion of that higher
    and better training which is under personality” (Hopkins, Sermon
    on Prayer-gauge, 16).


It seems more in accordance with both Scripture and reason to say that:

B. God may answer prayer, even when that answer involves changes in the
sequences of nature,—

(_a_) By new combinations of natural forces, in regions withdrawn from our
observation, so that effects are produced which these same forces left to
themselves would never have accomplished. As man combines the laws of
chemical attraction and of combustion, to fire the gunpowder and split the
rock asunder, so God may combine the laws of nature to bring about answers
to prayer. In all this there may be no suspension or violation of law, but
a use of law unknown to us.


    Hopkins, Sermon on the Prayer-gauge: “Nature is uniform in her
    processes but not in her results. Do you say that water cannot run
    uphill? Yes, it can and does. Whenever man constructs a milldam
    the water runs up the environing hills till it reaches the top of
    the milldam. Man can make a spark of electricity do his bidding;
    why cannot God use a bolt of electricity? Laws are not our
    masters, but our servants. They do our bidding all the better
    because they are uniform. And our servants are not God’s masters.”
    Kendall Brooks: “The master of a musical instrument can vary
    without limit the combination of sounds and the melodies which
    these combinations can produce. The laws of the instrument are not
    changed, but in their unchanging steadfastness produce an infinite
    variety of tunes. It is necessary that they should be unchanging
    in order to secure a desired result. So nature, which exercises
    the infinite skill of the divine Master, is governed by unvarying
    laws; but he, by these laws, produces an infinite variety of
    results.”

    Hodge, Popular Lectures, 45, 99—“The system of natural laws is far
    more flexible in God’s hands than it is in ours. We act on second
    causes externally; God acts on them internally. We act upon them
    at only a few isolated points; God acts upon every point of the
    system at the same time. The whole of nature may be as plastic to
    his will as the air in the organs of the great singer who
    articulates it into a fit expression of every thought and passion
    of his soaring soul.” Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 155—“If all the
    chemical elements of our solar system preëxisted in the fiery
    cosmic mist, there must have been a time when quite suddenly the
    attractions between these elements overcame the degree of caloric
    force which held them apart, and the rush of elements into
    chemical union must have been consummated with inconceivable
    rapidity. Uniformitarianism is not universal.”

    Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, chap. 2—“By a little increase of
    centrifugal force the elliptical orbit is changed into a parabola,
    and the planet becomes a comet. By a little reduction in
    temperature water becomes solid and loses many of its powers. So
    unexpected results are brought about and surprises as
    revolutionary as if a Supreme Power immediately intervened.”
    William James, Address before Soc. for Psych. Research:
    “Thought-transference may involve a critical point, as the
    physicists call it, which is passed only when certain psychic
    conditions are realized, and otherwise not reached at all—just as
    a big conflagration will break out at a certain temperature, below
    which no conflagration whatever, whether big or little, can
    occur.” Tennyson, Life, 1:324—“Prayer is like opening a sluice
    between the great ocean and our little channels, when the great
    sea gathers itself together and flows in at full tide.”


Since prayer is nothing more nor less than appeal to a personal and
present God, whose granting or withholding of the requested blessing is
believed to be determined by the prayer itself, we must conclude that
prayer moves God, or, in other words, induces the putting forth on his
part of an imperative volition.


    The view that in answering prayer God combines natural forces is
    elaborated by Chalmers, Works, 2:314, and 7:234. See Diman,
    Theistic Argument, 111—“When laws are conceived of, not as single,
    but as combined, instead of being immutable in their operation,
    they are the agencies of ceaseless change. Phenomena are governed,
    not by invariable forces, but by _endlessly varying combinations
    of invariable forces_.” Diman seems to have followed Argyll, Reign
    of Law, 100.

    Janet, Final Causes, 219—“I kindle a fire in my grate. I only
    intervene to produce and combine together the different agents
    whose natural action behooves to produce the effect I have need
    of; but the first step once taken, all the phenomena constituting
    combustion engender each other, conformably to their laws, without
    a new intervention of the agent; so that an observer who should
    study the series of these phenomena, without perceiving the first
    hand that had prepared all, could not seize that hand in any
    especial act, and yet there is a preconceived plan and
    combination.”

    Hopkins, Sermon on Prayer-gauge: Man, by sprinkling plaster on his
    field, may cause the corn to grow more luxuriantly; by kindling
    great fires and by firing cannon, he may cause rain; and God can
    surely, in answer to prayer, do as much as man can. Lewes says
    that the fundamental character of all theological philosophy is
    conceiving of phenomena as subject to supernatural volition, and
    consequently as eminently and irregularly variable. This notion,
    he says, is refuted, first, by exact and rational prevision of
    phenomena, and, secondly, by the possibility of our modifying
    these phenomena so as to promote our own advantage. But we ask in
    reply: If we can modify them, cannot God? But, lest this should
    seem to imply mutability in God or inconsistency in nature, we
    remark, in addition, that:


(_b_) God may have so preärranged the laws of the material universe and
the events of history that, while the answer to prayer is an expression of
his will, it is granted through the working of natural agencies, and in
perfect accordance with the general principle that results, both temporal
and spiritual, are to be attained by intelligent creatures through the use
of the appropriate and appointed means.


    J. P. Cooke, Credentials of Science, 194—“The Jacquard loom of
    itself would weave a perfectly uniform plain fabric; the
    perforated cards determine a selection of the threads, and through
    a combination of these variable conditions, so complex that the
    observer cannot follow their intricate workings, the predesigned
    pattern appears.” E. G. Robinson: “The most formidable objection
    to this theory is the apparent countenance it lends to the
    doctrine of necessitarianism. But if it presupposes that free
    actions have been taken into account, it cannot easily be shown to
    be false.” The bishop who was asked by his curate to sanction
    prayers for rain was unduly sceptical when he replied: “First
    consult the barometer.” Phillips Brooks: “Prayer is not the
    conquering of God’s reluctance, but the taking hold of God’s
    willingness.”

    The Pilgrims at Plymouth, somewhere about 1628, prayed for rain.
    They met at 9 A. M., and continued in prayer for eight or nine
    hours. While they were assembled clouds gathered, and the next
    morning began rains which, with some intervals, lasted fourteen
    days. John Easter was many years ago an evangelist in Virginia. A
    large out-door meeting was being held. Many thousands had
    assembled, when heavy storm clouds began to gather. There was no
    shelter to which the multitudes could retreat. The rain had
    already reached the adjoining fields when John Easter cried:
    “Brethren, be still, while I call upon God to stay the storm till
    the gospel is preached to this multitude!” Then he knelt and
    prayed that the audience might be spared the rain, and that after
    they had gone to their homes there might be refreshing showers.
    Behold, the clouds parted as they came near, and passed to either
    side of the crowd and then closed again, leaving the place dry
    where the audience had assembled, and the next day the postponed
    showers came down upon the ground that had been the day before
    omitted.


Since God is immanent in nature, an answer to prayer, coming about through
the intervention of natural law, may be as real a revelation of God’s
personal care as if the laws of nature were suspended, and God interposed
by an exercise of his creative power. Prayer and its answer, though having
God’s immediate volition as their connecting bond, may yet be provided for
in the original plan of the universe.


    The universe does not exist for itself, but for moral ends and
    moral beings, to reveal God and to furnish facilities of
    intercourse between God and intelligent creatures. Bishop
    Berkeley: “The universe is God’s ceaseless conversation with his
    creatures.” The universe certainly subserves moral ends—the
    discouragement of vice and the reward of virtue; why not spiritual
    ends also? When we remember that there is no true prayer which God
    does not inspire; that every true prayer is part of the plan of
    the universe linked in with all the rest and provided for at the
    beginning; that God is in nature and in mind, supervising all
    their movements and making all fulfill his will and reveal his
    personal care; that God can adjust the forces of nature to each
    other far more skilfully than can man when man produces effects
    which nature of herself could never accomplish; that God is not
    confined to nature or her forces, but can work by his creative and
    omnipotent will where other means are not sufficient,—we need have
    no fear, either that natural law will bar God’s answers to prayer,
    or that these answers will cause a shock or jar in the system of
    the universe.

    Matheson, Messages of the Old Religions, 321, 322—“Hebrew poetry
    never deals with outward nature for its own sake. The eye never
    rests on beauty for itself alone. The heavens are the work of
    God’s hands, the earth is God’s footstool, the winds are God’s
    ministers, the stars are God’s host, the thunder is God’s voice.
    What we call Nature the Jew called God.” Miss Heloise E. Hersey:
    “Plato in the Phædrus sets forth in a splendid myth the means by
    which the gods refresh themselves. Once a year, in a mighty host,
    they drive their chariots up the steep to the topmost vault of
    heaven. Thence they may behold all the wonders and the secrets of
    the universe; and, quickened by the sight of the great plain of
    truth, they return home replenished and made glad by the celestial
    vision.” Abp. Trench, Poems, 134—“Lord, what a change within us
    one short hour Spent in thy presence will prevail to make—What
    heavy burdens from our bosoms take, What parched grounds refresh
    as with a shower! We kneel, and all around us seems to lower; We
    rise, and all, the distant and the near, Stands forth in sunny
    outline, brave and clear; We kneel how weak, we rise how full of
    power! Why, therefore, should we do ourselves this wrong, Or
    others—that we are not always strong; That we are ever overborne
    with care; That we should ever weak or heartless be, Anxious or
    troubled, when with us is prayer, And joy and strength and courage
    are with thee?” See Calderwood, Science and Religion, 299-309;
    McCosh, Divine Government, 215; Liddon, Elements of Religion,
    178-203; Hamilton, Autology, 690-694. See also Jellett, Donnellan
    Lectures on the Efficacy of Prayer; Butterworth, Story of Notable
    Prayers; Patton, Prayer and its Answers; Monrad, World of Prayer;
    Prime, Power of Prayer; Phelps, The Still Hour; Haven, and
    Bickersteth, on Prayer; Prayer for Colleges; Cox, in Expositor,
    1877: chap. 3; Faunce, Prayer as a Theory and a Fact; Trumbull,
    Prayer, Its Nature and Scope.


C. If asked whether this relation between prayer and its providential
answer can be scientifically tested, we reply that it may be tested just
as a father’s love may be tested by a dutiful son.

(_a_) There is a general proof of it in the past experience of the
Christian and in the past history of the church.

_Ps. 116:1-8_—“_I love Jehovah because he heareth my voice and my
supplications._” Luther prays for the dying Melanchthon, and he recovers.
George Müller trusts to prayer, and builds his great orphan-houses. For a
multitude of instances, see Prime, Answers to Prayer. Charles H. Spurgeon:
“If there is any fact that is proved, it is that God hears prayer. If
there is any scientific statement that is capable of mathematical proof,
this is.” Mr. Spurgeon’s language is rhetorical: he means simply that
God’s answers to prayer remove all reasonable doubt. Adoniram Judson: “I
never was deeply interested in any object, I never prayed sincerely and
earnestly for anything, but it came; at some time—no matter at how distant
a day—somehow, in some shape, probably the last I should have devised—it
came. And yet I have always had so little faith! May God forgive me, and
while he condescends to use me as his instrument, wipe the sin of unbelief
from my heart!”

(_b_) In condescension to human blindness, God may sometimes submit to a
formal test of his faithfulness and power,—as in the case of Elijah and
the priests of Baal.


    _Is. 7:10-13_—Ahaz is rebuked for not asking a sign,—in him it
    indicated unbelief. _1 K. 18:36-38_—Elijah said, “_let it be known
    this day that thou art God in Israel.... Then the fire of Jehovah
    fell, and consumed the burnt offering._” Romaine speaks of “a year
    famous for believing.” _Mat 21:21, 22_—“_even if ye shall say unto
    this mountain, Be thou taken up and cast into the sea, it shall be
    done. And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer,
    believing, ye shall receive._” “Impossible?” said Napoleon; “then
    it shall be done!” Arthur Hallam, quoted in Tennyson’s Life,
    1:44—“With respect to prayer, you ask how I am to distinguish the
    operations of God in me from the motions of my own heart. Why
    should you distinguish them, or how do you know that there is any
    distinction? Is God less God because he acts by general laws when
    he deals with the common elements of nature?” “Watch in prayer to
    see what cometh. Foolish boys that knock at a door in wantonness,
    will not stay till somebody open to them; but a man that hath
    business will knock, and knock again, till he gets his answer.”

    Martineau, Seat of Authority, 102, 103—“God is not beyond nature
    simply,—he is within it. In nature and in mind we must find the
    action of his power. There is no need of his being a third factor
    over and above the life of nature and the life of man.” Hartley
    Coleridge: “Be not afraid to pray,—to pray is right. Pray if thou
    canst with hope, but ever pray, Though hope be weak, or sick with
    long delay; Pray in the darkness, if there be no light. Far is the
    time, remote from human sight, When war and discord on the earth
    shall cease; Yet every prayer for universal peace Avails the
    blessed time to expedite. Whate’er is good to wish, ask that of
    heaven, Though it be what thou canst not hope to see; Pray to be
    perfect, though the material leaven Forbid the spirit so on earth
    to be; But if for any wish thou dar’st not pray, Then pray to God
    to cast that wish away.”


(_c_) When proof sufficient to convince the candid inquirer has been
already given, it may not consist with the divine majesty to abide a test
imposed by mere curiosity or scepticism,—as in the case of the Jews who
sought a sign from heaven.


    _Mat. 12:39_—“_An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a
    sign; and there shall no sign be given to it but the sign of Jonah
    the prophet._” Tyndall’s prayer-gauge would ensure a conflict of
    prayers. Since our present life is a moral probation, delay in the
    answer to our prayers, and even the denial of specific things for
    which we pray, may be only signs of God’s faithfulness and love.
    George Müller: “I myself have been bringing certain requests
    before God now for seventeen years and six months, and never a day
    has passed without my praying concerning them all this time; yet
    the full answer has not come up to the present. But I look for it;
    I confidently expect it.” Christ’s prayer, “_let this cup pass
    away from me_” (_Mat. 26:39_), and Paul’s prayer that the “_thorn
    in the flesh_” might depart from him (_2 Cor. 12:7, 8_), were not
    answered in the precise way requested. No more are our prayers
    always answered in the way we expect. Christ’s prayer was not
    answered by the literal removing of the cup, because the drinking
    of the cup was really his glory; and Paul’s prayer was not
    answered by the literal removal of the thorn, because the thorn
    was needful for his own perfecting. In the case of both Jesus and
    Paul, there were larger interests to be consulted than their own
    freedom from suffering.


(_d_) Since God’s will is the link between prayer and its answer, there
can be no such thing as a physical demonstration of its efficacy in any
proposed case. Physical tests have no application to things into which
free will enters as a constitutive element. But there are moral tests, and
moral tests are as scientific as physical tests can be.


    Diman, Theistic Argument, 576, alludes to Goldwin Smith’s denial
    that any scientific method can be applied to history because it
    would make man a necessary link in a chain of cause and effect and
    so would deny his free will. But Diman says this is no more
    impossible than the development of the individual according to a
    fixed law of growth, while yet free will is sedulously respected.
    Froude says history is not a science, because no science could
    foretell Mohammedanism or Buddhism; and Goldwin Smith says that
    “prediction is the crown of all science.” But, as Diman remarks:
    “geometry, geology, physiology, are sciences, yet they do not
    predict.” Buckle brought history into contempt by asserting that
    it could be analyzed and referred solely to intellectual laws and
    forces. To all this we reply that there may be scientific tests
    which are not physical, or even intellectual, but only moral. Such
    a test God urges his people to use, in _Mal. 3:10_—“_Bring ye the
    whole tithe into the storehouse ... and prove me now herewith, if
    I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a
    blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it._” All
    such prayer is a reflection of Christ’s words—some fragment of his
    teaching transformed into a supplication (_John 15:7_; see
    Westcott, Bib. Com., _in loco_); all such prayer is moreover the
    work of the Spirit of God (_Rom. 8:26, 27_). It is therefore sure
    of an answer.

    But the test of prayer proposed by Tyndall is not applicable to
    the thing to be tested by it. Hopkins, Prayer and the
    Prayer-gauge, 22 _sq._—“We cannot measure wheat by the yard, or
    the weight of a discourse with a pair of scales.... God’s wisdom
    might see that it was not best for the petitioners, nor for the
    objects of their petition, to grant their request. Christians
    therefore could not, without special divine authorization, rest
    their faith upon the results of such a test.... Why may we not ask
    for great changes in nature? For the same reason that a
    well-informed child does not ask for the moon as a plaything....
    There are two limitations upon prayer. First, except by special
    direction of God, we cannot ask for a miracle, for the same reason
    that a child could not ask his father to burn the house down.
    Nature is the house we live in. Secondly, we cannot ask for
    anything under the laws of nature which would contravene the
    object of those laws. Whatever we can do for ourselves under these
    laws, God expects us to do. If the child is cold, let him go near
    the fire,—not beg his father to carry him.”

    Herbert Spencer’s Sociology is only social physics. He denies
    freedom, and declares anyone who will affix D. V. to the
    announcement of the Mildmay Conference to be incapable of
    understanding sociology. Prevision excludes divine or human will.
    But Mr. Spencer intimates that the evils of natural selection may
    be modified by artificial selection. What is this but the
    interference of will? And if man can interfere, cannot God do the
    same? Yet the wise child will not expect the father to give
    everything he asks for. Nor will the father who loves his child
    give him the razor to play with, or stuff him with unwholesome
    sweets, simply because the child asks these things. If the
    engineer of the ocean steamer should give me permission to press
    the lever that sets all the machinery in motion, I should decline
    to use my power and should prefer to leave such matters to him,
    unless he first suggested it and showed me how. So the Holy Spirit
    “_helpeth our infirmity; for we know not how to pray as we ought;
    but the Spirit himself __ maketh intercession for us with
    groanings which cannot be uttered_” (_Rom. 8:26_). And we ought
    not to talk of “submitting” to perfect Wisdom, or of “being
    resigned” to perfect Love. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra,
    2:1—“What they [the gods] do delay, they do not deny.... We,
    ignorant of ourselves, Beg often our own harms, which the wise
    powers Deny us for our good; so find we profit By losing of our
    prayers.” See Thornton, Old-Fashioned Ethics, 286-297. _Per
    contra_, see Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, 277-294.


3. To Christian activity.


Here the truth lies between the two extremes of quietism and naturalism.

(_a_) In opposition to the false abnegation of human reason and will which
quietism demands, we hold that God guides us, not by continual miracle,
but by his natural providence and the energizing of our faculties by his
Spirit, so that we rationally and freely do our own work, and work out our
own salvation.


    Upham, Interior Life, 356, defines quietism as “cessation of
    wandering thoughts and discursive imaginations, rest from
    irregular desires and affections, and perfect submission of the
    will.” Its advocates, however, have often spoken of it as a giving
    up of our will and reason, and a swallowing up of these in the
    wisdom and will of God. This phraseology is misleading, and savors
    of a pantheistic merging of man in God. Dorner: “Quietism makes
    God a monarch without living subjects.” Certain English quietists,
    like the Mohammedans, will not employ physicians in sickness. They
    quote _2 Chron. 16:12, 13_—Asa “_sought not to Jehovah, but to the
    physicians. And Asa slept with his fathers_.” They forget that the
    “_physicians_” alluded to in Chronicles were probably heathen
    necromancers. Cromwell to his Ironsides: “Trust God, and keep your
    powder dry!”

    Providence does not exclude, but rather implies the operation of
    natural law, by which we mean God’s regular way of working. It
    leaves no excuse for the sarcasm of Robert Browning’s Mr. Sludge
    the Medium, 223—“Saved your precious self from what befell The
    thirty-three whom Providence forgot.” Schurman, Belief in God,
    213—“The temples were hung with the votive offerings of those only
    who had _escaped_ drowning.” “So like Provvy!” Bentham used to
    say, when anything particularly unseemly occurred in the way of
    natural catastrophe, God reveals himself in natural law.
    Physicians and medicine are his methods, as well as the
    impartation of faith and courage to the patient. The advocates of
    faith-cure should provide by faith that no believing Christian
    should die. With the apostolic miracles should go inspiration, as
    Edward Irving declared. “Every man is as lazy as circumstances
    will admit.” We throw upon the shoulders of Providence the burdens
    which belong to us to bear. “_Work out your own salvation with
    fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will
    and to work, for his good pleasure_” (_Phil. 2:12, 13_).

    Prayer without the use of means is an insult to God. “If God has
    decreed that you should live, what is the use of your eating or
    drinking?” Can a drowning man refuse to swim, or even to lay hold
    of the rope that is thrown to him, and yet ask God to save him on
    account of his faith? “Tie your camel,” said Mohammed, “and commit
    it to God.” Frederick Douglas used to say that when in slavery he
    often prayed for freedom, but his prayer was never answered till
    he prayed with his feet—and ran away. Whitney, Integrity of
    Christian Science, 68—“The existence of the dynamo at the
    power-house does not make unnecessary the trolley line, nor the
    secondary motor, nor the conductor’s application of the power.
    True quietism is a resting in the Lord after we have done our
    part.” _Ps. 37:7_—“_Rest in Jehovah, and wait patiently for him_”;
    _Is. 57:2_—“_He entereth into peace; they rest in their beds, each
    one that walketh in his uprightness_”. Ian Maclaren, Cure of
    Souls, 147—“Religion has three places of abode: in the reason,
    which is theology; in the conscience, which is ethics; and in the
    heart, which is quietism.” On the self-guidance of Christ, see
    Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 202-232.

    George Müller, writing about ascertaining the will of God, says:
    “I seek at the beginning to get my heart into such a state that it
    has no will of its own in regard to a given matter. Nine tenths of
    the difficulties are overcome when our hearts are ready to do the
    Lord’s will, whatever it may be. Having done this, I do not leave
    the result to feeling or simple impression. If I do so, I make
    myself liable to a great delusion. I seek the will of the Spirit
    of God through, or in connection with, the Word of God. The Spirit
    and the Word must be combined. If I look to the Spirit alone,
    without the Word, I lay myself open to great delusions also. If
    the Holy Ghost guides us at all, he will do it according to the
    Scriptures, and never contrary to them. Next I take into account
    providential circumstances. These often plainly indicate God’s
    will in connection with his Word and his Spirit. I ask God in
    prayer to reveal to me his will aright. Thus through prayer to
    God, the study of the Word, and reflection, I come to a deliberate
    judgment according to the best of my knowledge and ability, and,
    if my mind is thus at peace, I proceed accordingly.”

    We must not confound rational piety with false enthusiasm. See
    Isaac Taylor, Natural History of Enthusiasm. “Not quiescence, but
    acquiescence, is demanded of us.” As God feeds “_the birds of the
    heaven_” (_Mat. 6:26_), not by dropping food from heaven into
    their mouths, but by stimulating them to seek food for themselves,
    so God provides for his rational creatures by giving them a
    sanctified common sense and by leading them to use it. In a true
    sense Christianity gives us more will than ever. The Holy Spirit
    emancipates the will, sets it upon proper objects, and fills it
    with new energy. We are therefore not to surrender ourselves
    passively to whatever professes to be a divine suggestion: _1 John
    4:1_—“_believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether
    they are of God._” The test is the revealed word of God: _Is.
    8:20_—“_To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not
    according to this word, surely there is no morning for them._” See
    remarks on false Mysticism, pages 32, 33.


(_b_) In opposition to naturalism, we hold that God is continually near
the human spirit by his providential working, and that this providential
working is so adjusted to the Christian’s nature and necessities as to
furnish instruction with regard to duty, discipline of religious
character, and needed help and comfort in trial.

In interpreting God’s providences, as in interpreting Scripture, we are
dependent upon the Holy Spirit. The work of the Spirit is, indeed, in
great part an application of Scripture truth to present circumstances.
While we never allow ourselves to act blindly and irrationally, but
accustom ourselves to weigh evidence with regard to duty, we are to
expect, as the gift of the Spirit, an understanding of circumstances—a
fine sense of God’s providential purposes with regard to us, which will
make our true course plain to ourselves, although we may not always be
able to explain it to others.


    The Christian may have a continual divine guidance. Unlike the
    unfaithful and unbelieving, of whom it is said, in _Ps. 106:13_,
    “_They waited not for his counsel,_” the true believer has wisdom
    given him from above. _Ps. 32:8_—“_I will instruct thee and teach
    thee in the way which thou shalt go_”; _Prov. 3:6_—“_In all thy
    ways acknowledge him, And he will direct thy paths_”; _Phil.
    1:9_—“_And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and
    more in knowledge and all discernment_” (αἰσθήσει = spiritual
    discernment); _James 1:5_—“_if any of you lacketh wisdom, let him
    ask of God, who giveth_ (τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ) _to all liberally and
    upbraideth not_”; _John 15:15_—“_No longer do I call you servants;
    for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called
    you friends_”; _Col. 1:9, 10_—“_that ye may be filled with the
    knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding,
    to walk worthily of the Lord unto all pleasing._”

    God’s Spirit makes Providence as well as the Bible personal to us.
    From every page of nature, as well as of the Bible, the living God
    speaks to us. Tholuck: “The more we recognize in every daily
    occurrence God’s secret inspiration, guiding and controlling us,
    the more will all which to others wears a common and every-day
    aspect prove to us a sign and a wondrous work.” Hutton, Essays:
    “Animals that are blind slaves of impulse, driven about by forces
    from within, have so to say fewer valves in their moral
    constitution for the entrance of divine guidance. But minds alive
    to every word of God give constant opportunity for his
    interference with suggestions that may alter the course of their
    lives. The higher the mind, the more it glides into the region of
    providential control. God turns the good by the slightest breath
    of thought.” So the Christian hymn, “Guide me, O thou great
    Jehovah!” likens God’s leading of the believer to that of Israel
    by the pillar of fire and cloud; and Paul in his dungeon calls
    himself “_the prisoner of Christ Jesus_” (_Eph. 3:1_). Affliction
    is the discipline of God’s providence. Greek proverb: “He who does
    not get thrashed, does not get educated.” On God’s Leadings, see
    A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 560-562.

    Abraham “_went out, not knowing whither he went_” (_Heb. 11:8_).
    Not till he reached Canaan did he know the place of his
    destination. Like a child he placed his hand in the hand of his
    unseen Father, to be led whither he himself knew not. We often
    have guidance without discernment of that guidance. _Is.
    42:16_—“_I will bring the blind by a way that they know not; in
    paths that they know not will I lead them._” So we act more wisely
    than we ourselves understand, and afterwards look back with
    astonishment to see what we have been able to accomplish. Emerson:
    “Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he
    knew.” Disappointments? Ah, you make a mistake in the spelling;
    the D should be an H: His appointments. Melanchthon: “Quem poetæ
    fortunam, nos Deum appellamus.” Chinese proverb: “The good God
    never smites with both hands.” “Tact is a sort of psychical
    automatism” (Ladd). There is a Christian tact which is rarely at
    fault, because its possessor is “_led by the Spirit of God_”
    (_Rom. 8:14_). Yet we must always make allowance, as Oliver
    Cromwell used to say, “for the possibility of being mistaken.”

    When Luther’s friends wrote despairingly of the negotiations at
    the Diet of Worms, he replied from Coburg that he had been looking
    up at the night sky, spangled and studded with stars, and had
    found no pillars to hold them up. And yet they did not fall. God
    needs no props for his stars and planets. He hangs them on
    nothing. So, in the working of God’s providence, the unseen is
    prop enough for the seen. Henry Drummond, Life, 127—“To find out
    God’s will: 1. Pray. 2. Think. 3. Talk to wise people, but do not
    regard their decision as final. 4. Beware of the bias of your own
    will, but do not be too much afraid of it (God never unnecessarily
    thwarts a man’s nature and likings, and it is a mistake to think
    that his will is always in the line of the disagreeable). 5.
    Meantime, do the next thing (for doing God’s will in small things
    is the best preparation for knowing it in great things). 6. When
    decision and action are necessary, go ahead. 7. Never reconsider
    the decision when it is finally acted on; and 8. You will probably
    not find out until afterwards, perhaps long afterwards, that you
    have been led at all.”

    Amiel lamented that everything was left to his own responsibility
    and declared: “It is this thought that disgusts me with the
    government of my own life. To win true peace, a man needs to feel
    himself directed, pardoned and sustained by a supreme Power, to
    feel himself in the right road, at the point where God would have
    him be,—in harmony with God and the universe. This faith gives
    strength and calm. I have not got it. All that is seems to me
    arbitrary and fortuitous.” How much better is Wordsworth’s faith,
    Excursion, book 4:581—“One adequate support For the calamities of
    mortal life Exists, one only: an assured belief That the
    procession of our fate, howe’er Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a
    Being Of infinite benevolence and power, Whose everlasting
    purposes embrace All accidents, converting them to good.” Mrs.
    Browning, De Profundis, stanza xxiii—“I praise thee while my days
    go on; I love thee while my days go on! Through dark and dearth,
    through fire and frost, With emptied arms and treasure lost, I
    thank thee while my days go on!”


4. To the evil acts of free agents.


(_a_) Here we must distinguish between the natural agency and the moral
agency of God, or between acts of permissive providence and acts of
efficient causation. We are ever to remember that God neither works evil,
nor causes his creatures to work evil. All sin is chargeable to the
self-will and perversity of the creature; to declare God the author of it
is the greatest of blasphemies.


    Bp. Wordsworth: “God _foresees_ evil deeds, but never _forces_
    them.” “God does not cause sin, any more than the rider of a
    limping horse causes the limping.” Nor can it be said that Satan
    is the author of man’s sin. Man’s powers are his own. Not Satan,
    but the man himself, gives the wrong application to these powers.
    Not the cause, but the occasion, of sin is in the tempter; the
    cause is in the evil will which yields to his persuasions.


(_b_) But while man makes up his evil decision independently of God, God
does, by his natural agency, order the method in which this inward evil
shall express itself, by limiting it in time, place, and measure, or by
guiding it to the end which his wisdom and love, and not man’s intent, has
set. In all this, however, God only allows sin to develop itself after its
own nature, so that it may be known, abhorred, and if possible overcome
and forsaken.


    Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:272-284—“Judas’s treachery works the
    reconciliation of the world, and Israel’s apostasy the salvation
    of the Gentiles.... God smooths the path of the sinner, and gives
    him chance for the outbreak of the evil, like a wise physician who
    draws to the surface of the body the disease that has been raging
    within, in order that it may be cured, if possible, by mild means,
    or, if not, may be removed by the knife.”

    Christianity rises in spite of, nay, in consequence of opposition,
    like a kite against the wind. When Christ has used the sword with
    which he has girded himself, as he used Cyrus and the Assyrian, he
    breaks it and throws it away. He turns the world upside down that
    he may get it right side up. He makes use of every member of
    society, as the locomotive uses every cog. The sufferings of the
    martyrs add to the number of the church; the worship of relics
    stimulates the Crusades; the worship of the saints leads to
    miracle plays and to the modern drama; the worship of images helps
    modern art; monasticism, scholasticism, the Papacy, even sceptical
    and destructive criticism stir up defenders of the faith.
    Shakespeare, Richard III, 5:1—“Thus doth he force the swords of
    wicked men To turn their own points on their masters’ bosoms”;
    Hamlet, 1:2—“Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o’erwhelm
    them, to men’s eyes”; Macbeth, 1:7—“Even handed justice Commends
    the ingredients of the poisoned chalice To our own lips.”

    The Emperor of Germany went to Paris incognito and returned,
    thinking that no one had known of his absence. But at every step,
    going and coming, he was surrounded by detectives who saw that no
    harm came to him. The swallow drove again and again at the little
    struggling moth, but there was a plate glass window between them
    which neither one of them knew. Charles Darwin put his cheek
    against the plate glass of the cobra’s cage, but could not keep
    himself from starting when the cobra struck. Tacitus, Annales,
    14:5—“Noctem sideribus illustrem, quasi convinsendum ad scelus,
    dii præbuere”—“a night brilliant with stars, as if for the purpose
    of proving the crime, was granted by the gods.” See F. A. Noble,
    Our Redemption, 59-76, on the self-registry and self-disclosure of
    sin, with quotation from Daniel Webster’s speech in the case of
    Knapp at Salem: “It must be confessed. It will be confessed. There
    is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is
    confession.”


(_c_) In cases of persistent iniquity, God’s providence still compels the
sinner to accomplish the design with which he and all things have been
created, namely, the manifestation of God’s holiness. Even though he
struggle against God’s plan, yet he must by his very resistance serve it.
His sin is made its own detector, judge, and tormentor. His character and
doom are made a warning to others. Refusing to glorify God in his
salvation, he is made to glorify God in his destruction.


    _Is. 10:5, 7_—“_Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, the staff in
    whose hand is mine indignation!... Howbeit, he meaneth not so._”
    Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago: “He [Treluddra] is one of those
    base natures, whom fact only lashes into greater fury,—a Pharaoh,
    whose heart the Lord himself can only harden”—here we would add
    the qualification: “consistently with the limits which he has set
    to the operations of his grace.” Pharaoh’s ordering the
    destruction of the Israelitish children (_Ex. 1:16_) was made the
    means of putting Moses under royal protection, of training him for
    his future work, and finally of rescuing the whole nation whose
    sons Pharaoh sought to destroy. So God brings good out of evil;
    see Tyler, Theology of Greek Poets, 28-35. Emerson: “My will
    fulfilled shall be, For in daylight as in dark My thunderbolt has
    eyes to see His way home to the mark.” See also Edwards, Works,
    4:300-312.

    _Col. 2:15_—“_having stripped off from himself the principalities
    and the powers_”—the hosts of evil spirits that swarmed upon him
    in their final onset—“_he made a show of them openly, triumphing
    over them in it_,” _i. e._, in the cross, thus turning their evil
    into a means of good. Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy,
    443,—“Love, seeking for absolute evil, is like an electric light
    engaged in searching for a shadow,—when Love gets there, the
    shadow has disappeared.” But this means, not that all things _are_
    good, but that “_all things work together __ for good_” (_Rom.
    8:28_)—God overruling for good that which in itself is only evil.
    John Wesley: “God buries his workmen, but carries on his work.”
    Sermon on “The Devil’s Mistakes”: Satan thought he could overcome
    Christ in the wilderness, in the garden, on the cross. He
    triumphed when he cast Paul into prison. But the cross was to
    Christ a lifting up, that should draw all men to him (_John
    12:32_), and Paul’s imprisonment furnished his epistles to the New
    Testament.

    “It is one of the wonders of divine love that even our blemishes
    and sins God will take when we truly repent of them and give them
    into his hands, and will in some way make them to be blessings. A
    friend once showed Ruskin a costly handkerchief on which a blot of
    ink had been made. ‘Nothing can be done with that,’ the friend
    said, thinking the handkerchief worthless and ruined now. Ruskin
    carried it away with him, and after a time sent it back to his
    friend. In a most skilful and artistic way, he had made a fine
    design in India ink, using the blot as its basis. Instead of being
    ruined, the handkerchief was made far more beautiful and valuable.
    So God takes the blots and stains upon our lives, the disfiguring
    blemishes, when we commit them to him, and by his marvellous grace
    changes them into marks of beauty. David’s grievous sin was not
    only forgiven, but was made a transforming power in his life.
    Peter’s pitiful fall became a step upward through his Lord’s
    forgiveness and gentle dealing.” So “men may rise on stepping
    stones Of their dead selves to higher things” (Tennyson, In
    Memoriam, I).



Section IV.—Good And Evil Angels.


As ministers of divine providence there is a class of finite beings,
greater in intelligence and power than man in his present state, some of
whom positively serve God’s purpose by holiness and voluntary execution of
his will, some negatively, by giving examples to the universe of defeated
and punished rebellion, and by illustrating God’s distinguishing grace in
man’s salvation.

The scholastic subtleties which encumbered this doctrine in the Middle
Ages, and the exaggerated representations of the power of evil spirits
which then prevailed, have led, by a natural reaction, to an undue
depreciation of it in more recent times.


    For scholastic discussions, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa (ed. Migne),
    1:833-993. The scholastics debated the questions, how many angels
    could stand at once on the point of a needle (relation of angels
    to space); whether an angel could be in two places at the same
    time; how great was the interval between the creation of angels
    and their fall; whether the sin of the first angel caused the sin
    of the rest; whether as many retained their integrity as fell;
    whether our atmosphere is the place of punishment for fallen
    angels; whether guardian-angels have charge of children from
    baptism, from birth, or while the infant is yet in the womb of the
    mother; even the excrements of angels were subjects of discussion,
    for if there was “_angels’ food_” (_Ps. 78:25_), and if angels ate
    (_Gen. 18:8_), it was argued that we must take the logical
    consequences.

    Dante makes the creation of angels simultaneous with that of the
    universe at large. “The fall of the rebel angels he considers to
    have taken place within twenty seconds of their creation, and to
    have originated in the pride which made Lucifer unwilling to await
    the time prefixed by his Maker for enlightening him with perfect
    knowledge”—see Rossetti, Shadow of Dante, 14, 15. Milton, unlike
    Dante, puts the creation of angels ages before the creation of
    man. He tells us that Satan’s first name in heaven is now lost.
    The sublime associations with which Milton surrounds the adversary
    diminish our abhorrence of the evil one. Satan has been called the
    hero of the Paradise Lost. Dante’s representation is much more
    true to Scripture. But we must not go to the extreme of giving
    ludicrous designations to the devil. This indicates and causes
    scepticism as to his existence.

    In mediæval times men’s minds were weighed down by the terror of
    the spirit of evil. It was thought possible to sell one’s soul to
    Satan, and such compacts were written with blood. Goethe
    represents Mephistopheles as saying to Faust: “I to thy service
    here agree to bind me, To run and never rest at call of thee; When
    _over yonder_ thou shalt find me, Then thou shalt do as much for
    me.” The cathedrals cultivated and perpetuated this superstition,
    by the figures of malignant demons which grinned from the
    gargoyles of their roofs and the capitals of their columns, and
    popular preaching exalted Satan to the rank of a rival god—a god
    more feared than was the true and living God. Satan was pictured
    as having horns and hoofs—an image of the sensual and
    bestial—which led Cuvier to remark that the adversary could not
    devour, because horns and hoofs indicated not a carnivorous but a
    ruminant quadruped.

    But there is certainly a possibility that the ascending scale of
    created intelligences does not reach its topmost point in man. As
    the distance between man and the lowest forms of life is filled in
    with numberless gradations of being, so it is possible that
    between man and God there exist creatures of higher than human
    intelligence. This possibility is turned to certainty by the
    express declarations of Scripture. The doctrine is interwoven with
    the later as well as with the earlier books of revelation.

    Quenstedt (Theol., 1:629) regards the existence of angels as
    antecedently probable, because there are no gaps in creation;
    nature does not proceed _per saltum_. As we have (1) beings purely
    corporeal, as stones; (2) beings partly corporeal and partly
    spiritual, as men: so we should expect in creation (3) beings
    wholly spiritual, as angels. Godet, in his Biblical Studies of the
    O. T., 1-29, suggests another series of gradations. As we have (1)
    vegetables—species without individuality; (2)
    animals—individuality in bondage to species; and (3) men—species
    overpowered by individuality: so we may expect (4)
    angels—individuality without species.

    If souls live after death, there is certainly a class of
    disembodied spirits. It is not impossible that God may have
    _created_ spirits without bodies. E. G. Robinson, Christian
    Theology, 110—“The existence of lesser deities in all heathen
    mythologies, and the disposition of man everywhere to believe in
    beings superior to himself and inferior to the supreme God, is a
    presumptive argument in favor of their existence.” Locke: “That
    there should be more species of intelligent creatures above us
    than there are of sensible and material below us, is probable to
    me from hence, that in all the visible and corporeal world we see
    no chasms and gaps.” Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 193—“A
    man may certainly believe in the existence of angels upon the
    testimony of one who claims to have come from the heavenly world,
    if he can believe in the Ornithorhyncus upon the testimony of
    travelers.” Tennyson, Two Voices: “This truth within thy mind
    rehearse, That in a boundless universe Is boundless better,
    boundless worse. Think you this world of hopes and fears Could
    find no statelier than his peers In yonder hundred million
    spheres?”

    The doctrine of angels affords a barrier against the false
    conception of this world as including the whole spiritual
    universe. Earth is only part of a larger organism. As Christianity
    has united Jew and Gentile, so hereafter will it blend our own and
    other orders of creation: _Col. 2:10_—“_who is the head of all
    principality and power_”—Christ is the head of angels as well as
    of men; _Eph. 1:10_—“_to sum up all things in Christ, the things
    in the heavens, and the things upon the earth._” On Christ and
    Angels, see Robertson Smith in The Expositor, second series, vols.
    1, 2, 3. On the general subject of angels, see also Whately, Good
    and Evil Angels; Twesten, transl. in Bib. Sac., 1:768, and 2:108;
    Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:282-337, and 3:251-354; Birks,
    Difficulties of Belief, 78 sq.; Scott, Existence of Evil Spirits;
    Herzog, Encyclopädie, arts.: Engel, Teufel; Jewett,
    Diabolology,—the Person and Kingdom of Satan; Alexander, Demonic
    Possession.


I. Scripture Statements and Imitations.


1. As to the nature and attributes of angels.


(_a_) They are created beings.


    _Ps. 148:2-5_—“_Praise ye him, all his angels.... For he
    commanded, and they were created_”; _Col. 1:16_—“_for in him were
    all things created ... whether thrones or dominions or
    principalities or powers_”; _cf._ _1 Pet. 3:32_—“_angels and
    authorities and powers._” God alone is uncreated and eternal. This
    is implied in _1 Tim. 6:16_—“_who only hath immortality._”


(_b_) They are incorporeal beings.


    In _Heb. 1:14_, where a single word is used to designate angels,
    they are described as “_spirits_”—“_are they not all ministering
    spirits?_” Men, with their twofold nature, material as well as
    immaterial, could not well be designated as “_spirits_.” That
    their being characteristically “_spirits_” forbids us to regard
    angels as having a bodily organism, seems implied in _Eph.
    6:12_—“_for our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but
    against ... the spiritual hosts_ [or “_things_”] _of wickedness in
    the heavenly places_”; cf. _Eph. 1:3_; _2:6_. In _Gen. 6:2_,
    “_sons of God_” =, not angels, but descendants of Seth and
    worshipers of the true God (see Murphy, Com., _in loco_). In _Ps.
    78:25_ (A. V.), “_angels’ food_” = manna coming from heaven where
    angels dwell; better, however, read with Rev. Vers.: “_bread of
    the mighty_”—probably meaning angels, though the word “_mighty_”
    is nowhere else applied to them; possibly = “bread of princes or
    nobles,” _i. e._, the finest, most delicate bread. _Mat
    22:30_—“_neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as
    angels in heaven_”—and _Luke 20:36_—“_neither can they die any
    more: for they are equal unto the angels_”—imply only that angels
    are without distinctions of sex. Saints are to be like angels, not
    as being incorporeal, but as not having the same sexual relations
    which they have here.

    There are no “souls of angels,” as there are “_souls of men_”
    (_Rev. 18:13_), and we may infer that angels have no bodies for
    souls to inhabit; see under Essential Elements of Human Nature.
    Nevius, Demon-Possession, 258, attributes to evil spirits an
    instinct or longing for a body to possess, even though it be the
    body of an inferior animal: “So in Scripture we have spirits
    represented as wandering about to seek rest in bodies, and asking
    permission to enter into swine” (_Mat. 12:43; 8:31_). Angels
    therefore, since they have no bodies, know nothing of growth, age,
    or death. Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 133—“It is precisely
    because the angels are only spirits, but not souls, that they
    cannot possess the same rich existence as man, whose soul is the
    point of union in which spirit and nature meet.”


(_c_) They are personal—that is, intelligent and voluntary—agents.


    _2 Sam. 14:20_—“_wise, according to the wisdom of an angel of
    God_”; _Luke 4:34_—“_I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of
    God_”; _2 Tim. 2:26_—“_snare of the devil ... taken captive by him
    unto his will_”; _Rev. 22:9_—“_See thou do it not_” = exercise of
    will; _Rev. 12:12_—“_The devil is gone down unto you, having great
    wrath_” = set purpose of evil.


(_d_) They are possessed of superhuman intelligence and power, yet an
intelligence and power that has its fixed limits.


    _Mat. 24:36_—“_of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even the
    angels of heaven_” = their knowledge, though superhuman, is yet
    finite. _1 Pet. 1:12_—“_which things angels desire to look into_”;
    _Ps. 103:20_—“_angels ... mighty in strength_”; _2 Thess.
    1:7_—“_the angels of his power_”; _2 Pet. 2:11_—“_angels, though
    greater_ [than men] _in might and power_”; _Rev. 20:2, 10_—“_laid
    hold on the dragon ... and bound him ... cast into the lake of
    fire._” Compare _Ps. 72:18_—“_God ... Who only doeth wondrous
    things_” = only God can perform miracles. Angels are imperfect
    compared with God (_Job 4:18; 15:15; 25:5_).

    Power, rather than beauty or intelligence, is their striking
    characteristic. They are “_principalities and powers_” (_Col.
    1:16_). They terrify those who behold them (_Mat. 28:4_). The
    rolling away of the stone from the sepulchre took strength. A
    wheel of granite, eight feet in diameter and one foot thick,
    rolling in a groove, would weigh more than four tons. Mason, Faith
    of the Gospel, 86—“The spiritual might and burning indignation in
    the face of Stephen reminded the guilty Sanhedrin of an angelic
    vision.” Even in their tenderest ministrations they strengthen
    (_Luke 22:43_; _cf._ _Dan. 10:19_). In _1 Tim. 6:15_—“_King of
    kings and Lord of lords_”—the words “_kings_” and “_lords_”
    (βασιλευόντων and κυριευόντων) may refer to angels. In the case of
    evil spirits especially, power seems the chief thing in mind, _e.
    g._, “_the prince of this world_,” “_the strong man armed_,” “_the
    power of darkness_,” “_rulers of the darkness of this world_,”
    “_the great dragon,_” “_all the power of the enemy_,” “_all these
    things will I give thee_,” “_deliver us from the evil one_.”


(_e_) They are an order of intelligences distinct from man and older than
man.


    Angels are distinct from man. _1 Cor. 6:3_—“_we shall judge
    angels_”; _Heb. 1:14_—“_Are they not all ministering spirits, sent
    forth to do service for the sake of them that shall inherit
    salvation?_” They are not glorified human spirits; see _Heb.
    2:16_—“_for verily not to angels doth he give help, but he giveth
    help to __ the seed of Abraham_”; also _12:22, 23_, where “_the
    innumerable hosts of angels_” are distinguished from “_the church
    of the firstborn_” and “_the spirits of just men made perfect_.”
    In _Rev. 22:9_—“_I am a fellow-servant with
    thee_”—“_fellow-servant_” intimates likeness to men, not in
    nature, but in service and subordination to God, the proper object
    of worship. Sunday School Times, Mch. 15, 1902:146—“Angels are
    spoken of as greater in power and might than man, but that could
    be said of many a lower animal, or even of whirlwind and fire.
    Angels are never spoken of as a superior order of spiritual
    beings. We are to ‘_judge angels_’ (_1 Cor. 6:3_), and inferiors
    are not to judge superiors.”

    Angels are an order of intelligences older than man. The Fathers
    made the creation of angels simultaneous with the original calling
    into being of the elements, perhaps basing their opinion on the
    apocryphal Ecclesiasticus, 18:1—“he that liveth eternally created
    all things together.” In _Job 38:7_, the Hebrews parallelism makes
    “_morning stars_”—“_sons of God,_” so that angels are spoken of as
    present at certain stages of God’s creative work. The mention of
    “_the serpent_” in _Gen. 3:1_ implies the fall of Satan before the
    fall of man. We may infer that the creation of angels took place
    before the creation of man—the lower before the higher. In _Gen.
    2:1_, “_all the host of them,_” which God had created, may be
    intended to include angels. Man was the crowning work of creation,
    created after angels were created. Mason, Faith of the Gospel,
    81—“Angels were perhaps created before the material heavens and
    earth—a spiritual substratum in which the material things were
    planted, a preparatory creation to receive what was to follow. In
    the vision of Jacob they ascend first and descend after; their
    natural place is in the world below.”


The constant representation of angels as personal beings in Scripture
cannot be explained as a personification of abstract good and evil, in
accommodation to Jewish superstitions, without wresting many narrative
passages from their obvious sense; implying on the part of Christ either
dissimulation or ignorance as to an important point of doctrine; and
surrendering belief in the inspiration of the Old Testament from which
these Jewish views of angelic beings were derived.


    Jesus accommodated himself to the popular belief in respect at
    least to “_Abraham’s bosom_” (_Luke 16:22_), and he confessed
    ignorance with regard to the time of the end (_Mark 13:32_); see
    Rush Rhees, Life of Jesus of Nazareth, 245-248. But in the former
    case his hearers probably understood him to speak figuratively and
    rhetorically, while in the latter case there was no teaching of
    the false but only limitation of knowledge with regard to the
    true. Our Lord did not hesitate to contradict Pharisaic belief in
    the efficacy of ceremonies, and Sadducean denial of resurrection
    and future life. The doctrine of angels had even stronger hold
    upon the popular mind than had these errors of the Pharisees and
    Sadducees. That Jesus did not correct or deny the general belief,
    but rather himself expressed and confirmed it, implies that the
    belief was rational and Scriptural. For one of the best statements
    of the argument for the existence of evil spirits, see Broadus,
    Com. on _Mat. 8:28_.

    _Eph. 3:10_—“_to the intent that now unto the principalities and
    the powers in the heavenly places might be made known through the
    church the manifold wisdom of God_”—excludes the hypothesis that
    angels are simply abstract conceptions of good or evil. We speak
    of “moon-struck” people (lunatics), only when we know that nobody
    supposes us to believe in the power of the moon to cause madness.
    But Christ’s contemporaries _did_ suppose him to believe in
    angelic spirits, good and evil. If this belief was an error, it
    was by no means a harmless one, and the benevolence as well as the
    veracity of Christ would have led him to correct it. So too, if
    Paul had known that there were no such beings as angels, he could
    not honestly have contented himself with forbidding the Colossians
    to worship them (_Col 2:18_) but would have denied their
    existence, as he denied the existence of heathen gods (_1 Cor.
    8:4_).

    Theodore Parker said it was very evident that Jesus Christ
    believed in a personal devil. Harnack, Wesen des Christenthums,
    35—“There can be no doubt that Jesus shared with his
    contemporaries the representation of two kingdoms, the kingdom of
    God and the kingdom of the devil.” Wendt, Teaching of Jesus,
    1:164—Jesus “makes it appear as if Satan was the immediate
    tempter. I am far from thinking that he does so in a merely
    figurative way. Beyond all doubt Jesus accepted the contemporary
    ideas as to the real existence of Satan, and accordingly, in the
    particular cases of disease referred to, he supposes a real
    Satanic temptation.” Maurice, Theological Essays, 32, 34—“The
    acknowledgment of an evil spirit is characteristic of
    Christianity.” H. B. Smith, System, 261—“It would appear that the
    power of Satan in the world reached its culminating point at the
    time of Christ, and has been less ever since.”


The same remark applies to the view which regards Satan as but a
collective term for all evil beings, human or superhuman. The Scripture
representations of the progressive rage of the great adversary, from his
first assault on human virtue in Genesis to his final overthrow in
Revelation, join with the testimony of Christ just mentioned, to forbid
any other conclusion than this, that there is a personal being of great
power, who carries on organized opposition to the divine government.


    Crane, The Religion of To-morrow, 299 sq.—“We well say ‘personal
    devil,’ for there is no devil but personality.” We cannot deny the
    personality of Satan except upon principles which would compel us
    to deny the existence of good angels, the personality of the Holy
    Spirit, and the personality of God the Father,—we may add, even
    the personality of the human soul. Says Nigel Penruddock in Lord
    Beaconsfield’s “Endymion”: “Give me a single argument against his
    [Satan’s] personality, which is not applicable to the personality
    of the Deity.” One of the most ingenious devices of Satan is that
    of persuading men that he has no existence. Next to this is the
    device of substituting for belief in a personal devil the belief
    in a merely impersonal spirit of evil. Such a substitution we find
    in Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:311—“The idea of the
    devil was a welcome expedient for the need of advanced religious
    reflection, to put God out of relation to the evil and badness of
    the world.” Pfleiderer tells us that the early optimism of the
    Hebrews, like that of the Greeks, gave place in later times to
    pessimism and despair. But the Hebrews still had hope of
    deliverance by the Messiah and an apocalyptic reign of good.

    For the view that Satan is merely a collective term for all evil
    beings, see Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 131-137.
    Bushnell, holding moral evil to be a necessary “condition
    privative” of all finite beings as such, believes that “good
    angels have all been passed through and helped up out of a fall,
    as the redeemed of mankind will be.” “_Elect angels_” (_1 Tim.
    5:21_) then would mean those saved _after_ falling, not those
    saved _from_ falling; and “_Satan_” would be, not the name of a
    particular person, but the all or total of all bad minds and
    powers. _Per contra_, see Smith’s Bible Dictionary, arts.: Angels,
    Demons, Demoniacs, Satan; Trench, Studies in the Gospels, 16-26.
    For a comparison of Satan in the Book of Job, with Milton’s Satan
    in “Paradise Lost,” and Goethe’s Mephistopheles in “Faust,” see
    Masson, The Three Devils. We may add to this list Dante’s Satan
    (or Dis) in the “Divine Comedy,” Byron’s Lucifer in “Cain,” and
    Mrs. Browning’s Lucifer in her “Drama of Exile”; see Gregory,
    Christian Ethics, 219.


2. As to their number and organization.


(_a_) They are of great multitude.


    _Deut. 33:2_—“_Jehovah ... came from the ten thousands of holy
    ones_”; _Ps. 68:17_—“_The chariots of God are twenty thousand,
    even thousands upon thousands_”; _Dan. 7:10_—“_thousands of
    thousands ministered unto him, and ten thousand times ten thousand
    stood before him_”; _Rev. 5:11_—“_I heard a voice of many angels
    ... and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand,
    and thousands of thousands._” Anselm thought that the number of
    lost angels was filled up by the number of elect men. Savage, Life
    after Death, 61—The Pharisees held very exaggerated notions of the
    number of angelic spirits. They “said that a man, if he threw a
    stone over his shoulder or cast away a broken piece of pottery,
    asked pardon of any spirit that he might possibly have hit in so
    doing.” So in W. H. H. Murray’s time it was said to be dangerous
    in the Adirondack to fire a gun,—you might hit a man.


(_b_) They constitute a company, as distinguished from a race.


    _Mat. 22:30_—“_they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but
    are as angels in heaven_”; _Luke 20:36_—“_neither can they die any
    more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are sons of God._”
    We are called “_sons of men_,” but angels are never called “_sons
    of angels_,” but only “_sons of God_.” They are not developed from
    one original stock, and no such common nature binds them together
    as binds together the race of man. They have no common character
    and history. Each was created separately, and each apostate angel
    fell by himself. Humanity fell all at once in its first father.
    Cut down a tree, and you cut down its branches. But angels were so
    many separate trees. Some lapsed into sin, but some remained holy.
    See Godet, Bib. Studies O. T., 1-29. This may be one reason why
    salvation was provided for fallen man, but not for fallen angels.
    Christ could join himself to humanity by taking the common nature
    of all. There was no common nature of angels which he could take.
    See _Heb. 2:16_—“_not to angels doth he give help._” The angels
    are “_sons of God_,” as having no earthly parentage and no
    parentage at all except the divine. _Eph. 3:14, 15_—“_the Father,
    of whom every fatherhood in heaven and on earth is named,_”—not
    “_every family_,” as in R. V., for there are no families among the
    angels. The marginal rendering “_fatherhood_” is better than
    “_family_,”—all the πατριαί are named from the πατήρ. Dodge,
    Christian Theology, 172—“The bond between angels is simply a
    mental and moral one. They can gain nothing by inheritance,
    nothing through domestic and family life, nothing through a
    society held together by a bond of blood.... Belonging to two
    worlds and not simply to one, the human soul has in it the springs
    of a deeper and wider experience than angels can have.... God
    comes nearer to man than to his angels.” Newman Smyth, Through
    Science to Faith, 191—“In the resurrection life of man, the
    species has died; man the individual lives on. Sex shall be no
    more needed for the sake of life; they shall no more marry, but
    men and women, the children of marriage, shall be as the angels.
    Through the death of the human species shall be gained, as the
    consummation of all, the immortality of the individuals.”


(_c_) They are of various ranks and endowments.


    _Col. 1:16_—“_thrones or dominions or principalities or powers_”;
    _1 Thess. 4:16_—“_the voice of the archangel_”; _Jude 9_—“_Michael
    the archangel._” Michael (= who is like God?) is the only one
    expressly called an archangel in Scripture, although Gabriel (=
    God’s hero) has been called an archangel by Milton. In Scripture,
    Michael seems the messenger of law and judgment; Gabriel, the
    messenger of mercy and promise. The fact that Scripture has but
    one archangel is proof that its doctrine of angels was not, as has
    sometimes been charged, derived from Babylonian and Persian
    sources; for there we find seven archangels instead of one. There,
    moreover, we find the evil spirit enthroned as a god, while in
    Scripture he is represented as a trembling slave.

    Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:51—“The devout and trustful
    consciousness of the immediate nearness of God, which is expressed
    in so many beautiful utterances of the Psalmist, appears to be
    supplanted in later Judaism by a belief in angels, which is
    closely analogous to the superstitious belief in the saints on the
    part of the Romish church. It is very significant that the Jews in
    the time of Jesus could no longer conceive of the promulgation of
    the law on Sinai, which was to them the foundation of their whole
    religion, as an immediate revelation of Jehovah to Moses, except
    as instituted through the mediation of angels (_Acts 7:38, 53_;
    _Gal. 3:19_; _Heb. 2:2_; Josephus, Ant. 15:5, 3).”


(_d_) They have an organization.


    _1 Sam. 1:11_—“_Jehovah of hosts_”; _1 K. 22:19_—“_Jehovah sitting
    on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing by him on his
    right hand and on his left_”; _Mat. 26:53_—“_twelve legions of
    angels_”—suggests the organization of the Roman army;
    _25:41_—“_the devil and his angels_”; _Eph. 2:2_—“_the prince of
    the powers in the air_”; _Rev. 2:13_—“_Satan’s throne_” (not
    “_seat_”); _16:10_—“_throne of the beast_”—“a hellish parody of
    the heavenly kingdom” (Trench). The phrase “_host of heaven_,” in
    _Deut. 4:19_; _17:3_; _Acts 7:42_, probably = the stars; but in
    _Gen. 32:2_, “_God’s host_” = angels, for when Jacob saw the
    angels he said “_this is God’s host_.” In general the phrases
    “_God of hosts_”, “_Lord of hosts_” seem to mean “God of angels”,
    “Lord of angels”: compare _2 Chron. 18:18_; _Luke 2:13_; _Rev.
    19:14_—“_the armies which are in heaven._” Yet in _Neh. 9:6_ and
    _Ps. 33:6_ the word “_host_” seems to include both angels and
    stars.

    Satan is “the ape of God.” He has a throne. He is “_the prince of
    the world_” (_John 14:30; 16:11_), “_the prince of the powers of
    the air_” (_Eph. 2:2_). There is a cosmos and order of evil, as
    well as a cosmos and order of good, though Christ is stronger than
    the strong man armed (_Luke 11:21_) and rules even over Satan. On
    Satan in the Old Testament, see art. by T. W. Chambers, in Presb.
    and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:22-34. The first mention of Satan is in
    the account of the Fall in _Gen. 3:1-15_; the second in _Lev.
    16:8_, where one of the two goats on the day of atonement is said
    to be “_for Azazel_,” or Satan; the third where Satan moved David
    to number Israel (_1 Chron. 21:1_); the fourth in the book of _Job
    1:6-12_; the fifth in _Zech. 3:1-3_, where Satan stands as the
    adversary of Joshua the high priest, but Jehovah addresses Satan
    and rebukes him. Cheyne, Com. on Isaiah, vol. 1, p. 11, thinks
    that the stars were first called the hosts of God, with the notion
    that they were animated creatures. In later times the belief in
    angels threw into the background the belief in the stars as
    animated beings; the angels however were connected very closely
    with the stars. Marlowe, in his Tamburlaine, says: “The moon, the
    planets, and the meteors light, These angels in their crystal
    armor fight A doubtful battle.”


With regard to the “cherubim” of Genesis, Exodus, and Ezekiel,—with which
the “seraphim” of Isaiah and the “living creatures” of the book of
Revelation are to be identified,—the most probable interpretation is that
which regards them, not as actual beings of higher rank than man, but as
symbolic appearances, intended to represent redeemed humanity, endowed
with all the creature perfections lost by the Fall, and made to be the
dwelling-place of God.


    Some have held that the cherubim are symbols of the divine
    attributes, or of God’s government over nature; see Smith’s Bib.
    Dict., art.: Cherub; Alford, Com. on _Rev. 4:6-8_, and Hulsean
    Lectures, 1841: vol. 1, Lect. 2; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:278. But
    whatever of truth belongs to this view may be included in the
    doctrine stated above. The cherubim are indeed symbols of nature
    pervaded by the divine energy and subordinated to the divine
    purposes, but they are symbols of nature only because they are
    symbols of man in his twofold capacity of _image of God_ and
    _priest of nature_. Man, as having a body, is a part of nature; as
    having a soul, he emerges from nature and gives to nature a voice.
    Through man, nature, otherwise blind and dead, is able to
    appreciate and to express the Creator’s glory.

    The doctrine of the cherubim embraces the following points: 1. The
    cherubim are not personal beings, but are artificial, temporary,
    symbolic figures. 2. While they are not themselves personal
    existences, they are symbols of personal existence—symbols not of
    divine or angelic perfections but of human nature (_Ex.
    1:5_—“_they had the likeness of a man_”; _Rev. 5:9_—A. V.—“_thou
    hast redeemed us to God by thy blood_”—so read א, B, and
    Tregelles; the Eng. and Am. Rev. Vers., however, follow A and
    Tischendorf, and omit the word “_us_”). 3. They are emblems of
    human nature, not in its present stage of development, but
    possessed of all its original perfections; for this reason the
    most perfect animal forms—the kinglike courage of the lion, the
    patient service of the ox, the soaring insight of the eagle—are
    combined with that of man (_Ez. 1_ and _10_; _Rev. 4:6-8_). 4.
    These cherubic forms represent, not merely material or earthly
    perfections, but human nature spiritualized and sanctified. They
    are “_living creatures_” and their life is a holy life of
    obedience to the divine will (_Ez. 1:12_—“_whither the spirit was
    to go, they went_”). 5. They symbolize a human nature exalted to
    be the dwelling-place of God. Hence the inner curtains of the
    tabernacle were inwoven with cherubic figures, and God’s glory was
    manifested on the mercy-seat between the cherubim (_Ex. 37:6-9_).
    While the flaming sword at the gates of Eden was the symbol of
    justice, the cherubim were symbols of mercy—keeping the “_way of
    the tree of life_” for man, until by sacrifice and renewal
    Paradise should be regained (_Gen. 3:24_).

    In corroboration of this general view, note that angels and
    cherubim never go together; and that in the closing visions of the
    book of Revelation these symbolic forms are seen no longer. When
    redeemed humanity has entered heaven, the figures which typified
    that humanity, having served their purpose, finally disappear. For
    fuller elaboration, see A. H. Strong, The Nature and Purpose of
    the Cherubim, in Philosophy and Religion, 391-399; Fairbairn,
    Typology, 1:185-208; Elliott, Horæ Apocalypticæ, 1:87; Bib. Sac.,
    1876:32-51; Bib. Com., 1:49-52—“The winged lions, eagles, and
    bulls, that guard the entrances of the palace of Nineveh, are
    worshipers rather than divinities.” It has lately been shown that
    the winged bull of Assyria was called “Kerub” almost as far back
    as the time of Moses. The word appears in its Hebrew form 500
    years before the Jews had any contact with the Persian dominion.
    The Jews did not derive it from any Aryan race. It belonged to
    their own language.

    The variable form of the cherubim seems to prove that they are
    symbolic appearances rather than real beings. A parallel may be
    found in classical literature. In Horace, Carmina, 3:11, 15,
    Cerberus has three heads; in 2:13, 34, he has a hundred. Bréal,
    Semantics suggests that the three heads may be dog-heads, while
    the hundred heads may be snake-heads. But Cerberus is also
    represented in Greece as having only one head. Cerberus must
    therefore be a symbol rather than an actually existing creature.
    H. W. Congdon of Wyoming, N. Y., held, however, that the cherubim
    are symbols of God’s life in the universe as a whole. _Ez.
    28:14-19_—“_the anointed cherub that covereth_”—the power of the
    King of Tyre was so all-pervading throughout his dominion, his
    sovereignty so absolute, and his decrees so instantly obeyed, that
    his rule resembled the divine government over the world. Mr.
    Congdon regarded the cherubim as a proof of monism. See
    Margoliouth, The Lord’s Prayer, 159-180. On animal characteristics
    in man, see Hopkins, Scriptural Idea of Man, 105.


3. As to their moral character.


(_a_) They were all created holy.


    _Gen. 1:31_—“_God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it
    was very good_”; _Jude 6_—“_angels that kept not their own
    beginning_”—ἀρχήν seems here to mean their beginning in holy
    character, rather than their original lordship and dominion.


(_b_) They had a probation.


    This we infer from _1 Tim. 5:21_—“_the elect angels_”; _cf._ _1
    Pet. 1:1, 2_—“_elect ... unto obedience._” If certain angels, like
    certain men, are “_elect ... unto obedience_,” it would seem to
    follow that there was a period of probation, during which their
    obedience or disobedience determined their future destiny; see
    Ellicott on _1 Tim. 5:21_. Mason, Faith of the Gospel,
    106-108—“_Gen. 3:14_—‘_Because thou hast done this, cursed art
    thou_’—in the sentence on the serpent, seems to imply that Satan’s
    day of grace was ended when he seduced man. Thenceforth he was
    driven to live on dust, to triumph only in sin, to pick up a
    living out of man, to possess man’s body or soul, to tempt from
    the good.”


(_c_) Some preserved their integrity.


    _Ps. 89:7_—“_the council of the holy ones_”—a designation of
    angels; _Mark 8:38_—“_the holy angels._” Shakespeare, Macbeth,
    4:3—“Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.”


(_d_) Some fell from their state of innocence.


    _John 8:44_—“_He was a murderer from the beginning, and standeth
    not in the truth, because there is no truth in him_”; _2 Pet.
    2:4_—“_angels when they sinned_”; _Jude 6_—“_angels who kept not
    their own beginning, but left their proper habitation._”
    Shakespeare, Henry VIII, 3:2—“Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away
    ambition; By that sin fell the angels; how can man then, The image
    of his Maker, hope to win by it?... How wretched Is that poor man
    that hangs on princes’ favors!... When he falls, he falls like
    Lucifer, Never to hope again.”


(_e_) The good are confirmed in good.


    _Mat. 6:10_—“_Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth_”;
    _18:10_—“_in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my
    Father who is in heaven_”; _2 Cor. 11:14_—“_an angel of light._”


(_f_) The evil are confirmed in evil.


    _Mat. 13:19_—“_the evil one_”; _1 John 5:18, 19_—“_the evil one
    toucheth him not ... the whole world lieth in the evil one_”;
    _cf._ _John 8:44_—“_Ye are of your father the devil ... When he
    speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the
    father thereof_”; _Mat. 6:13_—“_deliver us from the evil one._”

    From these Scriptural statements we infer that all free creatures
    pass through a period of probation; that probation does not
    necessarily involve a fall; that there is possible a sinless
    development of moral beings. Other Scriptures seem to intimate
    that the revelation of God in Christ is an object of interest and
    wonder to other orders of intelligence than our own; that they are
    drawn in Christ more closely to God and to us; in short, that they
    are confirmed in their integrity by the cross. See _1 Pet.
    1:12_—“_which things angels desire to look into_”; _Eph.
    3:10_—“_that now unto the principalities and the powers in the
    heavenly places might be made known through the church the
    manifold wisdom of God_”; _Col. 1:20_—“_through him to reconcile
    all things unto himself ... whether things upon the earth, or
    things in the heavens_”; _Eph. 1:10_—“_to sum up all things in
    Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the
    earth_”—“the unification of the whole universe in Christ as the
    divine centre.... The great system is a harp all whose strings are
    in tune but one, and that one jarring string makes discord
    throughout the whole. The whole universe shall feel the influence,
    and shall be reduced to harmony, when that one string, the world
    in which we live, shall be put in tune by the hand of love and
    mercy”—freely quoted from Leitch, God’s Glory in the Heavens,
    327-330.

    It is not impossible that God is using this earth as a
    breeding-ground from which to populate the universe. Mark Hopkins,
    Life, 317—“While there shall be gathered at last and preserved, as
    Paul says, a holy church, and every man shall be perfect and the
    church shall be spotless.... there will be other forms of
    perfection in other departments of the universe. And when the
    great day of restitution shall come and God shall vindicate his
    government, there may be seen to be coming in from other
    departments of the universe a long procession of angelic forms,
    great white legions from Sirius, from Arcturus and the chambers of
    the South, gathering around the throne of God and that centre
    around which the universe revolves.”


4. As to their employments.


A. The employments of good angels.


(_a_) They stand in the presence of God and worship him.


    _Ps. 29:1, 2_—“_Ascribe unto Jehovah, O ye sons of the mighty,
    Ascribe unto Jehovah glory and strength. Ascribe unto Jehovah the
    glory due unto his name. Worship Jehovah in holy array_”—Perowne:
    “Heaven being thought of as one great temple, and all the
    worshipers therein as clothed in priestly vestments.” _Ps.
    89:7_—“_a God very terrible in the council of the holy ones,_” _i.
    e._, angels—Perowne: “Angels are called an assembly or
    congregation, as the church above, which like the church below
    worships and praises God.” _Mat. 18:10_—“_in heaven their angels
    do always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven._” In
    apparent allusion to this text, Dante represents the saints as
    dwelling in the presence of God yet at the same time rendering
    humble service to their fellow men here upon the earth. Just in
    proportion to their nearness to God and the light they receive
    from him, is the influence they are able to exert over others.


(_b_) They rejoice in God’s works.


    _Job 38:7_—“_all the sons of God shouted for joy_”; _Luke
    15:10_—“_there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over
    one sinner that repenteth_”; _cf._ _2 Tim. 2:25_—“_if peradventure
    God may give them repentance._” Dante represents the angels that
    are nearest to God, the infinite source of life, as ever advancing
    toward the spring-time of youth, so that the oldest angels are the
    youngest.


(_c_) They execute God’s will,—by working in nature;


    _Ps. 103:20_—“_Ye his angels ... that fulfil his word, Hearkening
    unto the voice of his word_”; _104:4_ marg.—“_Who maketh his
    angels winds_; _His ministers a flaming fire_,” _i. e._,
    lightnings. See Alford on _Heb. 1:7_—“The order of the Hebrew
    words here [in _Ps. 104:4_] is not the same as in the former
    verses (see especially _v. 3_), where we have: ‘_Who maketh the
    clouds his chariot_.’ For this transposition, those who insist
    that the passage means ‘he maketh winds his messengers’ can give
    no reason.”

    Farrar on _Heb. 1:7_—“_He maketh his angels winds_”; “The Rabbis
    often refer to the fact that God makes his angels assume any form
    he pleases, whether man (_Gen. 18:2_) or woman (_Zech 5:9_—‘_two
    women, and the wind was in their wings_’), or wind or flame (_Ex.
    3:2_—‘_angel ... in a flame of fire_’; _2 K. 6:17_). But that
    untenable and fleeting form of existence which is the glory of the
    angels would be an inferiority in the Son. He could not be
    clothed, as they are at God’s will, in the fleeting robes of
    material phenomena.” John Henry Newman, in his Apologia, sees an
    angel in every flower. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 82—“Origen
    thought not a blade of grass nor a fly was without its angel.
    _Rev. 14:18_—an angel ‘_that hath power over fire_’; _John
    5:4_—intermittent spring under charge of an angel; _Mat.
    28:2_—descent of an angel caused earthquake on the morning of
    Christ’s resurrection; _Luke 13:11_—control of diseases is
    ascribed to angels.”


(_d_) by guiding the affairs of nations;


    _Dan. 10:12, 13, 21_—“_I come for thy words’ sake. But the prince
    of the kingdom of Persia withstood me ... Michael, one of the
    chief princes, came to help me ... Michael your prince_”;
    _11:1_—“_And as for me, in the first year of Darius the Mede, I
    stood up to confirm and strengthen him_”; _12:1_—“_at that time
    shall Michael stand up, the great prince who standeth for the
    children of thy people._” Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 87, suggests
    the question whether “the spirit of the age” or “the national
    character” in any particular case may not be due to the unseen
    “principalities” under which men live. Paul certainly recognizes,
    in _Eph. 2:2_, “_the prince of the powers of the air, ... the
    spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience._” May not
    good angels be entrusted with influence over nations’ affairs to
    counteract the evil and help the good?


(_e_) by watching over the interests of particular churches;


    _1 Cor. 11:10_—“_for this cause ought the women to have a sign of
    authority_ [_i. e._, a veil] _on her head, because of the
    angels_”—who watch over the church and have care for its order.
    Matheson, Spiritual Development of St. Paul, 242—“Man’s covering
    is woman’s power. Ministration _is_ her power and it allies her
    with a greater than man—the angel. Christianity is a feminine
    strength. Judaism had made woman only a means to an end—the
    multiplication of the race. So it had degraded her. Paul will
    restore woman to her original and equal dignity.” _Col.
    2:18_—“_Let no man rob you of your prize by a voluntary humility
    and worshiping of the angels_”—a false worship which would be very
    natural if angels were present to guard the meetings of the
    saints. _1 Tim. 5:21_—“_I charge thee in the sight of God, and
    Christ Jesus, and the elect angels, that thou observe these
    things_”—the public duties of the Christian minister.

    Alford regards “_the angels of the seven churches_” (_Rev. 1:20_)
    as superhuman beings appointed to represent and guard the
    churches, and that upon the grounds: (1) that the word is used
    elsewhere in the book of Revelation only in this sense; and (2)
    that nothing in the book is addressed to a teacher individually,
    but all to some one who reflects the complexion and fortunes of
    the church as no human person could. We prefer, however, to regard
    “_the angels of the seven churches_” as meaning simply the pastors
    of the seven churches. The word “_angel_” means simply
    “messenger,” and may be used of human as well as of superhuman
    beings—see _Hag. 1:13_—“_Haggai, Jehovah’s messenger_”—literally,
    “_the angel of Jehovah_.” The use of the word in this figurative
    sense would not be incongruous with the mystical character of the
    book of Revelation (see Bib. Sac. 12:339). John Lightfoot, Heb.
    and Talmud. Exerc., 2:90, says that “angel” was a term designating
    officer or elder of a synagogue. See also Bp. Lightfoot, Com. on
    Philippians, 187, 188; Jacobs, Eccl. Polity, 100 and note. In the
    Irvingite church, accordingly, “angels” constitute an official
    class.


(_f_) by assisting and protecting individual believers;


    _1 K. 19:5_—“_an angel touched him_ [Elijah], _and said unto him,
    Arise and eat_”; _Ps. 91:11_—“_he will give his angels charge over
    thee, To keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in
    their hands, Lest thou dash thy foot against a stone_”; _Dan.
    6:22_—“_My God hath sent his angel, and hath shut the lions’
    mouths, and they have not hurt me_”; _Mat. 4:11_—“_angels came and
    ministered unto him_”—Jesus was the type of all believers;
    _18:10_—“_despise not one of these little ones, for I say unto
    you, that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my
    Father_”; compare _verse 6_—“_one of these little ones that
    believe on me_”; see Meyer, Com. _in loco_, who regards these
    passages as proving the doctrine of guardian angels. _Luke
    16:22_—“_the beggar died, and ... was carried away by the angels
    into Abraham’s bosom_”; _Heb. 1:14_—“_Are they not all ministering
    spirits, sent forth to do service for the sake of them that shall
    inherit salvation?_” Compare _Acts 12:15_—“_And they said, It is
    his angel_”—of Peter standing knocking; see Hackett, Com. _in
    loco_: the utterance “expresses a popular belief prevalent among
    the Jews, which is neither affirmed nor denied.” Shakespeare,
    Henry IV, 2nd part, 2:2—“For the boy—there is a good angel about
    him.” _Per contra_, see Broadus, Com. on _Mat. 18:10_—“It is
    simply said of believers as a class that there are angels which
    are ‘_their angels_’; but there is nothing here or elsewhere to
    show that one angel has special charge of one believer.”


(_g_) by punishing God’s enemies.


    _2 K. 19:35_—“_it came to pass that night, that the angel of
    Jehovah went forth, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an
    hundred fourscore and five thousand_”; _Acts 12:23_—“_And
    immediately an angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave not
    God the glory: and he was eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost._”


A general survey of this Scripture testimony as to the employments of good
angels leads us to the following conclusions:

First,—that good angels are not to be considered as the mediating agents
of God’s regular and common providence, but as the ministers of his
special providence in the affairs of his church. He “maketh his angels
winds” and “a flaming fire,” not in his ordinary procedure, but in
connection with special displays of his power for moral ends (Deut. 33:2;
Acts 7:53; Gal. 3:19; Heb. 2:2). Their intervention is apparently
occasional and exceptional—not at their own option, but only as it is
permitted or commanded by God. Hence we are not to conceive of angels as
coming between us and God, nor are we, without special revelation of the
fact, to attribute to them in any particular case the effects which the
Scriptures generally ascribe to divine providence. Like miracles,
therefore, angelic appearances generally mark God’s entrance upon new
epochs in the unfolding of his plans. Hence we read of angels at the
completion of creation (Job 38:7); at the giving of the law (Gal 3:19); at
the birth of Christ (Luke 2:13); at the two temptations in the wilderness
and in Gethsemane (Mat. 4:11, Luke 22:43); at the resurrection (Mat.
28:2); at the ascension (Acts 1:10); at the final judgment (Mat. 25:31).


    The substance of these remarks may be found in Hodge, Systematic
    Theology, 1:637-645. Milton tells us that “Millions of spiritual
    creatures walk the earth Unseen, both when we wake and when we
    sleep.” Whether this be true or not, it is a question of interest
    why such angelic beings as have to do with human affairs are not
    at present seen by men. Paul’s admonition against the “_worshiping
    of the angels_” (_Col. 2:18_) seems to suggest the reason. If men
    have not abstained from worshiping their fellow-men, when these
    latter have been priests or media of divine communications, the
    danger of idolatry would be much greater if we came into close and
    constant contact with angels; see _Rev. 22:8, 9_—“_I fell down to
    worship before the feet of the angel which showed me these things.
    And he saith unto me, See thou do it not._”

    The fact that we do not in our day see angels should not make us
    sceptical as to their existence any more than the fact that we do
    not in our day see miracles should make us doubt the reality of
    the New Testament miracles. As evil spirits were permitted to work
    most actively when Christianity began its appeal to men, so good
    angels were then most frequently recognized as executing the
    divine purposes. Nevius, Demon-Possession, 278, thinks that evil
    spirits are still at work where Christianity comes in conflict
    with heathenism, and that they retire into the background as
    Christianity triumphs. This may be true also of good angels.
    Otherwise we might be in danger of overestimating their greatness
    and authority. Father Taylor was right when he said: “Folks are
    better than angels.” It is vain to sing: “I want to be an angel.”
    We never shall be angels. Victor Hugo is wrong when he says: “I am
    the tadpole of an archangel.” John Smith is not an angel, and he
    never will be. But he may be far greater than an angel, because
    Christ took, not the nature of angels, but the nature of man
    (_Heb. 2:16_).

    As intimated above, there is no reason to believe that even the
    invisible presence of angels is a constant one. Doddridge’s dream
    of accident prevented by angelic interposition seems to embody the
    essential truth. We append the passages referred to in the text.
    _Job 38:7_—“_When the morning stars sang together, And all the
    sons of God shouted for joy_”; _Deut. 33:2_—“_Jehovah came from
    Sinai ... he came from the ten thousands of holy ones: At his
    right hand was a fiery law for them_”; _Gal. 3:19_—“_it_ [the law]
    _was ordained through angels by the hand of a mediator_”; _Heb.
    2:2_—“_the word spoken through angels_”; _Acts 7:53_—“_who
    received the law as it was ordained by angels_”; _Luke
    2:13_—“_suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the
    heavenly host_”; _Mat. 4:11_—“_Then the devil leaveth him; and
    behold, angels came and ministered unto him_”; _Luke 22:43_—“_And
    there appeared unto him an angel from heaven, strengthening him_”;
    _Mat. 28:2_—“_an angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came
    and rolled away the stone, and sat upon it_”; _Acts 1:10_—“_And
    while they were looking steadfastly into heaven as he went,
    behold, two men stood by them in white apparel_”; _Mat.
    25:31_—“_when the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the
    angels with him, then shall he sit on the throne of his glory._”


Secondly,—that their power, as being in its nature dependent and derived,
is exercised in accordance with the laws of the spiritual and natural
world. They cannot, like God, create, perform miracles, act without means,
search the heart. Unlike the Holy Spirit, who can influence the human mind
directly, they can influence men only in ways analogous to those by which
men influence each other. As evil angels may tempt men to sin, so it is
probable that good angels may attract men to holiness.


    Recent psychical researches disclose almost unlimited
    possibilities of influencing other minds by suggestion. Slight
    physical phenomena, as the odor of a violet or the sight in a book
    of a crumpled roseleaf, may start trains of thought which change
    the whole course of a life. A word or a look may have great power
    over us. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 276—“The facts
    of hypnotism illustrate the possibility of one mind falling into a
    strange thraldom under another.” If other men can so powerfully
    influence us, it is quite possible that spirits which are not
    subject to limitations of the flesh may influence us yet more.

    Binet, in his Alterations of Personality, says that experiments on
    hysterical patients have produced in his mind the conviction that,
    in them at least, “a plurality of persons exists.... We have
    established almost with certainty that in such patients, side by
    side with the principal personality, there is a secondary
    personality, which is unknown by the first, which sees, hears,
    reflects, reasons and acts”; see Andover Review, April, 1890:422.
    Hudson, Law of Psychic Phenomena, 81-143, claims that we have two
    minds, the objective and conscious, and the subjective and
    unconscious. The latter works automatically upon suggestion from
    the objective or from other minds. In view of the facts referred
    to by Binet and Hudson, we claim that the influence of angelic
    spirits is no more incredible than is the influence of suggestion
    from living men. There is no need of attributing the phenomena of
    hypnotism to spirits of the dead. Our human nature is larger and
    more susceptible to spiritual influence than we have commonly
    believed. These psychical phenomena indeed furnish us with a
    corroboration of our Ethical Monism, for if in one human being
    there may be two or more consciousnesses, then in the one God
    there may be not only three infinite personalities but also
    multitudinous finite personalities. See T. H. Wright, The Finger
    of God, 124-133.


B. The employments of evil angels.


(_a_) They oppose God and strive to defeat his will. This is indicated in
the names applied to their chief. The word “Satan” means
“adversary”—primarily to God, secondarily to men; the term “devil”
signifies “slanderer”—of God to men, and of men to God. It is indicated
also in the description of the “man of sin” as “he that opposeth and
exalteth himself against all that is called God.”


    _Job 1:6_—Satan appears among “_the sons of God_”; _Zech.
    3:1_—“_Joshua the high priest ... and Satan standing at his right
    hand to be his adversary_”; _Mat. 13:39_—“_the enemy that sowed
    them is the devil_”; _1 Pet. 5:8_—“_your adversary the devil._”
    Satan slanders God to men, in _Gen. 3:1, 4_—“_Yea, hath God
    said?... Ye shall not surely die_”; men to God, in _Job 1:9,
    11_—“_Doth Job fear God for naught?... put forth thy hand now, and
    touch all that he hath, and he will renounce thee to thy face_”;
    _2:4, 5_—“_Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give
    for his life. But put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone and
    his flesh, and he will renounce thee to thy face_”; _Rev.
    12:10_—“_the accuser of our brethren is cast down, who accuseth
    them before our God night and day._”

    Notice how, over against the evil spirit who thus accuses God to
    man and man to God, stands the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, who
    pleads God’s cause with man and man’s cause with God: _John
    16:8_—“_he, when he is come, will convict the world in respect of
    sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment_”; _Rom. 8:26_—“_the
    Spirit also helpeth our infirmity: for we know not how to pray as
    we ought; but the Spirit himself maketh intercession for us with
    groanings which cannot be uttered._” Hence Balaam can say: _Num.
    23:21_, “_He hath not beheld iniquity in Jacob, Neither hath he
    seen perverseness in Israel_”; and the Lord can say to Satan as he
    resists Joshua: “_Jehovah rebuke thee, O Satan; yea, Jehovah that
    hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee_” (_Zech. 3:2_). “Thus he puts
    himself between his people and every tongue that would accuse
    them” (C. H. M.). For the description of the “_man of sin_,” see
    _2 Thess. 2:3, 4_—“_he that opposeth_”; _cf._ _verse 9_—“_whose
    coming is according to the working of Satan._”

    On the “_man of sin_,” see Wm. Arnold Stevens, in Bap. Quar. Rev.,
    July, 1889:328-360. As in _Daniel 11:36_, the great enemy of the
    faith, he who “_shall exalt himself, and magnify himself above
    every God_”, is the Syrian King, Antiochus Epiphanes, so the man
    of lawlessness described by Paul in _2 Thess. 2:3, 4_ was “the
    corrupt and impious Judaism of the apostolic age.” This only had
    its seat in the temple of God. It was doomed to destruction when
    the Lord should come at the fall of Jerusalem. But this fulfilment
    does not preclude a future and final fulfilment of the prophecy.


Contrasts between the Holy Spirit and the spirit of evil: 1. The dove, and
the serpent; 2. the father of lies, and the Spirit of truth; 3. men
possessed by dumb spirits, and men given wonderful utterance in diverse
tongues; 4. the murderer from the beginning, and the life-giving Spirit,
who regenerates the soul and quickens our mortal bodies; 5. the adversary,
and the Helper; 6. the slanderer, and the Advocate; 7. Satan’s sifting,
and the Master’s winnowing; 8. the organizing intelligence and malignity
of the evil one, and the Holy Spirit’s combination of all the forces of
matter and mind to build up the kingdom of God; 9. the strong man fully
armed, and a stronger than he; 10. the evil one who works only evil, and
the holy One who is the author of holiness in the hearts of men. The
opposition of evil angels, at first and ever since their fall, may be a
reason why they are incapable of redemption.

(_b_) They hinder man’s temporal and eternal welfare,—sometimes by
exercising a certain control over natural phenomena, but more commonly by
subjecting man’s soul to temptation. Possession of man’s being, either
physical or spiritual, by demons, is also recognized in Scripture.


    Control of natural phenomena is ascribed to evil spirits in _Job
    1:12, 16, 19_ and _2:7_—“_all that he hath is in thy power_”—and
    Satan uses lightning, whirlwind, disease, for his purposes; _Luke
    13:11, 16_—“_a woman that had a spirit of infirmity ... whom Satan
    had bound, lo, these eighteen years_”; _Acts 10:38_—“_healing all
    that were oppressed of the devil_”; _2 Cor. 12:7_—“_a thorn in the
    flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet me_”; _1 Thess. 2:18_—“_we
    would fain have come unto you, I Paul once and again; and Satan
    hindered us_”; _Heb. 2:14_—“_him that had the power of death, that
    is, the devil._” Temptation is ascribed to evil spirits in _Gen.
    3:1_ _sq._—“_Now the serpent was more subtle_”; _cf._ _Rev.
    20:2_—“_the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan_”; _Mat.
    4:3_—“_the tempter came_”; _John 13:27_—“_after the sop, then
    entered Satan into him_”; _Acts 5:3_—“_why hath Satan filled thy
    heart to lie to the Holy Spirit?_” _Eph. 2:2_—“_the spirit that
    now worketh in the sons of disobedience_”; _1 Thess. 3:5_—“_lest
    by any means the tempter had tempted you_”; _1 Pet 5:8_—“_your
    adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking
    whom he may devour._”

    At the time of Christ, popular belief undoubtedly exaggerated the
    influence of evil spirits. Savage, Life after Death, 113—“While
    God was at a distance, the demons were very, very near. The air
    about the earth was full of these evil tempting spirits. They
    caused shipwreck at sea, and sudden death on land; they blighted
    the crops; they smote and blasted in the tempests; they took
    possession of the bodies and the souls of men. They entered into
    compacts, and took mortgages on men’s souls.” If some good end has
    been attained in spite of them they feel that “Their labor must be
    to pervert that end. And out of good still to find means of evil.”
    In Goethe’s Faust, Margaret detects the evil in Mephistopheles:
    “You see that he with no soul sympathizes. ’Tis written on his
    face—he never loved.... Whenever he comes near, I cannot pray.”
    Mephistopheles describes himself as “Ein Theil von jener Kraft Die
    stäts das Böse will Und stäts das Gute schafft”—“Part of that
    power not understood, which always wills the bad, and always works
    the good”—through the overruling Providence of God. “The devil
    says his prayers backwards.” “He tried to learn the Basque
    language, but had to give it up, having learned only three words
    in two years.” Walter Scott tells us that a certain sulphur spring
    in Scotland was reputed to owe its quality to an ancient
    compulsory immersion of Satan in it.

    Satan’s temptations are represented as both negative and
    positive,—he takes away the seed sown, and he sows tares. He
    controls many subordinate evil spirits; there is only one devil,
    but there are many angels or demons, and through their agency
    Satan may accomplish his purposes.

    Satan’s negative agency is shown in _Mark 4:15_—“_when they have
    heard, straightway cometh Satan, and taketh away the word which
    hath been sown in them_”; his positive agency in _Mat. 13:38,
    39_—“_the tares are the sons of the evil one; and the enemy that
    sowed them is the devil._” One devil, but many angels: see _Mat.
    25:41_—“_the devil and his angels_”; _Mark 5:9_—“_My name is
    Legion, for we are many_”; _Eph. 2:2_—“_the prince of the powers
    of the air_”; _6:12_—“_principalities ... powers ... world-rulers
    of this darkness ... spiritual hosts of wickedness._” The mode of
    Satan’s access to the human mind we do not know. It may be that by
    moving upon our physical organism he produces subtle signs of
    thought and so reaches the understanding and desires. He certainly
    has the power to present in captivating forms the objects of
    appetite and selfish ambition, as he did to Christ in the
    wilderness (_Mat. 4:3, 6, 9_), and to appeal to our love for
    independence by saying to us, as he did to our first parents—“_ye
    shall be as God_” (_Gen. 3:5_).

    C. C. Everett, Essays Theol. and Lit., 186-218, on The Devil: “If
    the supernatural powers would only hold themselves aloof and not
    interfere with the natural processes of the world, there would be
    no sickness, no death, no sorrow.... This shows a real, though
    perhaps unconscious, faith in the goodness and trustworthiness of
    nature. The world in itself is a source only of good. Here is the
    germ of a positive religion, though this religion when it appears,
    may adopt the form of supernaturalism.” If there was no Satan,
    then Christ’s temptations came from within, and showed a
    predisposition to evil on his own part.


Possession is distinguished from bodily or mental disease, though such
disease often accompanies possession or results from it.—The demons speak
in their own persons, with supernatural knowledge, and they are directly
addressed by Christ. Jesus recognizes Satanic agency in these cases of
possession, and he rejoices in the casting out of demons, as a sign of
Satan’s downfall. These facts render it impossible to interpret the
narratives of demoniac possession as popular descriptions of abnormal
physical or mental conditions.


    Possession may apparently be either physical, as in the case of
    the Gerasene demoniacs (_Mark 5:2-4_), or spiritual, as in the
    case of the “_maid having a spirit of divination_” (_Acts 16:16_),
    where the body does not seem to have been affected. It is
    distinguished from bodily disease: see _Mat. 17:15,
    18_—“_epileptic ... the demon went out from him: and the boy was
    cured_”; _Mark 9:25_—“_Thou dumb and deaf spirit_”; _3:11,
    12_—“_the unclean spirits ... cried, saying, Thou art the Son of
    God. And he charged them much that they should not make him
    known_”; _Luke 8:30, 31_—“_And Jesus asked him, What is thy name?
    And he said, Legion; for many demons were entered unto him. And
    they entreated him that he would not command them to depart into
    the abyss_”; _10:17, 18_—“_And the seventy returned with joy,
    saying, Lord, even the demons are subject unto us in thy name. And
    he said unto them, I beheld Satan fallen as lightning from
    heaven._”


These descriptions of personal intercourse between Christ and the demons
cannot be interpreted as metaphorical. “In the temptation of Christ and in
the possession of the swine, imagination could have no place. Christ was
_above_ its delusions; the brutes were _below_ them.” Farrar (Life of
Christ, 1:337-341, and 2:excursus vii), while he admits the existence and
agency of good angels, very inconsistently gives a metaphorical
interpretation to the Scriptural accounts of evil angels. We find
corroborative evidence of the Scripture doctrine in the domination which
one wicked man frequently exercises over others; in the opinion of some
modern physicians in charge of the insane, that certain phenomena in their
patients’ experience are best explained by supposing an actual subjection
of the will to a foreign power; and, finally, in the influence of the Holy
Spirit upon the human heart. See Trench, Miracles, 125-136; Smith’s Bible
Dictionary, 1:586—“Possession is distinguished from mere temptation by the
complete or incomplete loss of the sufferer’s reason or power of will; his
actions, words, and almost his thoughts, are mastered by the evil spirit,
till his personality seems to be destroyed, or at least so overborne as to
produce the consciousness of a twofold will within him like that in a
dream. In the ordinary assaults and temptations of Satan, the will itself
yields consciously, and by yielding gradually assumes, without losing its
apparent freedom of action, the characteristics of the Satanic nature. It
is solicited, urged, and persuaded against the strivings of grace, but it
is not overborne.”

T. H. Wright, The Finger of God, argues that Jesus, in his mention of
demoniacs, accommodated himself to the beliefs of his time. Fisher, Nature
and Method of Revelation, 274, with reference to Weiss’s Meyer on _Mat.
4:24_, gives Meyer’s arguments against demoniacal possession as follows:
1. the absence of references to demoniacal possession in the Old
Testament, and the fact that so-called demoniacs were cured by exorcists;
2. that no clear case of possession occurs at present; 3. that there is no
notice of demoniacal possession in John’s Gospel, though the overcoming of
Satan is there made a part of the Messiah’s work and Satan is said to
enter into a man’s mind and take control there (_John 13:27_); 4. and that
the so-called demoniacs are not, as would be expected, of a diabolic
temper and filled with malignant feelings toward Christ. Harnack, Wesen
des Christenthums, 38—“The popular belief in demon-possession gave form to
the conceptions of those who had nervous diseases, so that they expressed
themselves in language proper only to those who were actually possessed.
Jesus is no believer in Christian Science: he calls sickness sickness and
health health; but he regards all disease as a proof and effect of the
working of the evil one.”


    On _Mark 1:21-34_, see Maclaren in S. S. Times, Jan. 23, 1904—“We
    are told by some that this demoniac was an epileptic. Possibly;
    but, if the epilepsy was not the result of possession, why should
    it take the shape of violent hatred of Jesus? And what is there in
    epilepsy to give discernment of his character and the purpose of
    his mission?” Not Jesus’ exorcism of demons as a fact, but his
    casting them out by a word, was our Lord’s wonderful
    characteristic. Nevius, Demon-Possession, 240—“May not
    demon-possession be only a different, a more advanced, form of
    hypnotism?... It is possible that these evil spirits are familiar
    with the organism of the nervous system, and are capable of acting
    upon and influencing mankind in accordance with physical and
    psychological laws.... The hypnotic trance may be effected,
    without the use of physical organs, by the mere force of
    will-power, spirit acting upon spirit.” Nevius quotes F. W. A.
    Myers, Fortnightly Rev., Nov. 1885—“One such discovery, that of
    telepathy, or the transference of thought and sensation from mind
    to mind without the agency of the recognized organs of sense, has,
    as I hold, been already achieved.” See Bennet, Diseases of the
    Bible; Kedney, Diabolology; and references in Poole’s Synopsis,
    1:343; also Bramwell, Hypnotism, 358-398.


(_c_) Yet, in spite of themselves, they execute God’s plans of punishing
the ungodly, of chastening the good, and of illustrating the nature and
fate of moral evil.


    Punishing the ungodly: _Ps. 78:49_—“_He cast upon them the
    fierceness of his anger, Wrath and indignation, and trouble, A
    band of angels of evil_”; _1 K. 22:23_—“_Jehovah hath put a lying
    spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets; and Jehovah hath
    spoken evil concerning thee._” In _Luke 22:31_, Satan’s sifting
    accomplishes the opposite of the sifter’s intention, and the same
    as the Master’s winnowing (Maclaren).

    Chastening the good: see _Job, chapters 1_ and _2_; _1 Cor.
    5:5_—“_deliver such a one unto Satan for the destruction of the
    flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord
    Jesus_”; _cf._ _1 Tim. 1:20_—“_Hymenæus and Alexander; whom I
    delivered onto Satan, that they might be taught not to
    blaspheme._” This delivering to Satan for the destruction of the
    flesh seems to have involved four things: (1) excommunication from
    the church; (2) authoritative infliction of bodily disease or
    death; (3) loss of all protection from good angels, who minister
    only to saints; (4) subjection to the buffetings and tormentings
    of the great accuser. Gould, in Am. Com. on _1 Cor. 5:5_, regards
    “delivering to Satan” as merely putting a man out of the church by
    excommunication. This of itself was equivalent to banishing him
    into “the world,” of which Satan was the ruler.

    Evil spirits illustrate the nature and fate of moral evil: see
    _Mat 8:29_—“_art thou come hither to torment us before the time?_”
    _25:41_—“_eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his
    angels_”; _2 Thess. 2:8_—“_then shall be revealed the lawless
    one_”; _James 2:19_—“_the demons also believe, and shudder_”;
    _Rev. 12:9, 12_—“_the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole
    world ... the devil is gone down unto you, having great wrath,
    knowing that he hath but a short time_”; _20:10_—“_cast into the
    lake of fire ... tormented day and night for ever and ever._”

    It is an interesting question whether Scripture recognizes any
    special connection of evil spirits with the systems of idolatry,
    witchcraft, and spiritualism which burden the world. _1 Cor.
    10:20_—“_the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice
    to demons, and not to God_”; _2 Thess. 2:9_—“_the working of Satan
    with all power and signs of lying wonders_”—would seem to favor an
    affirmative answer. But _1 Cor. 8:4_—“_concerning therefore the
    eating of things sacrificed to idols, we know that no idol is
    anything in the world_”—seems to favor a negative answer. This
    last may, however, mean that “the beings whom the idols are
    designed to _represent_ have no existence, although it is
    afterwards shown (_10:20_) that there are _other_ beings connected
    with false worship” (Ann. Par. Bible, _in loco_). “Heathenism is
    the reign of the devil” (Meyer), and while the heathen think
    themselves to be sacrificing to Jupiter or Venus, they are really
    “_sacrificing to demons_,” and are thus furthering the plans of a
    malignant spirit who uses these forms of false religion as a means
    of enslaving their souls. In like manner, the network of
    influences which support the papacy, spiritualism, modern
    unbelief, is difficult of explanation, unless we believe in a
    superhuman intelligence which organizes these forces against God.
    In these, as well as in heathen religions, there are facts
    inexplicable upon merely natural principles of disease and
    delusion.

    Nevius, Demon-Possession, 294—“Paul teaches that the gods
    mentioned under different names are imaginary and non-existent;
    but that, behind and in connection with these gods, there are
    demons who make use of idolatry to draw men away from God; and it
    is to these that the heathen are unconsciously rendering obedience
    and service.... It is most reasonable to believe that the
    sufferings of people bewitched were caused by the devil, not by
    the so-called witches. Let us substitute ‘devilcraft’ for
    ‘witchcraft.’... Had the courts in Salem proceeded on the
    Scriptural presumption that the testimony of those under the
    control of evil spirits would, in the nature of the case, be
    false, such a thing as the Salem tragedy would never have been
    known.”


A survey of the Scripture testimony with regard to the employments of evil
spirits leads to the following general conclusions:

First,—the power of evil spirits over men is not independent of the human
will. This power cannot be exercised without at least the original consent
of the human will, and may be resisted and shaken off through prayer and
faith in God.


    _Luke 22:31, 40_—“_Satan asked to have you, that he might sift you
    as wheat.... Pray that ye enter not into temptation_”; _Eph.
    6:11_—“_Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to
    stand against the wiles of the devil_”; _16_—“_the shield of
    faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of
    the evil one_”; _James 4:7_—“_resist the devil, and he will flee
    from you_”; _1 Pet. 5:9_—“_whom withstand stedfast in your
    faith._” The coals are already in the human heart, in the shape of
    corrupt inclinations; Satan only blows them into flame. The double
    source of sin is illustrated in _Acts 5:3, 4_—“_Why hath Satan
    filled thy heart?... How is it that thou hast conceived this thing
    in thine heart?_” The Satanic impulse could have been resisted,
    and “_after it was_” suggested, it was still “_in his own power_,”
    as was the land that he had sold (Maclaren).

    The soul is a castle into which even the king of evil spirits
    cannot enter without receiving permission from within. Bp.
    Wordsworth: “The devil may _tempt_ us to fall, but he cannot
    _make_ us fall; he may persuade us to cast _ourselves_ down, but
    he cannot _cast_ us down.” E. G. Robinson: “It is left to us
    whether the devil shall get control of us. We pack off on the
    devil’s shoulders much of our own wrong doing, just as Adam had
    the impertinence to tell God that the woman did the mischief.”
    Both God and Satan stand at the door and knock, but neither heaven
    nor hell can come in unless we will. “We cannot prevent the birds
    from flying over our heads, but we can prevent them from making
    their nests in our hair.” _Mat 12:43-45_—“_The unclean spirit,
    when he is gone out of a man_”—suggests that the man who gets rid
    of one vice but does not occupy his mind with better things is
    ready to be repossessed. “_Seven other spirits more evil than
    himself_” implies that some demons are more wicked than others and
    so are harder to cast out (_Mark 9:29_). The Jews had cast out
    idolatry, but other and worse sins had taken possession of them.

    Hudson, Law of Psychic Phenomena, 129—“The hypnotic subject cannot
    be controlled so far as to make him do what he knows to be wrong,
    unless he himself voluntarily assents.” A. S. Hart: “Unless one is
    willing to be hypnotized, no one can put him under the influence.
    The more intelligent one is, the more susceptible. Hypnotism
    requires the subject to do two-thirds of the work, while the
    instructor does only one-third—that of telling the subject what to
    do. It is not an inherent influence, nor a gift, but can be
    learned by any one who can read. It is impossible to compel a
    person to do wrong while under the influence, for the subject
    retains a consciousness of the difference between right and
    wrong.”

    Höffding, Outlines of Psychology, 330-335—“Some persons have the
    power of intentionally calling up hallucinations; but it often
    happens to them as to Goethe’s Zauberlehrling, or
    apprentice-magician, that the phantoms gain power over them and
    will not be again dispersed. Goethe’s Fischer—‘Half she drew him
    down and half he sank’—repeats the duality in the second term; for
    to sink is to let one’s self sink.” Manton, the Puritan: “A
    stranger cannot call off a dog from the flock, but the Shepherd
    can do so with a word; so the Lord can easily rebuke Satan when he
    finds him most violent.” Spurgeon, the modern Puritan, remarks on
    the above: “O Lord, when I am worried by my great enemy, call him
    off, I pray thee! Let me hear a voice saying: ‘_Jehovah rebuke
    thee, O Satan; even Jehovah that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke
    thee!_’ (_Zech. 3:2)_. By thine election of me, rebuke him, I pray
    thee, and deliver me from ‘_the power of the dog_’! (_Ps.
    22:20)_.”


Secondly,—their power is limited, both in time and in extent, by the
permissive will of God. Evil spirits are neither omnipotent, omniscient,
nor omnipresent. We are to attribute disease and natural calamity to their
agency, only when this is matter of special revelation. Opposed to God as
evil spirits are, God compels them to serve his purposes. Their power for
harm lasts but for a season, and ultimate judgment and punishment will
vindicate God’s permission of their evil agency.


    _1 Cor. 10:13_—“_God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be
    tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation make
    also the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it_”; _Jude
    6_—“_angels which kept not their own beginning, but left their
    proper habitation, he hath kept in everlasting bonds under
    darkness unto the judgment of the great day._”


Luther saw Satan nearer to man than his coat, or his shirt, or even his
skin. In all misfortune he saw the devil’s work. Was there a conflagration
in the town? By looking closely you might see a demon blowing upon the
flame. Pestilence and storm he attributed to Satan. All this was a relic
of the mediæval exaggerations of Satan’s power. It was then supposed that
men might make covenants with the evil one, in which supernatural power
was purchased at the price of final perdition (see Goethe’s Faust).


    Scripture furnishes no warrant for such representations. There
    seems to have been permitted a special activity of Satan in
    temptation and possession during our Savior’s ministry, in order
    that Christ’s power might be demonstrated. By his death Jesus
    brought “_to naught him that had the power of death, that is, the
    devil_” (_Heb. 2:14)_ and “_having despoiled the principalities
    and the powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over
    them in it_,” _i. e._, in the Cross (_Col. 2:15_). _1 John
    3:8_—“_To this end was the Son of God manifested, that he might
    destroy the works of the devil._” Evil spirits now exist and act
    only upon sufferance. McLeod, Temptation of our Lord, 24—“Satan’s
    power is limited, (1) by the fact that he is a creature; (2) by
    the fact of God’s providence; (3) by the fact of his own
    wickedness.”

    Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, 136—“Having neither fixed
    principle in himself nor connection with the source of order
    outside, Satan has not prophetic ability. He can appeal to chance,
    but he cannot foresee. So Goethe’s Mephistopheles insolently
    boasts that he can lead Faust astray: ‘What will you bet? There’s
    still a chance to gain him, If unto me full leave you give Gently
    upon _my_ road to train him!’ And in _Job 1:11; 2:5_, Satan
    wagers: ‘_He will renounce thee to thy face._’ ” William Ashmore:
    “Is Satan omnipresent? No, but he is very spry. Is he bound? Yes,
    but with a rather loose rope.” In the Persian story, God scattered
    seed. The devil buried it, and sent the rain to rot it. But soon
    it sprang up, and the wilderness blossomed as the rose.


II. Objections to the Doctrine of Angels.


1. To the doctrine of angels in general.


It is objected:

(_a_) That it is opposed to the modern scientific view of the world, as a
system of definite forces and laws.—We reply that, whatever truth there
may be in this modern view, it does not exclude the play of divine or
human free agency. It does not, therefore, exclude the possibility of
angelic agency.


    Ladd, Philosophy of Knowledge, 332—“It is easier to believe in
    angels than in ether; in God rather than atoms; and in the history
    of his kingdom as a divine self-revelation rather than in the
    physicist’s or the biologist’s purely mechanical process of
    evolution.”


(_b_) That it is opposed to the modern doctrine of infinite space above
and beneath us—a space peopled with worlds. With the surrender of the old
conception of the firmament, as a boundary separating this world from the
regions beyond, it is claimed that we must give up all belief in a heaven
of the angels.—We reply that the notions of an infinite universe, of
heaven as a definite place, and of spirits as confined to fixed locality,
are without certain warrant either in reason or in Scripture. We know
nothing of the modes of existence of pure spirits.


    What we know of the universe is certainly finite. Angels are
    apparently incorporeal beings, and as such are free from all laws
    of matter and space. Heaven and hell are essentially conditions,
    corresponding to character—conditions in which the body and the
    surroundings of the soul express and reflect its inward state. The
    main thing to be insisted on is therefore the state; place is
    merely incidental. The fact that Christ ascended to heaven with a
    human body, and that the saints are to possess glorified bodies,
    would seem to imply that heaven is a place. Christ’s declaration
    with regard to him who is “_able to destroy both soul and body in
    hell_” (_Mat. 10:28_) affords some reason for believing that hell
    is also a place.

    Where heaven and hell are, is not revealed to us. But it is not
    necessary to suppose that they are in some remote part of the
    universe; for aught we know, they may be right about us, so that
    if our eyes were opened, like those of the prophet’s servant (_2
    Kings 6:17_), we ourselves should behold them. Upon ground of
    _Eph. 2:2_—“_prince of the __ powers of the air_”—and _3:10_—“_the
    principalities and the powers in the heavenly places_”—some have
    assigned the atmosphere of the earth as the abode of angelic
    spirits, both good and evil. But the expressions “_air_” and
    “_heavenly places_” may be merely metaphorical designations of
    their spiritual method of existence.

    The idealistic philosophy, which regards time and space as merely
    subjective forms of our human thinking and as not conditioning the
    thought of God, may possibly afford some additional aid in the
    consideration of this problem. If matter be only the expression of
    God’s mind and will, having no existence apart from his
    intelligence and volition, the question of place ceases to have
    significance. Heaven is in that case simply the state in which God
    manifests himself in his grace, and hell is the state in which a
    moral being finds himself in opposition to God, and God in
    opposition to him. Christ can manifest himself to his followers in
    all parts of the earth and to all the inhabitants of heaven at one
    and the same time (_John 14:21_; _Mat. 28:20_; _Rev. 1:7_). Angels
    in like manner, being purely spiritual beings, may be free from
    the laws of space and time, and may not be limited to any fixed
    locality.

    We prefer therefore to leave the question of place undecided, and
    to accept the existence and working of angels both good and evil
    as a matter of faith, without professing to understand their
    relations to space. For the rationalistic view, see Strauss,
    Glaubenslehre, 1:670-675. _Per contra_, see Van Oosterzee,
    Christian Dogmatics, 1:308-317; Martensen, Christian Dogmatics,
    127-136.


2. To the doctrine of evil angels in particular.


It is objected that:

(_a_) The idea of the fall of angels is self-contradictory, since a fall
determined by pride presupposes pride—that is, a fall before the fall.—We
reply that the objection confounds the occasion of sin with the sin
itself. The outward motive to disobedience is not disobedience. The fall
took place only when that outward motive was chosen by free will. When the
motive of independence was selfishly adopted, only then did the innocent
desire for knowledge and power become pride and sin. How an evil volition
could originate in spirits created pure is an insoluble problem. Our faith
in God’s holiness, however, compels us to attribute the origin of this
evil volition, not to the Creator, but to the creature.


    There can be no sinful propensity before there is sin. The reason
    of the _first_ sin can not be sin itself. This would be to make
    sin a necessary development; to deny the holiness of God the
    Creator; to leave the ground of theism for pantheism.


(_b_) It is irrational to suppose that Satan should have been able to
change his whole nature by a single act, so that he thenceforth willed
only evil.—But we reply that the circumstances of that decision are
unknown to us; while the power of single acts permanently to change
character is matter of observation among men.


    Instance the effect, upon character and life, of a single act of
    falsehood or embezzlement. The first glass of intoxicating drink,
    and the first yielding to impure suggestion, often establish
    nerve-tracts in the brain and associations in the mind which are
    not reversed and overcome for a whole lifetime. “Sow an act, and
    you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a
    character, and you reap a destiny.” And what is true of men, may
    be also true of angels.


(_c_) It is impossible that so wise a being should enter upon a hopeless
rebellion.—We answer that no amount of mere knowledge ensures right moral
action. If men gratify present passion, in spite of their knowledge that
the sin involves present misery and future perdition, it is not impossible
that Satan may have done the same.


    Scherer, Essays on English Literature, 139, puts this objection as
    follows: “The idea of Satan is a contradictory idea; for it is
    contradictory to know God and yet attempt rivalry with him.” But
    we must remember that understanding is the servant of will, and is
    darkened by will. Many clever men fail to see what belongs to
    their peace. It is the very madness of sin, that it persists in
    iniquity, even when it sees and fears the approaching judgment of
    God. Jonathan Edwards: “Although the devil be exceedingly crafty
    and subtle, yet he is one of the greatest fools and blockheads in
    the world, as the subtlest of wicked men are. Sin is of such a
    nature that it strangely infatuates and stultifies the mind.” One
    of Ben Jonson’s plays has, for its title: “The Devil is an Ass.”

    Schleiermacher, Die Christliche Glaube, 1:210, urges that
    continual wickedness must have weakened Satan’s understanding, so
    that he could be no longer feared, and he adds: “Nothing is easier
    than to contend against emotional evil.” On the other hand, there
    seems evidence in Scripture of a progressive rage and devastating
    activity in the case of the evil one, beginning in Genesis and
    culminating in the Revelation. With this increasing malignity
    there is also abundant evidence of his unwisdom. We may instance
    the devil’s mistakes in misrepresenting 1. God to man (_Gen.
    3:1_—“_hath God said?_”). 2. Man to himself (_Gen. 3:4_—“_Ye shall
    not surely die_”). 3. Man to God (_Job 1:9_—“_Doth Job fear God
    for naught?_”). 4. God to himself (_Mat. 4:3_—“_If thou art the
    Son of God_”). 5. Himself to man (_2 Cor. 11:14_—“_Satan
    fashioneth himself into an angel of light_”). 6. Himself to
    himself (_Rev. 12:12_—“_the devil is gone down unto you, having
    great wrath_”—thinking he could successfully oppose God or destroy
    man).


(_d_) It is inconsistent with the benevolence of God to create and uphold
spirits, who he knows will be and do evil.—We reply that this is no more
inconsistent with God’s benevolence than the creation and preservation of
men, whose action God overrules for the furtherance of his purposes, and
whose iniquity he finally brings to light and punishes.


    Seduction of the pure by the impure, piracy, slavery, and war,
    have all been permitted among men. It is no more inconsistent with
    God’s benevolence to permit them among angelic spirits. Caroline
    Fox tells of Emerson and Carlyle that the latter once led his
    friend, the serene philosopher, through the abominations of the
    streets of London at midnight, asking him with grim humor at every
    few steps: “Do you believe in the devil now?” Emerson replied that
    the more he saw of the English people, the greater and better he
    thought them. It must have been because with such depths beneath
    them they could notwithstanding reach such heights of
    civilization. Even vice and misery can be overruled for good, and
    the fate of evil angels may be made a warning to the universe.


(_e_) The notion of organization among evil spirits is self-contradictory,
since the nature of evil is to sunder and divide.—We reply that such
organization of evil spirits is no more impossible than the organization
of wicked men, for the purpose of furthering their selfish ends. Common
hatred to God may constitute a principle of union among them, as among
men.


    Wicked men succeed in their plans only by adhering in some way to
    the good. Even a robber-horde must have laws, and there is a sort
    of “honor among thieves.” Else the world would be a pandemonium,
    and society would be what Hobbes called it: “bellum omnium contra
    omnes.” See art. on Satan, by Whitehouse, in Hastings, Dictionary
    of the Bible: “Some personalities are ganglionic centres of a
    nervous system, incarnations of evil influence. The Bible teaches
    that Satan is such a centre.”

    But the organizing power of Satan has its limitations. Nevius,
    Demon-Possession, 279—“Satan is not omniscient, and it is not
    certain that all demons are perfectly subject to his control. Want
    of vigilance on his part, and personal ambition in them, may
    obstruct and delay the execution of his plans, as among men.” An
    English parliamentarian comforted himself by saying: “If the fleas
    were all of one mind, they would have us out of bed.” Plato,
    Lysis, 214—“The good are like one another, and friends to one
    another, and the bad are never at unity with one another or with
    themselves; for they are passionate and restless, and anything
    which is at variance and enmity with itself is not likely to be in
    union or harmony with any other thing.”


(_f_) The doctrine is morally pernicious, as transferring the blame of
human sin to the being or beings who tempt men thereto.—We reply that
neither conscience nor Scripture allows temptation to be an excuse for
sin, or regards Satan as having power to compel the human will. The
objection, moreover, contradicts our observation,—for only where the
personal existence of Satan is recognized, do we find sin recognized in
its true nature.


    The diabolic character of sin makes it more guilty and abhorred.
    The immorality lies, not in the maintenance, but in the denial, of
    the doctrine. Giving up the doctrine of Satan is connected with
    laxity in the administration of criminal justice. Penalty comes to
    be regarded as only deterrent or reformatory.


(_g_) The doctrine degrades man, by representing him as the tool and slave
of Satan.—We reply that it does indeed show his actual state to be
degraded, but only with the result of exalting our idea of his original
dignity, and of his possible glory in Christ. The fact that man’s sin was
suggested from without, and not from within, may be the one mitigating
circumstance which renders possible his redemption.


    It rather puts a stigma upon human nature to say that it is _not_
    fallen—that its present condition is its original and normal
    state. Nor is it worth while to attribute to man a dignity he does
    not possess, if thereby we deprive him of the dignity that may be
    his. Satan’s sin was, in its essence, sin against the Holy Ghost,
    for which there can be no “_Father, forgive them, for they know
    not what they do_” (_Luke 23:34_), since it was choosing evil with
    the _mala gaudia mentis_, or the clearest intuition that it was
    evil. If there be no devil, then man himself is devil. It has been
    said of Voltaire, that without believing in a devil, he saw him
    everywhere—even where he was not. Christian, in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s
    Progress, takes comfort when he finds that the blasphemous
    suggestions which came to him in the dark valley were suggestions
    from the fiend that pursued him. If all temptation is from within,
    our case would seem hopeless. But if “_an enemy hath done this_”
    (_Mat. 13:28_), then there is hope. And so we may accept the
    maxim: “Nullus diabolus, nullus Redemptor.” Unitarians have no
    Captain of their Salvation, and so have no Adversary against whom
    to contend. See Trench, Studies in the Gospels, 17; Birks,
    Difficulties of Belief, 78-100; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:291-293. Many
    of the objections and answers mentioned above have been taken from
    Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:251-284, where a fuller statement of
    them may be found.


III. Practical uses of the Doctrine of Angels.


A. Uses of the doctrine of good angels.


(_a_) It gives us a new sense of the greatness of the divine resources,
and of God’s grace in our creation, to think of the multitude of unfallen
intelligences who executed the divine purposes before man appeared.

(_b_) It strengthens our faith in God’s providential care, to know that
spirits of so high rank are deputed to minister to creatures who are
environed with temptations and are conscious of sin.

(_c_) It teaches us humility, that beings of so much greater knowledge and
power than ours should gladly perform these unnoticed services, in behalf
of those whose only claim upon them is that they are children of the same
common Father.

(_d_) It helps us in the struggle against sin, to learn that these
messengers of God are near, to mark our wrong doing if we fall, and to
sustain us if we resist temptation.

(_e_) It enlarges our conceptions of the dignity of our own being, and of
the boundless possibilities of our future existence, to remember these
forms of typical innocence and love, that praise and serve God unceasingly
in heaven.


    Instance the appearance of angels in Jacob’s life at Bethel (_Gen.
    28:12_—Jacob’s conversion?) and at Mahanaim (_Gen. 32:1, 2_—two
    camps, of angels, on the right hand and on the left; _cf._ _Ps.
    34:7_—“_The angel of Jehovah encampeth round about them that fear
    him, And delivereth them_”); so too the Angel at Penuel that
    struggled with Jacob at his entering the promised land (_Gen.
    32:24_; _cf._ _Hos. 12:3, 4_—“_in his manhood he had power with
    God: yea, he had power over the angel, and prevailed_”), and “_the
    angel who hath redeemed me from all evil_” (_Gen. 48:16_) to whom
    Jacob refers on his dying bed. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene:
    “And is there care in heaven? and is there love In heavenly
    spirits to these creatures base That may compassion of their evils
    move? There is; else much more wretched were the case Of men than
    beasts. But O, th’ exceeding grace Of highest God that loves his
    creatures so, And all his works with mercy doth embrace, That
    blessed angels he sends to and fro To serve to wicked man, to
    serve his wicked foe! How oft do they their silver bowers leave
    And come to succor us who succor want! How oft do they with golden
    pinions cleave The flitting skies like flying pursuivant, Against
    foul fiends to aid us militant! They for us fight; they watch and
    duly ward, And their bright squadrons round about us plant; And
    all for love, and nothing for reward. Oh, why should heavenly God
    for men have such regard!”

    It shows us that sin is not mere finiteness, to see these finite
    intelligences that maintained their integrity. Shakespeare, Henry
    VIII, 2:2—“He counsels a divorce—a loss of her That, like a jewel,
    has hung twenty years About his neck, yet never lost her lustre;
    Of her that loves him with that excellence That angels love good
    men with; even of her That, when the greatest stroke of fortune
    falls, Will bless the king.” Measure for Measure, 2:2—“Man, proud
    man, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, As makes the
    angels weep.”


B. Uses of the doctrine of evil angels.


(_a_) It illustrates the real nature of sin, and the depth of the ruin to
which it may bring the soul, to reflect upon the present moral condition
and eternal wretchedness to which these spirits, so highly endowed, have
brought themselves by their rebellion against God.

(_b_) It inspires a salutary fear and hatred of the first subtle
approaches of evil from within or from without, to remember that these may
be the covert advances of a personal and malignant being, who seeks to
overcome our virtue and to involve us in his own apostasy and destruction.

(_c_) It shuts us up to Christ, as the only Being who is able to deliver
us or others from the enemy of all good.

(_d_) It teaches us that our salvation is wholly of grace, since for such
multitudes of rebellious spirits no atonement and no renewal were
provided—simple justice having its way, with no mercy to interpose or
save.


    Philippi, in his Glaubenslehre, 3:151-284, suggests the following
    relations of the doctrine of Satan to the doctrine of sin: 1.
    Since Satan is a fallen _angel_, who once was pure, evil is not
    self-existent or necessary. Sin does not belong to the substance
    which God created, but is a later addition. 2. Since Satan is a
    purely _spiritual_ creature, sin cannot have its origin in mere
    sensuousness, or in the mere possession of a physical nature. 3.
    Since Satan is not a _weak_ and _poorly endowed_ creature, sin is
    not a necessary result of weakness and limitation. 4. Since Satan
    is _confirmed in evil_, sin is not necessarily a transient or
    remediable act of will. 5. Since in Satan sin _does not come to an
    end_, sin is not a step of creaturely development, or a stage of
    progress to something higher and better. On the uses of the
    doctrine, see also Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics, 1:316;
    Robert Hall, Works, 3:35-51; Brooks, Satan and his Devices.

    “They never sank so low, They are not raised so high; They never
    knew such depths of woe, Such heights of majesty. The Savior did
    not join Their nature to his own; For them he shed no blood
    divine. Nor heaved a single groan.” If no redemption has been
    provided for them, it may be because: 1. sin originated with them;
    2. the sin which they committed was “_an eternal sin_” (_cf._
    _Mark 3:29_); 3. they sinned with clearer intellect and fuller
    knowledge than ours (_cf._ _Luke 23:34_); 4. their incorporeal
    being aggravated their sin and made it analogous to our sinning
    against the Holy Spirit (_cf._ _Mat. 12:31, 32_); 5. this
    incorporeal being gave no opportunity for Christ to objectify his
    grace and visibly to join himself to them (_cf._ _Heb. 2:16_); 6.
    their persistence in evil, in spite of their growing knowledge of
    the character of God as exhibited in human history, has resulted
    in a hardening of heart which is not susceptible of salvation.

    Yet angels were created in Christ (_Col. 1:16_); they consist in
    him (_Col. 1:17_); he must suffer in their sin; God would save
    them, if he consistently could. Dr. G. W. Samson held that the
    Logos became an angel before he became man, and that this explains
    his appearances as “_the angel of Jehovah_” in the Old Testament
    (_Gen. 22:11_). It is not asserted that _all_ fallen angels shall
    be eternally tormented (_Rev. 14:10_). In terms equally strong
    (_Mat. 25:41_; _Rev. 20:10_) the existence of a place of eternal
    punishment for wicked men is declared, but nevertheless we do not
    believe that all men will go there, in spite of the fact that all
    men are wicked. The silence of Scripture with regard to a
    provision of salvation for fallen angels does not prove that there
    is no such provision. _2 Pet. 2:4_ shows that evil angels have not
    received _final_ judgment, but are in a temporary state of
    existence, and their final state is yet to be revealed. If God has
    not already provided, may he not yet provide redemption for them,
    and the “_elect angels_” (_1 Tim. 5:21_) be those whom God has
    predestinated to stand this future probation and be saved, while
    only those who persist in their rebellion will be consigned to the
    lake of fire and brimstone (_Rev. 20:10_)?

    The keeper of a young tigress patted her head and she licked his
    hand. But when she grew older she seized his hand with her teeth
    and began to craunch it. He pulled away his hand in shreds. He
    learned not to fondle a tigress. Let us learn not to fondle Satan.
    Let us not be “_ignorant of his devices_” (_2 Cor. 2:11_). It is
    not well to keep loaded firearms in the chimney corner. “They who
    fear the adder’s sting will not come near her hissing.” Talmage:
    “O Lord, help us to hear the serpent’s rattle before we feel its
    fangs.” Ian Maclaren, Cure of Souls, 215—The pastor trembles for a
    soul, “when he sees the destroyer hovering over it like a hawk
    poised in midair, and would have it gathered beneath Christ’s
    wing.”

    Thomas K. Beecher: “Suppose I lived on Broadway where the crowd
    was surging past in both directions all the time. Would I leave my
    doors and windows open, saying to the crowd of strangers: ‘Enter
    my door, pass through my hall, come into my parlor, make
    yourselves at home in my dining-room, go up into my bedchambers’?
    No! I would have my windows and doors barred and locked against
    intruders, to be opened only to me and mine and those I would have
    as companions. Yet here we see foolish men and women stretching
    out their arms and saying to the spirits of the vasty deep: ‘Come
    in, and take possession of me. Write with my hands, think with my
    brain, speak with my lips, walk with my feet, use me as a medium
    for whatever you will.’ God respects the sanctity of man’s spirit.
    Even Christ stands at the door and knocks. Holy Spirit, fill me,
    so that there shall be room for no other!” (_Rev. 3:20_; _Eph.
    5:18_.)





PART V. ANTHROPOLOGY, OR THE DOCTRINE OF MAN.




Chapter I. Preliminary.



I. Man a Creation of God and a Child of God.


The fact of man’s creation is declared in Gen. 1:27—“And God created man
in his own image, in the image of God created he him”; 2:7—“And Jehovah
God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils
the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

(_a_) The Scriptures, on the one hand, negate the idea that man is the
mere product of unreasoning natural forces. They refer his existence to a
cause different from mere nature, namely, the creative act of God.


    Compare _Hebrews 12:9_—“_the Father of spirits_”; _Num.
    16:22_—“_the God of the spirits of all flesh_”; _27:16_—“_Jehovah,
    the God of the spirits of all flesh_”; _Rev. 22:6_—“_the God of
    the spirits of the prophets._” Bruce, The Providential Order,
    25—“Faith in God may remain intact, though we concede that man in
    all his characteristics, physical and psychical, is no exception
    to the universal law of growth, no breach in the continuity of the
    evolutionary process.” By “_mere_ nature” we mean nature apart
    from God. Our previous treatment of the doctrine of creation in
    general has shown that the laws of nature are only the regular
    methods of God, and that the conception of a nature apart from God
    is an irrational one. If the evolution of the lower creation
    cannot be explained without taking into account the originating
    agency of God, much less can the coming into being of man, the
    crown of all created things. Hudson, Divine Pedigree of Man:
    “Spirit in man is linked with, because derived from, God, who is
    spirit.”


(_b_) But, on the other hand, the Scriptures do not disclose the method of
man’s creation. Whether man’s physical system is or is not derived, by
natural descent, from the lower animals, the record of creation does not
inform us. As the command “Let the earth bring forth living creatures”
(Gen. 1:24) does not exclude the idea of mediate creation, through natural
generation, so the forming of man “of the dust of the ground” (Gen. 2:7)
does not in itself determine whether the creation of man’s body was
mediate or immediate.


    We may believe that man sustained to the highest preceding brute
    the same relation which the multiplied bread and fish sustained to
    the five loaves and two fishes (_Mat. 14:19_), or which the wine
    sustained to the water which was transformed at Cana (_John
    2:7-10_), or which the multiplied oil sustained to the original
    oil in the O. T. miracle (_2 K. 4:1-7_). The “_dust_,” before the
    breathing of the spirit into it, may have been animated dust.
    Natural means may have been used, so far as they would go.
    Sterrett, Reason and Authority in Religion, 39—“Our heredity is
    from God, even though it be from lower forms of life, and our goal
    is also God, even though it be through imperfect manhood.”

    Evolution does not make the idea of a Creator superfluous, because
    evolution is only the method of God. It is perfectly consistent
    with a Scriptural doctrine of Creation that man should emerge at
    the proper time, governed by different laws from the brute
    creation yet growing out of the brute, just as the foundation of a
    house built of stone is perfectly consistent with the wooden
    structure built upon it. All depends upon the plan. An atheistic
    and undesigning evolution cannot include man without excluding
    what Christianity regards as essential to man; see Griffith-Jones,
    Ascent through Christ, 43-73. But a theistic evolution can
    recognize the whole process of man’s creation as equally the work
    of nature and the work of God.

    Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 42—“You are not what you have
    come from, but what you have become.” Huxley said of the brutes:
    “Whether _from_ them or not, man is assuredly not _of_ them.”
    Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:289—“The religious dignity of man
    rests after all upon what he _is_, not upon the mode and manner in
    which he has _become_ what he is.” Because he came _from_ a beast,
    it does not follow that he _is_ a beast. Nor does the fact that
    man’s existence can be traced back to a brute ancestry furnish any
    proper reason why the brute should become man. Here is a teleology
    which requires a divine Creatorship.

    J. M. Bronson: “The theist must accept evolution if he would keep
    his argument for the existence of God from the unity of design in
    nature. Unless man is an _end_, he is an _anomaly_. The greatest
    argument for God is the fact that all animate nature is one vast
    and connected unity. Man has developed not _from_ the ape, but
    _away from_ the ape. He was never anything but potential man. He
    did not, as man, come into being until he became a conscious moral
    agent.” This conscious moral nature, which we call personality,
    requires a divine Author, because it surpasses all the powers
    which can be found in the animal creation. Romanes, Mental
    Evolution in Animals, tells us that: 1. Mollusca learn by
    experience; 2. Insects and spiders recognize offspring; 3. Fishes
    make mental association of objects by their similarity; 4.
    Reptiles recognize persons; 5. Hymenoptera, as bees and ants,
    communicate ideas; 6. Birds recognize pictorial representations
    and understand words; 7. Rodents, as rats and foxes, understand
    mechanisms; 8. Monkeys and elephants learn to use tools; 9.
    Anthropoid apes and dogs have indefinite morality.

    But it is definite and not indefinite morality which differences
    man from the brute. Drummond, in his Ascent of Man, concedes that
    man passed through a period when he resembled the ape more than
    any known animal, but at the same time declares that no anthropoid
    ape could develop into a man. The brute can be defined in terms of
    man, but man cannot be defined in terms of the brute. It is
    significant that in insanity the higher endowments of man
    disappear in an order precisely the reverse of that in which,
    according to the development theory, they have been acquired. The
    highest part of man totters first. The last added is first to
    suffer. Man moreover can transmit his own acquisitions to his
    posterity, as the brute cannot. Weismann, Heredity, 2:69—“The
    evolution of music does not depend upon any increase of the
    musical faculty or any alteration in the inherent physical nature
    of man, but solely upon the power of transmitting the intellectual
    achievements of each generation to those which follow. This, more
    than anything, is the cause of the superiority of men over
    animals—this, and not merely human faculty, although it may be
    admitted that this latter is much higher than in animals.” To this
    utterance of Weismann we would add that human progress depends
    quite as much upon man’s power of reception as upon man’s power of
    transmission. Interpretation must equal expression; and, in this
    interpretation of the past, man has a guarantee of the future
    which the brute does not possess.


(_c_) Psychology, however, comes in to help our interpretation of
Scripture. The radical differences between man’s soul and the principle of
intelligence in the lower animals, especially man’s possession of
self-consciousness, general ideas, the moral sense, and the power of
self-determination, show that that which chiefly constitutes him man could
not have been derived, by any natural process of development, from the
inferior creatures. We are compelled, then, to believe that God’s
“breathing into man’s nostrils the breath of life” (Gen. 2:7), though it
was a mediate creation as presupposing existing material in the shape of
animal forms, was yet an immediate creation in the sense that only a
divine reinforcement of the process of life turned the animal into man. In
other words, man came not _from_ the brute, but _through_ the brute, and
the same immanent God who had previously created the brute created also
the man.


    Tennyson, In Memoriam, XLV—“The baby new to earth and sky, What
    time his tender palm is pressed Against the circle of the breast,
    Has never thought that ‘this is I’: But as he grows he gathers
    much, And learns the use of ‘I’ and ‘me,’ And finds ‘I am not what
    I see, And other than the things I touch.’ So rounds he to a
    separate mind From whence clear memory may begin, As thro’ the
    frame that binds him in His isolation grows defined.” Fichte
    called that the birthday of his child, when the child awoke to
    self-consciousness and said “I.” Memory goes back no further than
    language. Knowledge of the ego is objective, before it is
    subjective. The child at first speaks of himself in the third
    person: “Henry did so and so.” Hence most men do not remember what
    happened before their third year, though Samuel Miles Hopkins,
    Memoir, 20, remembered what must have happened when he was only 23
    months old. Only a conscious person remembers, and he remembers
    only as his will exerts itself in attention.

    Jean Paul Richter, quoted in Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 110—“Never
    shall I forget the phenomenon in myself, never till now recited,
    when I stood by the birth of my own self-consciousness, the place
    and time of which are distinct in my memory. On a certain
    forenoon, I stood, a very young child, within the house-door, and
    was looking out toward the wood-pile, as in an instant the inner
    revelation ‘I am I,’ like lightning from heaven, flashed and stood
    brightly before me; in that moment I had seen myself as I, for the
    first time and forever.”

    Höffding, Outlines of Psychology, 3—“The beginning of conscious
    life is to be placed probably before birth.... Sensations only
    faintly and dimly distinguished from the general feeling of
    vegetative comfort and discomfort. Still the experiences undergone
    before birth perhaps suffice to form the foundation of the
    consciousness of an external world.” Hill, Genetic Philosophy,
    282, suggests that this early state, in which the child speaks of
    self in the third person and is devoid of _self_-consciousness,
    corresponds to the brute condition of the race, before it had
    reached self-consciousness, attained language, and become man. In
    the race, however, there was no heredity to predetermine
    self-consciousness—it was a new acquisition, marking transition to
    a superior order of being.

    Connecting these remarks with our present subject, we assert that
    no brute ever yet said, or thought, “I.” With this, then, we may
    begin a series of simple distinctions between man and the brute,
    so far as the immaterial principle in each is concerned. These are
    mainly compiled from writers hereafter mentioned.

    1. The brute is conscious, but man is self-conscious. The brute
    does not objectify self. “If the pig could once say, ‘I am a pig,’
    it would at once and thereby cease to be a pig.” The brute does
    not distinguish itself from its sensations. The brute has
    perception, but only the man has apperception, _i. e._, perception
    accompanied by reference of it to the self to which it belongs.

    2. The brute has only percepts; man has also concepts. The brute
    knows white things, but not whiteness. It remembers things, but
    not thoughts. Man alone has the power of abstraction, _i. e._, the
    power of deriving abstract ideas from particular things or
    experiences.

    3. Hence the brute has no language. “Language is the expression of
    general notions by symbols” (Harris). Words are the symbols of
    concepts. Where there are no concepts there can be no words. The
    parrot utters cries; but “no parrot ever yet spoke a true word.”
    Since language is a sign, it presupposes the existence of an
    intellect capable of understanding the sign,—in short, language is
    the effect of mind, not the cause of mind. See Mivart, in Brit.
    Quar., Oct. 1881:154-172. “The ape’s tongue is eloquent in his own
    dispraise.” James, Psychology, 2:356—“The notion of a sign as
    such, and the general purpose to apply it to everything, is the
    distinctive characteristic of man.” Why do not animals speak?
    Because they have nothing to say, _i. e._, have no general ideas
    which words might express.

    4. The brute forms no judgments, _e. g._, that _this_ is like
    _that_, accompanied with belief. Hence there is no sense of the
    ridiculous, and no laughter. James, Psychology, 2:360—“The brute
    does not associate ideas by similarity.... Genius in man is the
    possession of this power of association in an extreme degree.”

    5. The brute has no reasoning—no sense that _this_ follows from
    _that_, accompanied by a feeling that the sequence is necessary.
    Association of ideas without judgment is the typical process of
    the brute mind, though not that of the mind of man. See Mind,
    5:402-409, 575-581. Man’s dream-life is the best analogue to the
    mental life of the brute.

    6. The brute has no general ideas or intuitions, as of space,
    time, substance, cause, right. Hence there is no generalizing, and
    no proper experience or progress. There is no capacity for
    improvement in animals. The brute cannot be trained, except in
    certain inferior matters of association, where independent
    judgment is not required. No animal makes tools, uses clothes,
    cooks food, breeds other animals for food. No hunter’s dog,
    however long its observation of its master, ever learned to put
    wood on a fire to keep itself from freezing. Even the rudest stone
    implements show a break in continuity and mark the introduction of
    man; see J. P. Cook, Credentials of Science, 14. “The dog can see
    the printed page as well as a man can, but no dog was ever taught
    to read a book. The animal cannot create in its own mind the
    thoughts of the writer. The physical in man, on the contrary, is
    only an aid to the spiritual. Education is a trained capacity to
    discern the inner meaning and deeper relations of things. So the
    universe is but a symbol and expression of spirit, a garment in
    which an invisible Power has robed his majesty and glory”; see S.
    S. Times, April 7, 1900. In man, mind first became supreme.

    7. The brute has determination, but not self-determination. There
    is no freedom of choice, no conscious forming of a purpose, and no
    self-movement toward a predetermined end. The donkey is
    determined, but not self-determined; he is the victim of heredity
    and environment; he acts only as he is acted upon. Harris, Philos.
    Basis of Theism, 537-554—“Man, though implicated in nature through
    his bodily organization, is in his personality supernatural; the
    brute is wholly submerged in nature.... Man is like a ship in the
    sea—in it, yet above it—guiding his course, by observing the
    heavens, even against wind and current. A brute has no such power;
    it is in nature like a balloon, wholly immersed in air, and driven
    about by its currents, with no power of steering.” Calderwood,
    Philosophy of Evolution, chapter on Right and Wrong: “The grand
    distinction of human life is self-control in the field of
    action—control over all the animal impulses, so that these do not
    spontaneously and of themselves determine activity” [as they do in
    the brute]. By what Mivart calls a process of “inverse
    anthropomorphism,” we clothe the brute with the attributes of
    freedom; but it does not really possess them. Just as we do not
    transfer to God all our human imperfections, so we ought not to
    transfer all our human perfections to the brute, “reading our full
    selves in life of lower forms.” The brute has no power to choose
    between motives; it simply obeys motive. The necessitarian
    philosophy, therefore, is a correct and excellent philosophy for
    the brute. But man’s power of initiative—in short, man’s free
    will—renders it impossible to explain his higher nature as a mere
    natural development from the inferior creatures. Even Huxley has
    said that, taking mind into the account, there is between man and
    the highest beasts an “enormous gulf,” a “divergence immeasurable”
    and “practically infinite.”

    8. The brute has no conscience and no religious nature. No dog
    ever brought back to the butcher the meat it had stolen. “The
    aspen trembles without fear, and dogs skulk without guilt.” The
    dog mentioned by Darwin, whose behavior in presence of a newspaper
    moved by the wind seemed to testify to “a sense of the
    supernatural,” was merely exhibiting the irritation due to the
    sense of an unknown future; see James, Will to Believe, 79. The
    bearing of flogged curs does not throw light upon the nature of
    conscience. If ethics is not hedonism, if moral obligation is not
    a refined utilitarianism, if the right is something distinct from
    the good we get out of it, then there must be a flaw in the theory
    that man’s conscience is simply a development of brute instincts;
    and a reinforcement of brute life from the divine source of life
    must be postulated in order to account for the appearance of man.
    Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 165-167—“Is the spirit of man derived
    from the soul of the animal? No, for neither one of these has
    self-existence. Both are self-differentiations of God. The latter
    is simply God’s preparation for the former.” Calderwood, Evolution
    and Man’s Place in Nature, 337, speaks of “the impossibility of
    tracing the origin of man’s rational life to evolution from a
    lower life.... There are no physical forces discoverable in nature
    sufficient to account for the appearance of this life.” Shaler,
    Interpretation of Nature, 186—“Man’s place has been won by an
    entire change in the limitations of his psychic development....
    The old bondage of the mind to the body is swept away.... In this
    new freedom we find the one dominant characteristic of man, the
    feature which entitles us to class him as an entirely new class of
    animal.”

    John Burroughs, Ways of Nature: “Animal life parallels human life
    at many points, but it is in another plane. Something guides the
    lower animals, but it is not thought; something restrains them,
    but it is not judgment; they are provident without prudence; they
    are active without industry; they are skilful without practice;
    they are wise without knowledge; they are rational without reason;
    they are deceptive without guile.... When they are joyful, they
    sing or they play; when they are distressed, they moan or they
    cry; ... and yet I do not suppose they experience the emotion of
    joy or sorrow, or anger or love, as we do, because these feelings
    in them do not involve reflection, memory, and what we call the
    higher nature, as with us. Their instinct is intelligence directed
    outward, never inward, as in man. They share with man the emotions
    of his animal nature, but not of his moral or æsthetic nature;
    they know no altruism, no moral code.” Mr. Burroughs maintains
    that we have no proof that animals in a state of nature can
    reflect, form abstract ideas, associate cause and effect. Animals,
    for instance, that store up food for the winter simply follow a
    provident instinct but do not take thought for the future, any
    more than does the tree that forms new buds for the coming season.
    He sums up his position as follows: “To attribute human motives
    and faculties to the animals is to caricature them; but to put us
    in such relation to them that we feel their kinship, that we see
    their lives embosomed in the same iron necessity as our own, that
    we see in their minds a humbler manifestation of the same psychic
    power and intelligence that culminates and is conscious of itself
    in man—that, I take it, is the true humanization.” We assent to
    all this except the ascription to human life of the same iron
    necessity that rules the animal creation. Man is man, because his
    free will transcends the limitations of the brute.

    While we grant, then, that man is the last stage in the
    development of life and that he has a brute ancestry, we regard
    him also as the offspring of God. The same God who was the author
    of the brute became in due time the creator of man. Though man
    came _through_ the brute, he did not come _from_ the brute, but
    from God, the Father of spirits and the author of all life.
    Œdipus’ terrific oracle: “Mayst thou ne’er know the truth of what
    thou art!” might well be uttered to those who believe only in the
    brute origin of man. Pascal says it is dangerous to let man see
    too clearly that he is on a level with the animals unless at the
    same time we show him his greatness. The doctrine that the brute
    is imperfect man is logically connected with the doctrine that man
    is a perfect brute. Thomas Carlyle: “If this brute philosophy is
    true, then man should go on all fours, and not lay claim to the
    dignity of being moral.” G. F. Wright, Ant. and Origin of Human
    Race, lecture IX—“One or other of the lower animals may exhibit
    all the faculties used by a child of fifteen months. The
    difference may seem very little, but what there is is very
    important. It is like the difference in direction in the early
    stages of two separating curves, which go on forever diverging....
    The probability is that both in his bodily and in his mental
    development man appeared as a _sport_ in nature, and leaped at
    once in some single pair from the plane of irrational being to the
    possession of the higher powers that have ever since characterized
    him and dominated both his development and his history.”

    Scripture seems to teach the doctrine that man’s nature is the
    creation of God. _Gen. 2:7_—“_Jehovah God formed man of the dust
    of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;
    and man became a living soul_”—appears, says Hovey (State of the
    Impen. Dead, 14), “to distinguish the vital informing principle of
    human nature from its material part, pronouncing the former to be
    more directly from God, and more akin to him, than the latter.” So
    in _Zech. 12:1_—“_Jehovah, who stretcheth forth the heavens, and
    layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man
    within him_”—the soul is recognized as distinct in nature from the
    body, and of a dignity and value far beyond those of any material
    organism. _Job 32:8_—“_there is a spirit in man, and the breath of
    the Almighty giveth them understanding_”; _Eccl. 12:7_—“_the dust
    returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto
    God who gave it._” A sober view of the similarities and
    differences between man and the lower animals may be found in
    Lloyd Morgan, Animal Life and Intelligence. See also Martineau,
    Types, 2:65, 140, and Study, 1:180; 2:9, 13, 184, 350; Hopkins,
    Outline Study of Man, 8:23; Chadbourne, Instinct, 187-211; Porter,
    Hum. Intellect, 384, 386, 397; Bascom, Science of Mind, 295-305;
    Mansel, Metaphysics, 49, 50; Princeton Rev., Jan. 1881:104-128;
    Henslow, in Nature, May 1, 1879:21, 22; Ferrier, Remains, 2:39;
    Argyll, Unity of Nature, 117-119; Bib. Sac., 29:275-282; Max
    Müller, Lectures on Philos. of Language, no. 1, 2, 3; F. W.
    Robertson, Lectures on Genesis, 21; Le Conte, in Princeton Rev.,
    May, 1884:238-261; Lindsay, Mind in Lower Animals; Romanes, Mental
    Evolution in Animals; Fiske, The Destiny of Man.


(_d_) Comparative physiology, moreover, has, up to the present time, done
nothing to forbid the extension of this doctrine to man’s body. No single
instance has yet been adduced of the transformation of one animal species
into another, either by natural or artificial selection; much less has it
been demonstrated that the body of the brute has ever been developed into
that of man. All evolution implies progress and reinforcement of life, and
is unintelligible except as the immanent God gives new impulses to the
process. Apart from the direct agency of God, the view that man’s physical
system is descended by natural generation from some ancestral simian form
can be regarded only as an irrational hypothesis. Since the soul, then, is
an immediate creation of God, and the forming of man’s body is mentioned
by the Scripture writer in direct connection with this creation of the
spirit, man’s body was in this sense an immediate creation also.


    For the theory of natural selection, see Darwin, Origin of
    Species, 398-424, and Descent of Man, 2:368-387; Huxley, Critiques
    and Addresses, 241-269, Man’s Place in Nature, 71-138, Lay
    Sermons, 323, and art.: Biology, in Encyc. Britannica, 9th ed.;
    Romanes, Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution. The theory
    holds that, in the struggle for existence, the varieties best
    adapted to their surroundings succeed in maintaining and
    reproducing themselves, while the rest die out. Thus, by gradual
    change and improvement of lower into higher forms of life, man has
    been evolved. We grant that Darwin has disclosed one of the
    important features of God’s method. We concede the partial truth
    of his theory. We find it supported by the vertebrate structure
    and nervous organization which man has in common with the lower
    animals; by the facts of embryonic development; of rudimentary
    organs; of common diseases and remedies; and of reversion to
    former types. But we refuse to regard natural selection as a
    complete explanation of the history of life, and that for the
    following reasons:

    1. It gives no account of the origin of substance, nor of the
    origin of variations. Darwinism simply says that “round stones
    will roll down hill further than flat ones” (Gray, Natural Science
    and Religion). It accounts for the selection, not for the
    creation, of forms. “Natural selection originates nothing. It is a
    destructive, not a creative, principle. If we must idealize it as
    a positive force, we must think of it, not as the preserver of the
    fittest, but as the destroyer, that follows ever in the wake of
    creation and devours the failures; the scavenger of creation, that
    takes out of the way forms which are not fit to live and reproduce
    themselves” (Johnson, on Theistic Evolution, in Andover Review,
    April, 1884:363-381). Natural selection is only unintelligent
    repression. Darwin’s Origin of Species is in fact “not the
    Genesis, but the Exodus, of living forms.” Schurman: “The
    _survival_ of the fittest does nothing to explain the _arrival_ of
    the fittest”; see also DeVries, Species and Varieties, _ad finem_.
    Darwin himself acknowledged that “Our ignorance of the laws of
    variation is profound.... The cause of each slight variation and
    of each monstrosity lies much more in the nature or constitution
    of the organism than in the nature of the surrounding conditions”
    (quoted by Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 280-301). Weismann has
    therefore modified the Darwinian theory by asserting that there
    would be no development unless there were a spontaneous, innate
    tendency to variation. In this innate tendency we see, not mere
    nature, but the work of an originating and superintending God. E.
    M. Caillard, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893:873-881—“Spirit was the
    moulding power, from the beginning, of those lower forms which
    would ultimately become man. Instead of the physical derivation of
    the soul, we propose the spiritual derivation of the body.”

    2. Some of the most important forms appear suddenly in the
    geological record, without connecting links to unite them with the
    past. The first fishes are the Ganoid, large in size and advanced
    in type. There are no intermediate gradations between the ape and
    man. Huxley, in Man’s Place in Nature, 94, tells us that the
    lowest gorilla has a skull capacity of 24 cubic inches, whereas
    the highest gorilla has 34-½. Over against this, the lowest man
    has a skull capacity of 62; though men with less than 65 are
    invariably idiotic; the highest man has 114. Professor Burt G.
    Wilder of Cornell University: “The largest ape-brain is only half
    as large as the smallest normal human.” Wallace, Darwinism,
    458—“The average human brain weighs 48 or 49 ounces; the average
    ape’s brain is only 18 ounces.” The brain of Daniel Webster
    weighed 53 ounces; but Dr. Bastian tells of an imbecile whose
    intellectual deficiency was congenital, yet whose brain weighed 55
    ounces. Large heads do not always indicate great intellect.
    Professor Virchow points out that the Greeks, one of the most
    intellectual of nations, are also one of the smallest-headed of
    all. Bain: “While the size of the brain increases in arithmetical
    proportion, intellectual range increases in geometrical
    proportion.”

    Respecting the Enghis and Neanderthal crania, Huxley says: “The
    fossil remains of man hitherto discovered do not seem to me to
    take us appreciably nearer to that lower pithecoid form by the
    modification of which he has probably become what he is.... In
    vain have the links which should bind man to the monkey been
    sought: not a single one is there to show. The so-called
    _Protanthropos_ who should exhibit this link has not been
    found.... None have been found that stood nearer the monkey than
    the men of to-day.” Huxley argues that the difference between man
    and the gorilla is smaller than that between the gorilla and some
    apes; if the gorilla and the apes constitute one family and have a
    common origin, may not man and the gorilla have a common ancestry
    also? We reply that the space between the lowest ape and the
    highest gorilla is filled in with numberless intermediate
    gradations. The space between the lowest man and the highest man
    is also filled in with many types that shade off one into the
    other. But the space between the highest gorilla and the lowest
    man is absolutely vacant; there are no intermediate types; no
    connecting links between the ape and man have yet been found.

    Professor Virchow has also very recently expressed his belief that
    no relics of any predecessor of man have yet been discovered. He
    said: “In my judgment, no skull hitherto discovered can be
    regarded as that of a predecessor of man. In the course of the
    last fifteen years we have had opportunities of examining skulls
    of all the various races of mankind—even of the most savage
    tribes; and among them all no group has been observed differing in
    its essential characters from the general human type.... Out of
    all the skulls found in the lake-dwellings there is not one that
    lies outside the boundaries of our present population.” Dr. Eugene
    Dubois has discovered in the Post-pliocene deposits of the island
    of Java the remains of a preeminently hominine anthropoid which he
    calls _Pithecanthropus erectus_. Its cranial capacity approaches
    the physiological minimum in man, and is double that of the
    gorilla. The thigh bone is in form and dimensions the absolute
    analogue of that of man, and gives evidence of having supported a
    habitually erect body. Dr. Dubois unhesitatingly places this
    extinct Javan ape as the intermediate form between man and the
    true anthropoid apes. Haeckel (in The Nation, Sept. 15, 1898) and
    Keane (in Man Past and Present, 3), regard the _Pithecanthropus_
    as a “missing link.” But “Nature” regards it as the remains of a
    human microcephalous idiot. In addition to all this, it deserves
    to be noticed that man does not degenerate as we travel back in
    time. “The Enghis skull, the contemporary of the mammoth and the
    cave-bear, is as large as the average of to-day, and might have
    belonged to a philosopher.” The monkey nearest to man in physical
    form is no more intelligent than the elephant or the bee.

    3. There are certain facts which mere heredity cannot explain,
    such for example as the origin of the working-bee from the queen
    and the drone, neither of which produces honey. The working-bee,
    moreover, does not transmit the honey-making instinct to its
    posterity; for it is sterile and childless. If man had descended
    from the conscienceless brute, we should expect him, when
    degraded, to revert to his primitive type. On the contrary, he
    does not revert to the brute, but dies out instead. The theory can
    give no explanation of beauty in the lowest forms of life, such as
    molluscs and diatoms. Darwin grants that this beauty must be of
    use to its possessor, in order to be consistent with its
    origination through natural selection. But no such use has yet
    been shown; for the creatures which possess the beauty often live
    in the dark, or have no eyes to see. So, too, the large brain of
    the savage is beyond his needs, and is inconsistent with the
    principle of natural selection which teaches that no organ can
    permanently attain a size unrequired by its needs and its
    environment. See Wallace, Natural Selection, 338-360. G. F.
    Wright, Man and the Glacial Epoch, 242-301—“That man’s bodily
    organization is in some way a development from some extinct member
    of the animal kingdom allied to the anthropoid apes is scarcely
    any longer susceptible of doubt.... But he is certainly not
    descended from any _existing_ species of anthropoid apes.... When
    once _mind_ became supreme, the bodily adjustment must have been
    rapid, if indeed it is not necessary to suppose that the bodily
    preparation for the highest mental faculties was instantaneous, or
    by what is called in nature a _sport_.” With this statement of Dr.
    Wright we substantially agree, and therefore differ from Shedd
    when he says that there is just as much reason for supposing that
    monkeys are degenerate men, as that men are improved monkeys.
    Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 1:1:249, seems to have hinted the
    view of Dr. Shedd: “The strain of man’s bred out into baboon and
    monkey.” Bishop Wilberforce asked Huxley whether he was related to
    an ape on his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side. Huxley replied
    that he should prefer such a relationship to having for an
    ancestor a man who used his position as a minister of religion to
    ridicule truth which he did not comprehend. “Mamma, am I descended
    from a monkey?” “I do not know, William, I never met any of your
    father’s people.”

    4. No species is yet known to have been produced either by
    artificial or by natural selection. Huxley, Lay Sermons, 323—“It
    is not absolutely proven that a group of animals having all the
    characters exhibited by species in nature has ever been originated
    by selection, whether artificial or natural”; Man’s Place in
    Nature, 107—“Our acceptance of the Darwinian hypothesis must be
    provisional, so long as one link in the chain of evidence is
    wanting; and so long as all the animals and plants certainly
    produced by selective breeding from a common stock are fertile
    with one another, that link will be wanting.” Huxley has more
    recently declared that the missing proof has been found in the
    descent of the modern horse with one toe, from Hipparion with two
    toes, Anchitherium with three, and Orohippus with four. Even if
    this were demonstrated, we should still maintain that the only
    proper analogue was to be found in that artificial selection by
    which man produces new varieties, and that natural selection can
    bring about no useful results and show no progress, unless it be
    the method and revelation of a wise and designing mind. In other
    words, selection implies intelligence and will, and therefore
    cannot be exclusively natural. Mivart, Man and Apes, 192—“If it is
    inconceivable and impossible for man’s body to be developed or to
    exist without his informing soul, we conclude that, as no natural
    process accounts for the different kind of soul—one capable of
    articulately expressing general conceptions,—so no merely natural
    process can account for the origin of the body informed by it—a
    body to which such an intellectual faculty was so essentially and
    intimately related.” Thus Mivart, who once considered that
    evolution could account for man’s body, now holds instead that it
    can account neither for man’s body nor for his soul, and calls
    natural selection “a puerile hypothesis” (Lessons from Nature,
    300; Essays and Criticisms, 2:289-314).


(_e_) While we concede, then, that man has a brute ancestry, we make two
claims by way of qualification and explanation: first, that the laws of
organic development which have been followed in man’s origin are only the
methods of God and proofs of his creatorship; secondly, that man, when he
appears upon the scene, is no longer brute, but a self-conscious and
self-determining being, made in the image of his Creator and capable of
free moral decision between good and evil.


    Both man’s original creation and his new creation in regeneration
    are creations from within, rather than from without. In both
    cases, God builds the new upon the basis of the old. Man is not a
    product of blind forces, but is rather an emanation from that same
    divine life of which the brute was a lower manifestation. The fact
    that God used preëxisting material does not prevent his authorship
    of the result. The wine in the miracle was not water because water
    had been used in the making of it, nor is man a brute because the
    brute has made some contributions to his creation. Professor John
    H. Strong: “Some who freely allow the presence and power of God in
    the age-long process seem nevertheless not clearly to see that, in
    the final result of finished man, God successfully revealed
    himself. God’s work was never really or fully done; man was a
    compound of brute and man; and a compound of two such elements
    could not be said to possess the qualities of either. God did not
    really succeed in bringing moral personality to birth. The
    evolution was incomplete; man is still on all fours; he cannot
    sin, because he was begotten of the brute; no fall, and no
    regeneration, is conceivable. We assert, on the contrary, that,
    though man came _through_ the brute, he did not come _from_ the
    brute. He came from God, whose immanent life he reveals, whose
    image he reflects in a finished moral personality. Because God
    succeeded, a fall was possible. We can believe in the age-long
    creation of evolution, provided only that this evolution completed
    itself. With that proviso, sin remains and the fall.” See also A.
    H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 163-180.

    An atheistic and unteleological evolution is a reversion to the
    savage view of animals as brethren, and to the heathen idea of a
    sphynx-man growing out of the brute. Darwin himself did not deny
    God’s authorship. He closes his first great book with the
    declaration that life, with all its potencies, was originally
    breathed “by the Creator” into the first forms of organic being.
    And in his letters he refers with evident satisfaction to Charles
    Kingsley’s finding nothing in the theory which was inconsistent
    with an earnest Christian faith. It was not Darwin, but disciples
    like Haeckel, who put forward the theory as making the hypothesis
    of a Creator superfluous. We grant the principle of evolution, but
    we regard it as only the method of the divine intelligence, and
    must moreover consider it as preceded by an original creative act,
    introducing vegetable and animal life, and as supplemented by
    other creative acts, at the introduction of man and at the
    incarnation of Christ. Chadwick, Old and New Unitarianism,
    33—“What seemed to wreck our faith in human nature [its origin
    from the brute] has been its grandest confirmation. For nothing
    argues the essential dignity of man more clearly than his triumph
    over the limitations of his brute inheritance, while the long way
    that he has come is prophecy of the moral heights undreamed of
    that await his tireless feet.” All this is true if we regard human
    nature, not as an undesigned result of atheistic evolution, but as
    the efflux and reflection of the divine personality. R. E.
    Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 29, 1906—“The greatest fact in
    heredity is our descent from God, and the greatest fact in
    environment is his presence in human life at every point.”

    The atheistic conception of evolution is well satirized in the
    verse: “There was an ape in days that were earlier; Centuries
    passed and his hair became curlier; Centuries more and his thumb
    gave a twist, And he was a man and a Positivist.” That this
    conception is not a necessary conclusion of modern science, is
    clear from the statements of Wallace, the author with Darwin of
    the theory of natural selection. Wallace believes that man’s body
    was developed from the brute, but he thinks there have been three
    breaks in continuity: 1. the appearance of life; 2. the appearance
    of sensation and consciousness; and 3. the appearance of spirit.
    These seem to correspond to 1. vegetable; 2. animal; and 3. human
    life. He thinks natural selection may account for man’s place _in_
    nature, but not for man’s place _above_ nature, as a spiritual
    being. See Wallace, Darwinism, 445-478—“I fully accept Mr.
    Darwin’s conclusion as to the essential identity of man’s bodily
    structure with that of the higher mammalia, and his descent from
    some ancestral form common to man and the anthropoid apes.” But
    the conclusion that man’s higher faculties have also been derived
    from the lower animals “appears to me not to be supported by
    adequate evidence, and to be directly opposed to many
    well-ascertained facts” (461).... The mathematical, the artistic
    and musical faculties, are results, not causes, of
    advancement,—they do not help in the struggle for existence and
    could not have been developed by natural selection. The
    introduction of life (vegetable), of consciousness (animal), of
    higher faculty (human), point clearly to a world of spirit, to
    which the world of matter is subordinate (474-476).... Man’s
    intellectual and moral faculties could not have been developed
    from the animal, but must have had another origin; and for this
    origin we can find an adequate cause only in the world of spirit.

    Wallace, Natural Selection, 338—“The average cranial capacity of
    the lowest savage is probably not less than five-sixths of that of
    the highest civilized races, while the brain of the anthropoid
    apes scarcely amounts to one-third of that of man, in both cases
    taking the average; or the proportions may be represented by the
    following figures: anthropoid apes, 10; savages, 26; civilized
    man, 32.” _Ibid._, 360—“The inference I would draw from this class
    of phenomena is, that a superior intelligence has guided the
    development of man in a definite direction and for a special
    purpose, just as man guides the development of many animal and
    vegetable forms.... The controlling action of a higher
    intelligence is a necessary part of the laws of nature, just as
    the action of all surrounding organisms is one of the agencies in
    organic development,—else the laws which govern the material
    universe are insufficient for the production of man.” Sir Wm.
    Thompson: “That man could be evolved out of inferior animals is
    the wildest dream of materialism, a pure assumption which offends
    me alike by its folly and by its arrogance.” Hartmann, in his
    Anthropoid Apes, 302-306, while not despairing of “the possibility
    of discovering the true link between the world of man and
    mammals,” declares that “that purely hypothetical being, the
    common ancestor of man and apes, is still to be found,” and that
    “man cannot have descended from any of the fossil species which
    have hitherto come to our notice, nor yet from any of the species
    of apes now extant.” See Dana, Amer. Journ. Science and Arts,
    1876:251, and Geology, 603, 604; Lotze, Mikrokosmos, vol. I, bk.
    3, chap. 1; Mivart, Genesis of Species, 202-222, 259-307, Man and
    Apes, 88, 149-192, Lessons from Nature, 128-242, 280-301, The Cat.
    and Encyclop. Britannica, art.: Apes; Quatrefages, Natural History
    of Man, 64-87; Bp. Temple, Bampton Lect., 1884:161-189; Dawson,
    Story of the Earth and Man, 321-329; Duke of Argyll, Primeval Man,
    38-75; Asa Gray, Natural Science and Religion; Schmid, Theories of
    Darwin, 115-140; Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 59; McIlvaine,
    Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 55-86; Bible Commentary, 1:43;
    Martensen, Dogmatics, 136; LeConte, in Princeton Rev., Nov.
    1878:776-803; Zöckler, Urgeschichte, 81-105; Shedd, Dogm. Theol.,
    1:499-515. Also, see this Compendium, pages 392, 393.


(_f_) The truth that man is the offspring of God implies the correlative
truth of a common divine Fatherhood. God is Father of all men, in that he
originates and sustains them as personal beings like in nature to himself.
Even toward sinners God holds this natural relation of Father. It is his
fatherly love, indeed, which provides the atonement. Thus the demands of
holiness are met and the prodigal is restored to the privileges of sonship
which have been forfeited by transgression. This natural Fatherhood,
therefore, does not exclude, but prepares the way for, God’s special
Fatherhood toward those who have been regenerated by his Spirit and who
have believed on his Son; indeed, since all God’s creations take place in
and through Christ, there is a natural and physical sonship of all men, by
virtue of their relation to Christ, the eternal Son, which antedates and
prepares the way for the spiritual sonship of those who join themselves to
him by faith. Man’s natural sonship underlies the history of the fall, and
qualifies the doctrine of Sin.


    Texts referring to God’s natural and common Fatherhood are: _Mal.
    2:10_—“_Have we not all one father_ [Abraham]? _hath not one God
    created us?_” _Luke 3:38_—“_Adam, the son of God_”; _15:11-32_—the
    parable of the prodigal son, in which the father is father even
    before the prodigal returns; _John 3:16_—“_God so loved the world,
    that he gave his only begotten Son_”; _John 15:6_—“_If a man abide
    not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and they
    gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are
    burned_”;—these words imply a natural union of all men with
    Christ,—otherwise they would teach that those who are spiritually
    united to him can perish everlastingly. _Acts 17:28_—“_For we are
    also his offspring_”—words addressed by Paul to a heathen
    audience; _Col. 1:16, 17_—“_in him were all things created ... and
    in him all things consist_”; _Heb. 12:9_—“_the Father of
    spirits._” Fatherhood, in this larger sense, implies: 1.
    Origination; 2. Impartation of life; 3. Sustentation; 4. Likeness
    in faculties and powers; 5. Government; 6. Care; 7. Love. In all
    these respects God is the Father of all men, and his fatherly love
    is both preserving and atoning. God’s natural fatherhood is
    mediated by Christ, through whom all things were made, and in whom
    all things, even humanity, consist. We are naturally children of
    God, as we were _created_ in Christ; we are spiritually sons of
    God, as we have been _created anew_ in Christ Jesus. G. W.
    Northrop: “God never _becomes_ Father to any men or class of men;
    he only becomes a _reconciled_ and _complacent_ Father to those
    who become ethically like him. Men are not sons in the full ideal
    sense until they comport themselves as sons of God.” Chapman,
    Jesus Christ and the Present Age, 39—“While God is the Father of
    all men, all men are not the children of God: in other words, God
    always realizes completely the idea of Father to every man; but
    the majority of men realize only partially the idea of sonship.”

    Texts referring to the special Fatherhood of grace are: _John
    1:12, 13_—“_as many as received him, to them gave he the right to
    become children of God, even to them that believe on his name; who
    were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the
    will of man, but of God_”; _Rom. 8:14_—“_for as many as are led by
    the Spirit of God, these are sons of God_”; _15_—“_ye received the
    spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father_”; _2 Cor.
    6:17_—“_Come ye out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the
    Lord, and touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you, and will
    be to you a Father, and ye shall be to me sons and daughters,
    saith the Lord Almighty_”; _Eph. 1:5, 6_—“_having foreordained us
    unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto himself_”; _3:14,
    15_—“_the Father, from whom every family_ [marg. “fatherhood”] _in
    heaven and on earth is named_” (= every race among angels or
    men—so Meyer, Romans, 158, 159); _Gal 3:26_—“_for ye are all sons
    of God, through faith, in Christ Jesus_”; _4:6_—“_And because ye
    are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts,
    crying, Abba, Father_”; _1 John 3:1, 2_—“_Behold what manner of
    love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called
    children of God; __ and such we are.... Beloved, now are we
    children of God._” The sonship of the race is only rudimentary.
    The actual realization of sonship is possible only through Christ.
    _Gal. 4:1-7_ intimates a universal sonship, but a sonship in which
    the child “_differeth nothing from a bondservant though he is lord
    of all_,” and needs still to “_receive the adoption of sons_.”
    Simon, Reconciliation, 81—“It is one thing to be a father; another
    to discharge all the fatherly functions. Human fathers sometimes
    fail to behave like fathers for reasons lying solely in
    themselves; sometimes because of hindrances in the conduct or
    character of their children. No father can normally discharge his
    fatherly functions toward children who are unchildlike. So even
    the rebellious son is a son, but he does not act like a son.”
    Because all men are naturally sons of God, it does not follow that
    all men will be saved. Many who are naturally sons of God are not
    spiritually sons of God; they are only “_servants_” who “_abide
    not in the house forever_” (_John 8:35_). God is their Father, but
    they have yet to “_become_” his children (_Mat. 5:45_).

    The controversy between those who maintain and those who deny that
    God is the Father of all men is a mere logomachy. God is
    physically and naturally the Father of all men; he is morally and
    spiritually the Father only of those who have been renewed by his
    Spirit. All men are sons of God in a lower sense by virtue of
    their natural union with Christ; only those are sons of God in the
    higher sense who have joined themselves by faith to Christ in a
    spiritual union. We can therefore assent to much that is said by
    those who deny the universal divine fatherhood, as, for example,
    C. M. Mead, in Am. Jour. Theology, July, 1897:577-600, who
    maintains that sonship consists in spiritual kinship with God, and
    who quotes, in support of this view, _John 8:41-44_—“_If God were
    your Father, ye would love me.... Ye are of your father, the
    devil_” = the Fatherhood of God is not universal; _Mat. 5:44,
    45_—“_Love your enemies ... in order that ye may become sons of
    your Father who is in heaven_”; _John 1:12_—“_as many as received
    him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to
    them that believe on his name._” Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit,
    103—“That God has created all men does not constitute them his
    sons in the evangelical sense of the word. The sonship on which
    the N. T. dwells so constantly is based solely on the experience
    of the new birth, while the doctrine of universal sonship rests
    either on a daring denial or a daring assumption—the denial of the
    universal fall of man through sin, or the assumption of the
    universal regeneration of man through the Spirit. In either case
    the teaching belongs to ‘_another gospel_’ (_Gal. 1:7_), the
    recompense of whose preaching is not a beatitude, but an
    ‘_anathema_’ (_Gal 1:8._)”

    But we can also agree with much that is urged by the opposite
    party, as for example, Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:193—“God does
    not _become_ the Father, but _is_ the heavenly Father, even of
    those who become his sons.... This Fatherhood of God, instead of
    the kingship which was the dominant idea of the Jews, Jesus made
    the primary doctrine. The relation is ethical, not the Fatherhood
    of mere origination, and therefore only those who live aright are
    true sons of God.... 209—Mere kingship, or exaltation above the
    world, led to Pharisaic legal servitude and external ceremony and
    to Alexandrian philosophical speculation. The Fatherhood
    apprehended and announced by Jesus was essentially a relation of
    love and holiness.” A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 116-120—“There
    is something sacred in humanity. But systems of theology once
    began with the essential and natural worthlessness of man.... If
    there is no Fatherhood, then selfishness is logical. But
    Fatherhood carries with it identity of nature between the parent
    and the child. Therefore every laborer is of the nature of God,
    and he who has the nature of God cannot be treated like the
    products of factory and field.... All the children of God are by
    nature partakers of the life of God. They are called ‘_children of
    wrath_’ (_Eph. 2:3_), or ‘_of perdition_’ (_John 17:12_), only to
    indicate that their proper relations and duties have been
    violated.... Love for man is dependent on something worthy of
    love, and that is found in man’s essential divinity.” We object to
    this last statement, as attributing to man at the beginning what
    can come to him only through grace. Man was indeed created in
    Christ (_Col. 1:16_) and was a son of God by virtue of his union
    with Christ (_Luke 3:38_; _John 15:6_). But since man has sinned
    and has renounced his sonship, it can be restored and realized. In
    a moral and spiritual sense, only through the atoning work of
    Christ and the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit (_Eph.
    2:10_—“_created in Christ Jesus for good works_”; _2 Pet
    1:4_—“_his precious and exceeding great promises; that through
    these ye may become partakers of the divine nature_”).

    Many who deny the universal Fatherhood of God refuse to carry
    their doctrine to its logical extreme. To be consistent they
    should forbid the unconverted to offer the Lord’s Prayer or even
    to pray at all. A mother who did not believe God to be the Father
    of all actually said: “My children are not converted, and if I
    were to teach them the Lord’s Prayer, I must teach them to say:
    ‘Our father who art in hell’; for they are only children of the
    devil.” Papers on the question: Is God the Father of all Men? are
    to be found in the Proceedings of the Baptist Congress,
    1896:106-136. Among these the essay of F. H. Rowley asserts God’s
    universal Fatherhood upon the grounds: 1. Man is created in the
    image of God; 2. God’s fatherly treatment of man, especially in
    the life of Christ among men; 3. God’s universal claim on man for
    his filial love and trust; 4. Only God’s Fatherhood makes
    incarnation possible, for this implies oneness of nature between
    God and man. To these we may add: 5. The atoning death of Christ
    could be efficacious only upon the ground of a common nature in
    Christ and in humanity; and 6. The regenerating work of the Holy
    Spirit is intelligible only as the restoration of a filial
    relation which was native to man, but which his sin had put into
    abeyance. For denial that God is Father to any but the regenerate,
    see Candlish, Fatherhood of God; Wright, Fatherhood of God. For
    advocacy of the universal Fatherhood, see Crawford, Fatherhood of
    God; Lidgett, Fatherhood of God.



II. Unity of the Human Race.


(_a_) The Scriptures teach that the whole human race is descended from a
single pair.


    _Gen. 1:27, 28_—“_And God created man in his own image, in the
    image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And
    God blessed them: and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and
    multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it_”; _2:7_—“_And
    Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed
    into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living
    soul_”; _22_—“_and the rib, which Jehovah God had taken from the
    man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man_”; _3:20_—“_And
    the man called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of
    all living_” = even Eve is traced back to Adam; _9:19_—“_These
    three were the sons of Noah; and of these was the whole earth
    overspread._” Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 110—“Logically, it seems
    easier to account for the divergence of what was at first one,
    than for the union of what was at first heterogeneous.”


(_b_) This truth lies at the foundation of Paul’s doctrine of the organic
unity of mankind in the first transgression, and of the provision of
salvation for the race in Christ.


    _Rom. 5:12_—“_Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the
    world, and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men,
    for that all sinned_”; _19_—“_For as through the one man’s
    disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the
    obedience of the one shall the many be made righteous_”; _1 Cor.
    15:21, 22_—“_For since by man came death, by man came also the
    resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in
    Christ shall all be made alive_”; _Heb. 2:16_—“_For verily not of
    angels doth he take hold, but he taketh hold of the seed of
    Abraham._” One of the most eminent ethnologists and
    anthropologists, Prof. D. G. Brinton, said not long before his
    death that all scientific research and teaching tended to the
    conviction that mankind has descended from one pair.


(_c_) This descent of humanity from a single pair also constitutes the
ground of man’s obligation of natural brotherhood to every member of the
race.


    _Acts 17:26_—“_he made of one every nation of men to dwell on all
    the face of the earth_”—here the Rev. Vers. omits the word
    “_blood_” (“_made of one blood_”—Auth. Vers.). The word to be
    supplied is possibly “father,” but more probably “body”; _cf._
    _Heb. 2:11_—“_for both he that sanctifieth and they that are
    sanctified are all of one_ [father or body]: _for which cause he
    is not ashamed to call them brethren, saying, I will declare thy
    name unto my brethren, In the midst of the congregation will I
    sing thy praise._”

    Winchell, in his Preadamites, has recently revived the theory
    broached in 1655 by Peyrerius, that there were men before Adam:
    “Adam is descended from a black race—not the black races from
    Adam.” Adam is simply “the remotest ancestor to whom the Jews
    could trace their lineage.... The derivation of Adam from an older
    human stock is essentially the creation of Adam.” Winchell does
    not deny the unity of the race, nor the retroactive effect of the
    atonement upon those who lived before Adam; he simply denies that
    Adam was the first man. 297—He “regards the Adamic stock as
    derived from an older and humbler human type,” originally as low
    in the scale as the present Australian savages.

    Although this theory furnishes a plausible explanation of certain
    Biblical facts, such as the marriage of Cain (_Gen. 4:17_), Cain’s
    fear that men would slay him (_Gen. 4:14_), and the distinction
    between “_the sons of God_” and “_the daughters of men_” (_Gen.
    6:1, 2_), it treats the Mosaic narrative as legendary rather than
    historical. Shem, Ham, and Japheth, it is intimated, may have
    lived hundreds of years apart from one another (409). Upon this
    view, Eve could not be “_the mother of all living_” (_Gen. 3:20_),
    nor could the transgression of Adam be the cause and beginning of
    condemnation to the whole race (_Rom. 5:12, 19_). As to Cain’s
    fear of other families who might take vengeance upon him, we must
    remember that we do not know how many children were born to Adam
    between Cain and Abel, nor what the age of Cain and Abel was, nor
    whether Cain feared only those that were then living. As to Cain’s
    marriage, we must remember that even if Cain married into another
    family, his wife, upon any hypothesis of the unity of the race,
    must have been descended from some other original Cain that
    married his sister.

    See Keil and Delitzsch, Com. on Pentateuch, 1:116—“The marriage of
    brothers and sisters was inevitable in the case of children of the
    first man, in case the human race was actually to descend from a
    single pair, and may therefore be justified, in the face of the
    Mosaic prohibition of such marriages, on the ground that the sons
    and daughters of Adam represented not merely the family but the
    genus, and that it was not till after the rise of several families
    that the bonds of fraternal and conjugal love became distinct from
    one another and assumed fixed and mutually exclusive forms, the
    violation of which is sin.” Prof. W. H. Green: “_Gen. 20:12_ shows
    that Sarah was Abraham’s half-sister;...the regulations
    subsequently ordained in the Mosaic law were not then in force.”
    G. H. Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, has shown that marriage
    between cousins is harmless where there is difference of
    temperament between the parties. Modern palæontology makes it
    probable that at the beginning of the race there was greater
    differentiation of brothers and sisters in the same family than
    obtains in later times. See Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:275. For criticism
    of the doctrine that there were men before Adam, see Methodist
    Quar. Rev., April, 1881:205-231; Presb. Rev., 1881:440-444.


The Scripture statements are corroborated by considerations drawn from
history and science. Four arguments may be briefly mentioned:


1. The argument from history.


So far as the history of nations and tribes in both hemispheres can be
traced, the evidence points to a common origin and ancestry in central
Asia.


    The European nations are acknowledged to have come, in successive
    waves of migration, from Asia. Modern ethnologists generally agree
    that the Indian races of America are derived from Mongoloid
    sources in Eastern Asia, either through Polynesia or by way of the
    Aleutian Islands. Bunsen, Philos. of Universal History, 2:112—the
    Asiatic origin of all the North American Indians “is as fully
    proved as the unity of family among themselves.” Mason, Origins of
    Invention, 361—“Before the time of Columbus, the Polynesians made
    canoe voyages from Tahiti to Hawaii, a distance of 2300 miles.”
    Keane, Man Past and Present, 1-15, 349-440, treats of the American
    Aborigines under two primitive types: Longheads from Europe and
    Roundheads from Asia. The human race, he claims, originated in
    Indomalaysia and spread thence by migration over the globe. The
    world was peopled from one center by Pleistocene man. The primary
    groups were evolved each in its special habitat, but all sprang
    from a Pleiocene precursor 100,000 years ago. W. T. Lopp,
    missionary to the Eskimos, at Port Clarence, Alaska, on the
    American side of Bering Strait, writes under date of August 31,
    1892: “No thaws during the winter, and ice blocked in the Strait.
    This has always been doubted by whalers. Eskimos have told them
    that they sometimes crossed the Strait on ice, but they have never
    believed them. Last February and March our Eskimos had a tobacco
    famine. Two parties (five men) went with dogsleds to East Cape, on
    the Siberian coast, and traded some beaver, otter and marten skins
    for Russian tobacco, and returned safely. It is only during an
    occasional winter that they can do this. But every summer they
    make several trips in their big wolf-skin boats—forty feet long.
    These observations may throw some light upon the origin of the
    prehistoric races of America.”

    Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:48—“The semi-civilized nations of Java
    and Sumatra are found in possession of a civilization which at
    first glance shows itself to have been borrowed from Hindu and
    Moslem sources.” See also Sir Henry Rawlinson, quoted in Burgess,
    Antiquity and Unity of the Race, 156, 157; Smyth, Unity of Human
    Races, 223-236; Pickering, Races of Man, Introd., synopsis, and
    page 316; Guyot, Earth and Man, 298-334; Quatrefages, Natural
    History of Man, and Unité de l’Espèce Humaine; Godron, Unité de
    l’Espèce Humaine, 2:412 _sq._ _Per contra_, however, see Prof. A.
    H. Sayce: “The evidence is now all tending to show that the
    districts in the neighborhood of the Baltic were those from which
    the Aryan languages first radiated, and where the race or races
    who spoke them originally dwelt. The Aryan invaders of
    Northwestern India could only have been a late and distant
    offshoot of the primitive stock, speedily absorbed into the
    earlier population of the country as they advanced southward; and
    to speak of ‘our Indian brethren’ is as absurd and false as to
    claim relationship with the negroes of the United States because
    they now use an Aryan language.” Scribner, Where Did Life Begin?
    has lately adduced arguments to prove that life on the earth
    originated at the North Pole, and Prof. Asa Gray favors this view;
    see his Darwiniana, 205, and Scientific Papers, 2:152; so also
    Warren, Paradise Found; and Wieland, in Am. Journal of Science,
    Dec. 1903:401-430. Dr. J. L. Wortman, in Yale Alumni Weekly, Jan.
    14, 1903:129—“The appearance of all these primates in North
    America was very abrupt at the beginning of the second stage of
    the Eocene. And it is a striking coincidence that approximately
    the same forms appear in beds of exactly corresponding age in
    Europe. Nor does this synchronism stop with the apes. It applies
    to nearly all the other types of Eocene mammalia in the Northern
    Hemisphere, and to the accompanying flora as well. These facts can
    be explained only on the hypothesis that there was a common centre
    from which these plants and animals were distributed. Considering
    further that the present continental masses were essentially the
    same in the Eocene time as now, and that the North Polar region
    then enjoyed a subtropical climate, as is abundantly proved by
    fossil plants, we are forced to the conclusion that this common
    centre of dispersion lay approximately within the Arctic
    Circle.... The origin of the human species did not take place on
    the Western Hemisphere.”


2. The argument from language.


Comparative philology points to a common origin of all the more important
languages, and furnishes no evidence that the less important are not also
so derived.


    On Sanskrit as a connecting link between the Indo-Germanic
    languages, see Max Müller, Science of Language, 1:146-165,
    326-342, who claims that all languages pass through the three
    stages: monosyllabic, agglutinative, inflectional; and that
    nothing necessitates the admission of different independent
    beginnings for either the material or the formal elements of the
    Turanian, Semitic, and Aryan branches of speech. The changes of
    language are often rapid. Latin becomes the Romance languages, and
    Saxon and Norman are united into English, in three centuries. The
    Chinese may have departed from their primitive abodes while their
    language was yet monosyllabic.

    G. J. Romanes, Life and Letters, 195—“Children are the
    constructors of all _languages_, as distinguished from
    _language_.” Instance Helen Keller’s sudden acquisition of
    language, uttering publicly a long piece only three weeks after
    she first began to imitate the motions of the lips. G. F. Wright,
    Man and the Glacial Period, 242-301—“Recent investigations show
    that children, when from any cause isolated at an early age, will
    often produce at once a language _de novo_. Thus it would appear
    by no means improbable that various languages in America, and
    perhaps the earliest languages of the world, may have arisen in a
    short time where conditions were such that a family of small
    children could have maintained existence when for any cause
    deprived of parental and other fostering care.... Two or three
    thousand years of prehistoric time is perhaps all that would be
    required to produce the diversification of languages which appears
    at the dawn of history.... The prehistoric stage of Europe ended
    less than a thousand years before the Christian Era.” In a people
    whose speech has not been fixed by being committed to writing,
    baby-talk is a great source of linguistic corruption, and the
    changes are exceedingly rapid. Humboldt took down the vocabulary
    of a South American tribe, and after fifteen years of absence
    found their speech so changed as to seem a different language.

    Zöckler, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 8:68 _sq._, denies
    the progress from lower methods of speech to higher, and declares
    the most highly developed inflectional languages to be the oldest
    and most widespread. Inferior languages are a degeneration from a
    higher state of culture. In the development of the Indo-Germanic
    languages (such as the French and the English), we have instances
    of change from more full and luxuriant expression to that which is
    monosyllabic or agglutinative. The theory of Max Müller is also
    opposed by Pott, Die Verschiedenheiten der menschlichen Rassen,
    202, 242. Pott calls attention to the fact that the Australian
    languages show unmistakable similarity to the languages of Eastern
    and Southern Asia, although the physical characteristics of these
    tribes are far different from the Asiatic.

    On the old Egyptian language as a connecting link between the
    Indo-European and the Semitic tongues, see Bunsen, Egypt’s Place,
    1: preface, 10; also see Farrar, Origin of Language, 213. Like the
    old Egyptian, the Berber and the Touareg are Semitic in parts of
    their vocabulary, while yet they are Aryan in grammar. So the
    Tibetan and Burmese stand between the Indo-European languages, on
    the one hand, and the monosyllabic languages, as of China, on the
    other. A French philologist claims now to have interpreted the
    _Yh-King_, the oldest and most unintelligible monumental writing
    of the Chinese, by regarding it as a corruption of the old
    Assyrian or Accadian cuneiform characters, and as resembling the
    syllabaries, vocabularies, and bilingual tablets in the ruined
    libraries of Assyria and Babylon; see Terrien de Lacouperie, The
    Oldest Book of the Chinese and its Authors, and The Languages of
    China before the Chinese, 11, note; he holds to “the
    non-indigenousness of the Chinese civilization and its derivation
    from the old Chaldæo-Babylonian focus of culture by the medium of
    Susiana.” See also Sayce, in Contemp. Rev., Jan. 1884:934-936;
    also, The Monist, Oct. 1906:562-596, on The Ideograms of the
    Chinese and the Central American Calendars. The evidence goes to
    show that the Chinese came into China from Susiana in the 23d
    century before Christ. Initial G wears down in time into a Y
    sound. Many words which begin with Y in Chinese are found in
    Accadian beginning with G, as Chinese Ye, “night,” is in Accadian
    Ge, “night.” The order of development seems to be: 1. picture
    writing; 2. syllabic writing; 3. alphabetic writing.

    In a similar manner, there is evidence that the Pharaonic
    Egyptians were immigrants from another land, namely, Babylonia.
    Hommel derives the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians from the pictures
    out of which the cuneiform characters developed, and he shows that
    the elements of the Egyptian language itself are contained in that
    mixed speech of Babylonia which originated in the fusion of
    Sumerians and Semites. The Osiris of Egypt is the Asari of the
    Sumerians. Burial in brick tombs in the first two Egyptian
    dynasties is a survival from Babylonia, as are also the
    seal-cylinders impressed on clay. On the relations between Aryan
    and Semitic languages, see Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 55-61;
    Murray, Origin and Growth of the Psalms, 7; Bib. Sac., 1870:162;
    1876:352-380; 1879:674-706. See also Pezzi, Aryan Philology, 125;
    Sayce, Principles of Comp. Philology, 132-174; Whitney, art. on
    Comp. Philology in Encyc. Britannica, also Life and Growth of
    Language, 269, and Study of Language, 307, 308—“Language affords
    certain indications of doubtful value, which, taken along with
    certain other ethnological considerations, also of questionable
    pertinency, furnish ground for suspecting an ultimate
    relationship.... That more thorough comprehension of the history
    of Semitic speech will enable us to determine this ultimate
    relationship, may perhaps be looked for with hope, though it is
    not to be expected with confidence.” See also Smyth, Unity of
    Human Races, 199-222; Smith’s Bib. Dict., art.: Confusion of
    Tongues.

    We regard the facts as, on the whole, favoring an opposite
    conclusion from that in Hastings’s Bible Dictionary, art.: Flood:
    “The diversity of the human race and of language alike makes it
    improbable that men were derived from a single pair.” E. G.
    Robinson: “The only trustworthy argument for the unity of the race
    is derived from comparative philology. If it should be established
    that one of the three families of speech was more ancient than the
    others, and the source of the others, the argument would be
    unanswerable. Coloration of the skin seems to lie back of climatic
    influences. We believe in the unity of the race because in this
    there are the fewest difficulties. We would not know how else to
    interpret Paul in _Romans 5_.” Max Müller has said that the
    fountain head of modern philology as of modern freedom and
    international law is the change wrought by Christianity,
    superseding the narrow national conception of patriotism by the
    recognition of all the nations and races as members of one great
    human family.


3. The argument from psychology.


The existence, among all families of mankind, of common mental and moral
characteristics, as evinced in common maxims, tendencies and capacities,
in the prevalence of similar traditions, and in the universal
applicability of one philosophy and religion, is most easily explained
upon the theory of a common origin.


    Among the widely prevalent traditions may be mentioned the
    tradition of the fashioning of the world and man, of a primeval
    garden, of an original innocence and happiness, of a tree of
    knowledge, of a serpent, of a temptation and fall, of a division
    of time into weeks, of a flood, of sacrifice. It is possible, if
    not probable, that certain myths, common to many nations, may have
    been handed down from a time when the families of the race had not
    yet separated. See Zöckler, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie,
    8:71-90; Max Müller, Science of Language, 2:444-455; Prichard,
    Nat. Hist. of Man, 2:657-714; Smyth, Unity of Human Races,
    236-240; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:77-91; Gladstone, Juventus Mundi.


4. The argument from physiology.


A. It is the common judgment of comparative physiologists that man
constitutes but a single species. The differences which exist between the
various families of mankind are to be regarded as varieties of this
species. In proof of these statements we urge: (_a_) The numberless
intermediate gradations which connect the so-called races with each other.
(_b_) The essential identity of all races in cranial, osteological, and
dental characteristics. (_c_) The fertility of unions between individuals
of the most diverse types, and the continuous fertility of the offspring
of such unions.


    Huxley, Critiques and Addresses, 163—“It may be safely affirmed
    that, even if the differences between men are specific, they are
    so small that the assumption of more than one primitive stock for
    all is altogether superfluous. We may admit that Negroes and
    Australians are distinct species, yet be the strictest
    monogenists, and even believe in Adam and Eve as the primeval
    parents of mankind, _i. e._, on Darwin’s hypothesis”; Origin of
    Species, 118—“I am one of those who believe that at present there
    is no evidence whatever for saying that mankind sprang originally
    from more than a single pair; I must say that I cannot see any
    good ground whatever, or any tenable evidence, for believing that
    there is more than one species of man.” Owen, quoted by Burgess,
    Ant. and Unity of Race, 185—“Man forms but one species, and
    differences are but indications of varieties. These variations
    merge into each other by easy gradations.” Alex. von Humboldt:
    “The different races of men are forms of one sole species,—they
    are not different species of a genus.”

    Quatrefages, in Revue d. deux Mondes, Dec. 1860:814—“If one places
    himself exclusively upon the plane of the natural sciences, it is
    impossible not to conclude in favor of the monogenist doctrine.”
    Wagner, quoted in Bib. Sac., 19:607—“Species—the collective total
    of individuals which are capable of producing one with another an
    uninterruptedly fertile progeny.” Pickering, Races of Man,
    316—“There is no middle ground between the admission of eleven
    distinct species in the human family and their reduction to one.
    The latter opinion implies a central point of origin.”

    There is an impossibility of deciding how many races there are, if
    we once allow that there are more than one. While Pickering would
    say eleven, Agassiz says eight, Morton twenty-two, and Burke
    sixty-five. Modern science all tends to the derivation of each
    family from a single germ. Other common characteristics of all
    races of men, in addition to those mentioned in the text, are the
    duration of pregnancy, the normal temperature of the body, the
    mean frequency of the pulse, the liability to the same diseases.
    Meehan, State Botanist of Pennsylvania, maintains that hybrid
    vegetable products are no more sterile than are ordinary plants
    (Independent, Aug. 21, 1884).

    E. B. Tylor, art.: Anthropology, in Encyc. Britannica: “On the
    whole it may be asserted that the doctrine of the unity of mankind
    now stands on a firmer basis than in previous ages.” Darwin,
    Animals and Plants under Domestication, 1:39—“From the resemblance
    in several countries of the half-domesticated dogs to the wild
    species still living there, from the facility with which they can
    be crossed together, from even half tamed animals being so much
    valued by savages, and from the other circumstances previously
    remarked on which favor domestication, it is highly probable that
    the domestic dogs of the world have descended from two good
    species of wolf (_viz._, _Canis lupus_ and _Canis latrans_), and
    from two or three other doubtful species of wolves (namely, the
    European, Indian and North American forms); from at least one or
    two South American canine species; from several races or species
    of the jackal; and perhaps from one or more extinct species.” Dr.
    E. M. Moore tried unsuccessfully to produce offspring by pairing a
    Newfoundland dog and a wolf-like dog from Canada. He only proved
    anew the repugnance of even slightly separated species toward one
    another.


B. Unity of species is presumptive evidence of unity of origin. Oneness of
origin furnishes the simplest explanation of specific uniformity, if
indeed the very conception of species does not imply the repetition and
reproduction of a primordial type-idea impressed at its creation upon an
individual empowered to transmit this type-idea to its successors.


    Dana, quoted in Burgess, Antiq. and Unity of Race, 185, 186—“In
    the ascending scale of animals, the number of species in any genus
    diminishes as we rise, and should by analogy be smallest at the
    head of the series. Among mammals, the higher genera have few
    species, and the highest group next to man, the orang-outang, has
    only eight, and these constitute but two genera. Analogy requires
    that man should have preëminence and should constitute only one.”
    194—“A species corresponds to a specific amount or condition of
    concentrated force defined in the act or law of creation.... The
    species in any particular case began its existence when the first
    germ-cell or individual was created. When individuals multiply
    from generation to generation, it is but a repetition of the
    primordial type-idea.... The specific is based on a numerical
    unity, the species being nothing else than an enlargement of the
    individual.” For full statement of Dana’s view, see Bib. Sac., Oct
    1857:862-866. On the idea of species, see also Shedd, Dogm.
    Theol., 2:63-74.


(_a_) To this view is opposed the theory, propounded by Agassiz, of
different centres of creation, and of different types of humanity
corresponding to the varying fauna and flora of each. But this theory
makes the plural origin of man an exception in creation. Science points
rather to a single origin of each species, whether vegetable or animal. If
man be, as this theory grants, a single species, he should be, by the same
rule, restricted to one continent in his origin. This theory, moreover,
applies an unproved hypothesis with regard to the distribution of
organized beings in general to the very being whose whole nature and
history show conclusively that he is an exception to such a general rule,
if one exists. Since man can adapt himself to all climes and conditions,
the theory of separate centres of creation is, in his case, gratuitous and
unnecessary.


    Agassiz’s view was first published in an essay on the Provinces of
    the Animal World, in Nott and Gliddon’s Types of Mankind, a book
    gotten up in the interest of slavery. Agassiz held to eight
    distinct centres of creation, and to eight corresponding types of
    humanity—the Arctic, the Mongolian, the European, the American,
    the Negro, the Hottentot, the Malay, the Australian. Agassiz
    regarded Adam as the ancestor only of the white race, yet like
    Peyrerius and Winchell be held that man in all his various races
    constitutes but one species.

    The whole tendency of recent science, however, has been adverse to
    the doctrine of separate centres of creation, even in the case of
    animal and vegetable life. In temperate North America there are
    two hundred and seven species of quadrupeds, of which only eight,
    and these polar animals, are found in the north of Europe or Asia.
    If North America be an instance of a separate centre of creation
    for its peculiar species, why should God create the same species
    of man in eight different localities? This would make man an
    exception in creation. There is, moreover, no need of creating man
    in many separate localities; for, unlike the polar bears and the
    Norwegian firs, which cannot live at the equator, man can adapt
    himself to the most varied climates and conditions. For replies to
    Agassiz, see Bib. Sac., 19:607-632; Princeton Rev., 1862:435-464.


(_b_) It is objected, moreover, that the diversities of size, color, and
physical conformation, among the various families of mankind, are
inconsistent with the theory of a common origin. But we reply that these
diversities are of a superficial character, and can be accounted for by
corresponding diversities of condition and environment. Changes which have
been observed and recorded within historic times show that the differences
alluded to may be the result of slowly accumulated divergences from one
and the same original and ancestral type. The difficulty in the case,
moreover, is greatly relieved when we remember (1) that the period during
which these divergences have arisen is by no means limited to six thousand
years (see note on the antiquity of the race, pages 224-226); and (2)
that, since species in general exhibit their greatest power of divergence
into varieties immediately after their first introduction, all the
varieties of the human species may have presented themselves in man’s
earliest history.


    Instances of physiological change as the result of new conditions:
    The Irish driven by the English two centuries ago from Armagh and
    the south of Down, have become prognathous like the Australians.
    The inhabitants of New England have descended from the English,
    yet they have already a physical type of their own. The Indians of
    North America, or at least certain tribes of them, have
    permanently altered the shape of the skull by bandaging the head
    in infancy. The Sikhs of India, since the establishment of Bába
    Nának’s religion (1500 A. D.) and their consequent advance in
    civilization, have changed to a longer head and more regular
    features, so that they are now distinguished greatly from their
    neighbors, the Afghans, Tibetans, Hindus. The Ostiak savages have
    become the Magyar nobility of Hungary. The Turks in Europe are, in
    cranial shape, greatly in advance of the Turks in Asia from whom
    they descended. The Jews are confessedly of one ancestry; yet we
    have among them the light-haired Jews of Poland, the dark Jews of
    Spain, and the Ethiopian Jews of the Nile Valley. The Portuguese
    who settled in the East Indies in the 16th century are now as dark
    in complexion as the Hindus themselves. Africans become lighter in
    complexion as they go up from the alluvial river-banks to higher
    land, or from the coast; and on the contrary the coast tribes
    which drive out the negroes of the interior and take their
    territory end by becoming negroes themselves. See, for many of the
    above facts, Burgess, Antiquity and Unity of the Race, 195-202.

    The law of originally greater plasticity, mentioned in the text,
    was first hinted by Hall, the palæontologist of New York. It is
    accepted and defined by Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 360—“A
    new law is coming into view: that species when first introduced
    have an innate power of expansion, which enables them rapidly to
    extend themselves to the limit of their geographical range, and
    also to reach the limit of their divergence into races. This limit
    once reached, these races run on in parallel lines until they one
    by one run out and disappear. According to this law the most
    aberrant races of men might be developed in a few centuries, after
    which divergence would cease, and the several lines of variation
    would remain permanent, at least so long as the conditions under
    which they originated remained.” See the similar view of Von Baer
    in Schmid, Theories of Darwin, 55, note. Joseph Cook: Variability
    is a lessening quantity; the tendency to change is greatest at the
    first, but, like the rate of motion of a stone thrown upward, it
    lessens every moment after. Ruskin, Seven Lamps, 125—“The life of
    a nation is usually, like the flow of a lava-stream, first bright
    and fierce, then languid and covered, at last advancing only by
    the tumbling over and over of its frozen blocks.” Renouf, Hibbert
    Lectures, 54—“The further back we go into antiquity, the more
    closely does the Egyptian type approach the European.” Rawlinson
    says that negroes are not represented in the Egyptian monuments
    before 1500 B. C. The influence of climate is very great,
    especially in the savage state.

    In May, 1891, there died in San Francisco the son of an
    interpreter at the Merchants’ Exchange. He was 21 years of age.
    Three years before his death his clear skin was his chief claim to
    manly beauty. He was attacked by “Addison’s disease,” a gradual
    darkening of the color of the surface of the body. At the time of
    his death his skin was as dark as that of a full-blooded negro.
    His name was George L. Sturtevant. Ratzel, History of Mankind,
    1:9, 10—As there is only one species of man, “the reunion into one
    real whole of the parts which have diverged after the fashion of
    sports” is said to be “the unconscious ultimate aim of all the
    movements” which have taken place since man began his wanderings.
    “With Humboldt we can only hold fast to the external unity of the
    race.” See Sir Wm. Hunter, The Indian Empire, 223, 410; Encyc.
    Britannica, 12:808; 20:110; Zöckler, Urgeschichte, 109-132, and in
    Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 8:51-71; Prichard, Researches,
    5:547-552, and Nat. Hist. of Man, 2:644-656; Duke of Argyll,
    Primeval Man, 96-108; Smith, Unity of Human Races, 255-283;
    Morris, Conflict of Science and Religion, 325-385; Rawlinson, in
    Journ. Christ. Philosophy, April, 1883:359.



III. Essential Elements of Human Nature.


1. The Dichotomous Theory.


Man has a two-fold nature,—on the one hand material, on the other hand
immaterial. He consists of body, and of spirit, or soul. That there are
two, and only two, elements in man’s being, is a fact to which
consciousness testifies. This testimony is confirmed by Scripture, in
which the prevailing representation of man’s constitution is that of
dichotomy.


    Dichotomous, from δίχα, “in two,” and τέμνω, “to cut,” = composed
    of two parts. Man is as conscious that his immaterial part is a
    unity, as that his body is a unity. He knows two, and only two,
    parts of his being—body and soul. So man is the true Janus
    (Martensen), Mr. Facing-both-ways (Bunyan). That the Scriptures
    favor dichotomy will appear by considering:


(_a_) The record of man’s creation (Gen. 2:7), in which, as a result of
the inbreathing of the divine Spirit, the body becomes possessed and
vitalized by a single principle—the living soul.


    _Gen. 2:7_—“_And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground,
    and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became
    a living soul_”—here it is not said that man was first a living
    soul, and that then God breathed into him a spirit; but that God
    inbreathed spirit, and man became a living soul = God’s life took
    possession of clay, and as a result, man had a soul. _Cf._ _Job
    27:3_—“_for my life is yet whole in me, And the spirit of God is
    in my nostrils_”; _32:8_—“_there is a spirit in man, And the
    breath of the Almighty giveth them understanding_”; _33:4_—“_The
    Spirit of God hath made me, And the breath of the Almighty giveth
    me life._”


(_b_) Passages in which the human soul, or spirit, is distinguished, both
from the divine Spirit from whom it proceeded, and from the body which it
inhabits.


    _Num. 16:22_—“_O God, the God of the spirits of all flesh_”;
    _Zech. 12:1_—“_Jehovah, who ... formeth the spirit of man within
    him_”; _1 Cor. 2:11_—“_the spirit of the man which is in him ...
    the Spirit of God_”; _Heb. 12:9_—“_the Father of spirits._” The
    passages just mentioned distinguish the spirit of man from the
    Spirit of God. The following distinguish the soul, or spirit, of
    man from the body which it inhabits: _Gen, 35:18_—“_it came to
    pass, as her soul was departing (for she died)_”; _1 K. 17:21_—“_O
    Jehovah my God, I pray thee, let this child’s soul come into him
    again_”; _Eccl. 12:7_—“_the dust returneth to the earth as it was,
    and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it_”; _James
    2:26_—“_the body apart from the spirit is dead._” The first class
    of passages refutes pantheism; the second refutes materialism.


(_c_) The interchangeable use of the terms “soul” and “spirit.”


    _Gen. 41:8_—“_his spirit was troubled_”; _cf._ _Ps. 42:6_—“_my
    soul is cast down within me._” _John 12:27_—“_Now is my soul
    troubled_”; _cf._ _13:21_—“_he was troubled in the spirit._” _Mat.
    20:28_—“_to give his life (ψυχήν) a ransom for many_”; _cf._
    _27:50_—“_yielded up his spirit (πνεῦμα)._” _Heb. 12:23_—“_spirits
    of just men made perfect_”; _cf._ _Rev. 6:9_—“_I saw underneath
    the altar the souls of them that had been slain for the word of
    God._” In these passages “_spirit_” and “_soul_” seem to be used
    interchangeably.


(_d_) The mention of body and soul (or spirit) as together constituting
the whole man.


    _Mat 10:28_—“_able to destroy both soul and body in hell_”; _1
    Cor. 5:3_—“_absent in body but present in spirit_”; _3 John 2_—“_I
    pray that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul
    prospereth._” These texts imply that body and soul (or spirit)
    together constitute the whole man.

    For advocacy of the dichotomous theory, see Goodwin, in Journ.
    Society Bib. Exegesis, 1881:73-86; Godet, Bib. Studies of the O.
    T., 32; Oehler, Theology of the O. T., 1:219; Hahn, Bib. Theol. N.
    T., 390 _sq._; Schmid, Bib. Theology N. T., 503; Weiss, Bib.
    Theology N. T., 214; Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 112, 113;
    Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:294-298; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 1:549; 3:249;
    Harless, Com. on Eph., 4:23, and Christian Ethics, 22; Thomasius,
    Christi Person und Werk. 1:164-168; Hodge, in Princeton Review,
    1865:116, and Systematic Theol., 2:47-51; Ebrard, Dogmatik,
    1:261-263; Wm. H. Hodge, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Apl. 1897.


2. The Trichotomous Theory.


Side by side with this common representation of human nature as consisting
of two parts, are found passages which at first sight appear to favor
trichotomy. It must be acknowledged that πνεῦμα (spirit) and ψυχή (soul),
although often used interchangeably, and always designating the same
indivisible substance, are sometimes employed as contrasted terms.

In this more accurate use, ψυχή denotes man’s immaterial part in its
inferior powers and activities;—as ψυχή, man is a conscious individual,
and, in common with the brute creation, has an animal life, together with
appetite, imagination, memory, understanding. Πνεῦμα, on the other hand,
denotes man’s immaterial part in its higher capacities and faculties;—as
πνεῦμα, man is a being related to God, and possessing powers of reason,
conscience, and free will, which difference him from the brute creation
and constitute him responsible and immortal.


    In the following texts, spirit and soul are distinguished from
    each other: _1 Thess. 5:23_—“_And the God of peace himself
    sanctify you wholly; and may your spirit and soul and body be
    preserved entire, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus
    Christ_”; _Heb. 4:12_—“_For the word of God is living, and active,
    and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the
    dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and quick
    to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart._” Compare _1
    Cor. 2:14_—“_Now the natural_ [Gr. “_psychical_”] _man receiveth
    not the things of the Spirit of God_”; _15:44_—“_It is sown a
    natural_ [Gr. “_psychical_”] _body; it is raised a spiritual body.
    If there is a natural_ [Gr. “psychical”] _body, there is also a
    spiritual body_”; _Eph. 4:23_—“_that ye be renewed in the spirit
    of your mind_”; _Jude 19_—“_sensual_ [Gr. “_psychical_”], _having
    not the Spirit._”

    For the proper interpretation of these texts, see note on the next
    page. Among those who cite them as proofs of the trichotomous
    theory (trichotomous, from τρίχα, “in three parts,” and τέμνω, “to
    cut,” = composed of three parts, _i. e._, spirit, soul, and body)
    may be mentioned Olshausen, Opuscula, 134, and Com. on _1 Thess.,
    5:23_; Beck, Biblische Seelenlehre, 81; Delitzsch, Biblical
    Psychology, 117, 118; Göschel, in Herzog, Realencyclopädie, art.:
    Seele; also, art. by Auberlen: Geist des Menschen; Cremer, N. T.
    Lexicon, on πνεῦμα and ψυχή; Usteri, Paulin. Lehrbegriff, 384
    _sq._; Neander, Planting and Training, 394; Van Oosterzee,
    Christian Dogmatics, 365, 366; Boardman, in Bap. Quarterly, 1:177,
    325, 428; Heard, Tripartite Nature of Man, 62-114; Ellicott,
    Destiny of the Creature, 106-125.


The element of truth in trichotomy is simply this, that man has a
triplicity of endowment, in virtue of which the single soul has relations
to matter, to self, and to God. The trichotomous theory, however, as it is
ordinarily defined, endangers the unity and immateriality of our higher
nature, by holding that man consists of three _substances_, or three
component _parts_—body, soul and spirit—and that soul and spirit are as
distinct from each other as are soul and body.


    The advocates of this view differ among themselves as to the
    nature of the ψυχή and its relation to the other elements of our
    being; some (as Delitzsch) holding that the ψυχή is an efflux of
    the πνεῦμα, distinct in substance, but not in essence, even as the
    divine Word is distinct from God, while yet he is God; others (as
    Göschel) regarding the ψυχή, not as a distinct substance, but as a
    resultant of the union of the πνεῦμα and the σῶμα. Still others
    (as Cremer) hold the ψυχή to be the subject of the personal life
    whose principle is the πνεῦμα. Heard, Tripartite Nature of Man,
    103—“God is the Creator _ex traduce_ of the animal and
    intellectual part of every man.... Not so with the spirit.... It
    proceeds from God, not by creation, but by emanation.”


We regard the trichotomous theory as untenable, not only for the reasons
already urged in proof of the dichotomous theory, but from the following
additional considerations:

(_a_) Πνεῦμα, as well as ψυχή, is used of the brute creation.


    _Eccl. 3:21_—“_Who knoweth the spirit of man, whether it goeth_
    [marg. “_that goeth_”] _upward, and the spirit of the beast,
    whether it goeth_ [marg. “_that goeth_”] _downward to the earth?_”
    _Rev. 16:3_—“_And the second poured out his bowl into the sea; and
    it became blood, as of a dead man; and every living soul died,
    even the things that were in the sea_” = the fish.


(_b_) ψυχή is ascribed to Jehovah.


    _Amos 6:8_—“_The Lord Jehovah hath sworn by himself_” (lit. “_by
    his soul_”) LXX _42:1_—“_my chosen in whom my soul delighteth_”;
    _Jer. 9:9_—“_Shall I not visit them for these things? saith
    Jehovah; shall not my soul be avenged?_” _Heb. 10:38_—“_my
    righteous one shall live by faith: And if he shrink back, my soul
    hath no pleasure in him._”


(_c_) The disembodied dead are called ψυχαί.


    _Rev. 6:9_—“_I saw underneath the altar the souls of them that had
    been slain for the word of God_”; _cf._ _20:4_—“_souls of them
    that had been beheaded._”


(_d_) The highest exercises of religion are attributed to the ψυχή.


    _Mark 12:30_—“_thou shalt love the Lord thy God ... with all thy
    soul_”; _Luke 1:46_—“_My soul doth magnify the Lord_”; _Heb. 6:18,
    19_—“_the hope set before us: which we have as an anchor of the
    soul_”; _James 1:21_—“_the implanted word, which is able to save
    your souls._”


(_e_) To lose this ψυχή is to lose all.


    _Mark 8:36, 37_—“_For what doth it profit a man, to gain the whole
    world, and forfeit his life_ [or “_soul_,” ψυχή]? _For what should
    a man give in exchange for his life_ [or ‘_soul_,’ ψυχή]?”


(_f_) The passages chiefly relied upon as supporting trichotomy may be
better explained upon the view already indicated, that soul and spirit are
not two distinct substances or parts, but that they designate the
immaterial principle from different points of view.


    _1 Thess. 5:23_—“_may your spirit and soul and body be preserved
    entire_” = not a scientific enumeration of the constituent parts
    of human nature, but a comprehensive sketch of that nature in its
    chief relations; compare _Mark 12:30_—“_thou shalt love the Lord
    thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all
    thy mind, and with all thy strength_”—where none would think of
    finding proof of a fourfold division of human nature. On _1 Thess.
    5:23_, see Riggenbach (in Lange’s Com.), and Commentary of Prof.
    W. A. Stevens. _Heb. 4:12_—“_piercing even to the dividing of soul
    and spirit, of both joints and marrow_” = not the dividing of soul
    _from_ spirit, or of joints _from_ marrow, but rather the piercing
    of the soul and of the spirit, even to their very joints and
    marrow; _i. e._, to the very depths of the spiritual nature. On
    _Heb. 4:12_, see Ebrard (in Olshausen’s Com.), and Lünemann (in
    Meyer’s Com.); also Tholuck, Com. _in loco_. _Jude 19_—“_sensual,
    having not the Spirit_” (ψυχικοί, πνεῦμα μὴ ἔχοντες)—even though
    πνεῦμα = the human spirit, need not mean that there is no spirit
    existing, but only that the spirit is torpid and inoperative—as we
    say of a weak man: “he has no mind,” or of an unprincipled man:
    “he has no conscience”; so Alford; see Nitzsch, Christian
    Doctrine, 202. But πνεῦμα here probably = the divine πνεῦμα. Meyer
    takes this view, and the Revised Version capitalizes the word
    “_Spirit_.” See Goodwin, Soc. Bib. Exegesis, 1881:85—“The
    distinction between ψυχή and πνεῦμα is a _functional_, and not a
    _substantial_, distinction.” Moule, Outlines of Christian
    Doctrine, 161, 162—“Soul = spirit organized, inseparably linked
    with the body; spirit = man’s inner being considered as God’s
    gift. Soul = man’s inner being viewed as his own; spirit = man’s
    inner being viewed as from God. They are not separate elements.”
    See Lightfoot, Essay on St. Paul and Seneca, appended to his Com.
    on Philippians, on the influence of the ethical language of
    Stoicism on the N. T. writers. Martineau, Seat of Authority,
    39—“The difference between man and his companion creatures on this
    earth is not that his instinctive life is less than theirs, for in
    truth it goes far beyond them; but that in him it acts in the
    presence and under the eye of other powers which transform it, and
    by giving to it vision as well as light take its blindness away.
    He is let into his own secrets.”


We conclude that the immaterial part of man, viewed as an individual and
conscious life, capable of possessing and animating a physical organism,
is called ψυχή; viewed as a rational and moral agent, susceptible of
divine influence and indwelling, this same immaterial part is called
πνεῦμα. The πνεῦμα, then, is man’s nature looking Godward, and capable of
receiving and manifesting the Πνεῦμα ἅγιον; the ψυχή is man’s nature
looking earthward, and touching the world of sense. The πνεῦμα is man’s
higher part, as related to spiritual realities or as capable of such
relation; the ψυχή is man’s higher part, as related to the body, or as
capable of such relation. Man’s being is therefore not trichotomous but
dichotomous, and his immaterial part, while possessing duality of powers,
has unity of substance.


    Man’s nature is not a three-storied house, but a two-storied
    house, with windows in the upper story looking in two
    directions—toward earth and toward heaven. The lower story is the
    physical part of us—the body. But man’s “upper story” has two
    aspects; there is an outlook toward things below, and a skylight
    through which to see the stars. “Soul” says Hovey, “is spirit as
    modified by union with the body.” Is man then the same in kind
    with the brute, but different in degree? No, man is different in
    kind, though possessed of certain powers which the brute has. The
    frog is not a magnified sensitive-plant, though his nerves
    automatically respond to irritation. The animal is different in
    kind from the vegetable, though he has some of the same powers
    which the vegetable has. God’s powers include man’s; but man is
    not of the same substance with God, nor could man be enlarged or
    developed into God. So man’s powers include those of the brute,
    but the brute is not of the same substance with man, nor could he
    be enlarged or developed into man.

    Porter, Human Intellect, 39—“The spirit of man, in addition to its
    higher endowments, may also possess the lower powers which
    vitalize dead matter into a human body.” It does not follow that
    the soul of the animal or plant is capable of man’s higher
    functions or developments, or that the subjection of man’s spirit
    to body, in the present life, disproves his immortality. Porter
    continues: “That the soul begins to exist as a vital force, does
    not require that it should always exist as such a force or in
    connection with a material body. Should it require another such
    body, it may have the power to create it for itself, as it has
    formed the one it first inhabited; or it may have already formed
    it, and may hold it ready for occupation and use as soon as it
    sloughs off the one which connects it with the earth.”

    Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 547—“Brutes may have organic life
    and sensitivity, and yet remain submerged in nature. It is not
    life and sensitivity that lift man above nature, but it is the
    distinctive characteristic of personality.” Parkhurst, The Pattern
    in the Mount, 17-30, on Prov. 20:27—“The spirit of man is the lamp
    of Jehovah”—not necessarily lighted, but capable of being lighted,
    and intended to be lighted, by the touch of the divine flame.
    _Cf._ _Mat. 6:22, 23_—“_The lamp of the body.... If therefore the
    light that is in thee be darkness, how great is the darkness._”

    Schleiermacher, Christliche Glaube, 2:487—“We think of the spirit
    as soul, only when in the body, so that we cannot speak of an
    immortality of the soul, in the proper sense, without bodily
    life.” The doctrine of the spiritual body is therefore the
    complement to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. A. A.
    Hodge, Pop. Lectures, 221—“By soul we mean only one thing, _i.
    e._, an incarnate spirit, a spirit with a body. Thus we never
    speak of the souls of angels. They are pure spirits, having no
    bodies.” Lisle, Evolution of Spiritual Man, 72—“The animal is the
    foundation of the spiritual; it is what the cellar is to the
    house; it is the base of supplies.” Ladd, Philosophy of Mind,
    371-378—“Trichotomy is absolutely untenable on grounds of
    psychological science. Man’s reason, or the spirit that is in man,
    is not to be regarded as a sort of Mansard roof, built on to one
    building in a block, all the dwellings in which are otherwise
    substantially alike.... On the contrary, in every set of
    characteristics, from those called lowest to those pronounced
    highest, the soul of man differences itself from the soul of any
    species of animals.... The highest has also the lowest. All must
    be assigned to one subject.”


This view of the soul and spirit as different aspects of the same
spiritual principle furnishes a refutation of six important errors:

(_a_) That of the Gnostics, who held that the πνεῦμα is part of the divine
essence, and therefore incapable of sin.

(_b_) That of the Apollinarians, who taught that Christ’s humanity
embraced only σῶμα and ψυχή, while his divine nature furnished the πνεῦμα.

(_c_) That of the Semi-Pelagians, who excepted the human πνεῦμα from the
dominion of original sin.

(_d_) That of Placeus, who held that only the πνεῦμα was directly created
by God (see our section on Theories of Imputation).

(_e_) That of Julius Müller, who held that the ψυχή comes to us from Adam,
but that our πνεῦμα was corrupted in a previous state of being (see page
490).

(_f_) That of the Annihilationists, who hold that man at his creation had
a divine element breathed into him, which he lost by sin, and which he
recovers only in regeneration; so that only when he has this πνεῦμα
restored by virtue of his union with Christ does man become immortal,
death being to the sinner a complete extinction of being.


    Tacitus might almost be understood to be a trichotomist when he
    writes: “Si ut sapientibus placuit, non extinguuntur cum corpora
    _magnæ_ animæ.” Trichotomy allies itself readily with materialism.
    Many trichotomists hold that man can exist without a πνεῦμα, but
    that the σῶμα and the ψυχή by themselves are mere matter, and are
    incapable of eternal existence. Trichotomy, however, when it
    speaks of the πνεῦμα as the divine principle in man, seems to
    savor of emanation or of pantheism. A modern English poet
    describes the glad and winsome child as “A silver stream, Breaking
    with laughter from the lake divine, Whence all things flow.”
    Another poet, Robert Browning, in his Death in the Desert, 107,
    describes body, soul, and spirit, as “What does, what knows, what
    is—three souls, one man.”

    The Eastern church generally held to trichotomy, and is best
    represented by John of Damascus (11:12) who speaks of the soul as
    the sensuous life-principle which takes up the spirit—the spirit
    being an efflux from God. The Western church, on the other hand,
    generally held to dichotomy, and is best represented by Anselm:
    “Constat homo ex duabus naturis, ex natura animæ et ex natura
    carnis.”

    Luther has been quoted upon both sides of the controversy: by
    Delitzsch, Bib. Psych., 460-462, as trichotomous, and as making
    the Mosaic tabernacle with its three divisions an image of the
    tripartite man. “The first division,” he says, “was called the
    holy of holies, since God dwelt there, and there was no light
    therein. The next was denominated the holy place, for within it
    stood a candlestick with seven branches and lamps. The third was
    called the atrium or court; this was under the broad heaven, and
    was open to the light of the sun. A regenerate man is depicted in
    this figure. His spirit is the holy of holies, God’s
    dwelling-place, in the darkness of faith, without a light, for he
    believes what he neither sees, nor feels, nor comprehends. The
    _psyche_ of that man is the holy place, whose seven lights
    represent the various powers of understanding, the perception and
    knowledge of material and visible things. His body is the atrium
    or court, which is open to everybody, so that all can see how he
    acts and lives.”

    Thomasius, however, in his Christi Person und Werk, 1:164-168,
    quotes from Luther the following statement, which is clearly
    dichotomous: “The first part, the spirit, is the highest, deepest,
    noblest part of man. By it he is fitted to comprehend eternal
    things, and it is, in short, the house in which dwell faith and
    the word of God. The other, the soul, is this same spirit,
    according to nature, but yet in another sort of activity, namely,
    in this, that it animates the body and works through it; and it is
    its method not to grasp things incomprehensible, but only what
    reason can search out, know, and measure.” Thomasius himself says:
    “Trichotomy, I hold with Meyer, is not Scripturally sustained.”
    Neander, sometimes spoken of as a trichotomist, says that spirit
    is soul in its elevated and normal relation to God and divine
    things; ψυχή is that same soul in its relation to the sensuous and
    perhaps sinful things of this world. Godet, Bib. Studies of O. T.,
    32—“Spirit = the breath of God, considered as independent of the
    body; soul = that same breath, in so far as it gives life to the
    body.”

    The doctrine we have advocated, moreover, in contrast with the
    heathen view, puts honor upon man’s body, as proceeding from the
    hand of God and as therefore originally pure (_Gen. 1:31_—“_And
    God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very
    good_”); as intended to be the dwelling place of the divine Spirit
    (_1 Cor. 6:19_—“_know ye not that your body is a temple of the
    Holy Spirit which is in you, which ye have from God?_”); and as
    containing the germ of the heavenly body (_1 Cor. 15:44_—“_it is
    sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body_”; _Rom.
    8:11_—“_shall give life also to your mortal bodies through his
    Spirit that dwelleth in you_”—here many ancient authorities read
    “_because of his Spirit that dwelleth in you_”—διά τὸ ἐνοικοῦν
    αὐτοῦ πνεῦμα). Birks, in his Difficulties of Belief, suggests that
    man, unlike angels, may have been provided with a fleshly body,
    (1) to objectify sin, and (2) to enable Christ to unite himself to
    the race, in order to save it.



IV. Origin of the Soul.


Three theories with regard to this subject have divided opinion:


1. The Theory of Preëxistence.


This view was held by Plato, Philo, and Origen; by the first, in order to
explain the soul’s possession of ideas not derived from sense; by the
second, to account for its imprisonment in the body; by the third, to
justify the disparity of conditions in which men enter the world. We
concern ourselves, however, only with the forms which the view has assumed
in modern times. Kant and Julius Müller in Germany, and Edward Beecher in
America, have advocated it, upon the ground that the inborn depravity of
the human will can be explained only by supposing a personal act of
self-determination in a previous, or timeless, state of being.


    The truth at the basis of the theory of preëxistence is simply the
    ideal existence of the soul, before birth, in the mind of God—that
    is, God’s foreknowledge of it. The intuitive ideas of which the
    soul finds itself in possession, such as space, time, cause,
    substance, right, God, are evolved from itself; in other words,
    man is so constituted that he perceives these truths upon proper
    occasions or conditions. The apparent recollection that we have
    seen at some past time a landscape which we know to be now for the
    first time before us, is an illusory putting together of
    fragmentary concepts or a mistaking of a part for the whole; we
    have seen something like a part of the landscape,—we fancy that we
    have seen this landscape, and the whole of it. Our recollection of
    a past event or scene is one whole, but this one idea may have an
    indefinite number of subordinate ideas existing within it. The
    sight of something which is similar to one of these parts suggests
    the past whole. Coleridge: “The great law of the imagination that
    likeness in part tends to become likeness of the whole.” Augustine
    hinted that this illusion of memory may have played an important
    part in developing the belief in metempsychosis.

    Other explanations are those of William James, in his Psychology:
    The brain tracts excited by the event proper, and those excited in
    its recall, are different; Baldwin, Psychology, 263, 264: We may
    remember what we have seen in a dream, or there may be a revival
    of ancestral or race experiences. Still others suggest that the
    two hemispheres of the brain act asynchronously;
    self-consciousness or apperception is distinguished from
    perception; divorce, from fatigue, of the processes of sensation
    and perception, causes paramnesia. Sully, Illusions, 280, speaks
    of an organic or atavistic memory: “May it not happen that by the
    law of hereditary transmission ... ancient experiences will now
    and then reflect themselves in our mental life, and so give rise
    to apparently personal recollections?” Letson, The Crowd, believes
    that the mob is atavistic and that it bases its action upon
    inherited impulses: “The inherited reflexes are atavistic
    memories” (quoted in Colegrove, Memory, 204).

    Plato held that intuitive ideas are reminiscences of things
    learned in a previous state of being; he regarded the body as the
    grave of the soul; and urged the fact that the soul had knowledge
    before it entered the body, as proof that the soul would have
    knowledge after it left the body, that is, would be immortal. See
    Plato, Meno, 82-85, Phædo, 72-75, Phædrus, 245-250, Republic,
    5:460 and 10:614. Alexander, Theories of the Will, 36, 37—“Plato
    represents preëxistent souls as having set before them a choice of
    virtue. The choice is free, but it will determine the destiny of
    each soul. Not God, but he who chooses, is responsible for his
    choice. After making their choice, the souls go to the fates, who
    spin the threads of their destiny, and it is thenceforth
    irreversible. As Christian theology teaches that man was free but
    lost his freedom by the fall of Adam, so Plato affirms that the
    preëxistent soul is free until it has chosen its lot in life.” See
    Introductions to the above mentioned works of Plato in Jowett’s
    translation. Philo held that all souls are emanations from God,
    and that those who allowed themselves, unlike the angels, to be
    attracted by matter, are punished for this fall by imprisonment in
    the body, which corrupts them, and from which they must break
    loose. See Philo, De Gigantibus, Pfeiffer’s ed., 2:360-364. Origen
    accounted for disparity of conditions at birth by the differences
    in the conduct of these same souls in a previous state. God’s
    justice at the first made all souls equal; condition here
    corresponds to the degree of previous guilt; _Mat. 20:3_—“_others
    standing in the market place idle_” = souls not yet brought into
    the world. The Talmudists regarded all souls as created at once in
    the beginning, and as kept like grains of corn in God’s granary,
    until the time should come for joining each to its appointed body.
    See Origen, De Anima, 7; περὶ ἀρχῶν, ii:9:6; _cf._ i:1:2, 4, 18;
    4:36. Origen’s view was condemned at the Synod of Constantinople,
    538. Many of the preceding facts and references are taken from
    Bruch, Lehre der Präexistenz, translated in Bib. Sac., 20:681-733.

    For modern advocates of the theory, see Kant, Critique of Pure
    Reason, sec. 15; Religion in. d. Grenzen d. bl. Vernunft, 26, 27;
    Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:357-401; Edward Beecher,
    Conflict of Ages. The idea of preëxistence has appeared to a
    notable extent in modern poetry. See Vaughan, The Retreate (1621);
    Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality in Early Childhood;
    Tennyson, Two Voices, stanzas 105-119, and Early Sonnets, 25—“As
    when with downcast eyes we muse and brood, And ebb into a former
    life, or seem To lapse far back in some confused dream To states
    of mystical similitude; If one but speaks or hems or stirs his
    chair, Ever the wonder waxeth more and more, So that we say ‘All
    this hath been before, All this hath been, I know not when or
    where.’ So, friend, when first I looked upon your face, Our
    thought gave answer each to each, so true—Opposed mirrors each
    reflecting each—That though I knew not in what time or place,
    Methought that I had often met with you, And either lived in
    either’s heart and speech.” Robert Browning, La Saisiaz, and
    Christina: “Ages past the soul existed; Here an age ’tis resting
    merely, And hence fleets again for ages.” Rossetti, House of Life:
    “I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell; I know
    the grass beyond the door, The sweet, keen smell, The sighing
    sound, the lights along the shore. You have been mine before, How
    long ago I may not know; But just when, at that swallow’s soar,
    Your neck turned so, Some veil did fall—I knew it all of yore”;
    quoted in Colegrove, Memory, 103-106, who holds the phenomenon due
    to false induction and interpretation.

    Briggs, School, College and Character, 95—“Some of us remember the
    days when we were on earth for the first time;”—which reminds us
    of the boy who remembered sitting in a corner before he was born
    and crying for fear he would be a girl. A more notable
    illustration is that found in the Life of Sir Walter Scott, by
    Lockhart, his son-in-law, 8:274—“Yesterday, at dinner time, I was
    strangely haunted by what I would call the sense of
    preëxistence—viz., a confused idea that nothing that passed was
    said for the first time—that the same topics had been discussed
    and the same persons had started the same opinions on them. It is
    true there might have been some ground for recollections,
    considering that three at least of the company were old friends
    and had kept much company together.... But the sensation was so
    strong as to resemble what is called a mirage in the desert, or a
    calenture on board of ship, when lakes are seen in the desert and
    sylvan landscapes in the sea. It was very distressing yesterday
    and brought to mind the fancies of Bishop Berkeley about an ideal
    world. There was a vile sense of want of reality in all I did and
    said.... I drank several glasses of wine, but these only
    aggravated the disorder. I did not find the _in vino veritas_ of
    the philosophers.”


To the theory of preëxistence we urge the following objections:

(_a_) It is not only wholly without support from Scripture, but it
directly contradicts the Mosaic account of man’s creation in the image of
God, and Paul’s description of all evil and death in the human race as the
result of Adam’s sin.


    _Gen. 1:27_—“_And God created man in his own image, in the image
    of God created he him_”; _31_—“_And God saw every thing that he
    had made, and, behold, it was very good._” _Rom.
    5:12_—“_Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the world,
    and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that
    all sinned._” The theory of preëxistence would still leave it
    doubtful whether all men are sinners, or whether God assembles
    only sinners upon the earth.


(_b_) If the soul in this preëxistent state was conscious and personal, it
is inexplicable that we should have no remembrance of such preëxistence,
and of so important a decision in that previous condition of being;—if the
soul was yet unconscious and impersonal, the theory fails to show how a
moral act involving consequences so vast could have been performed at all.


    Christ remembered his preëxistent state; why should not we? There
    is every reason to believe that in the future state we shall
    remember our present existence; why should we not now remember the
    past state from which we came? It may be objected that
    Augustinians hold to a sin of the race in Adam—a sin which none of
    Adam’s descendants can remember. But we reply that no Augustinian
    holds to a personal existence of each member of the race in Adam,
    and therefore no Augustinian needs to account for lack of memory
    of Adam’s sin. The advocate of preëxistence, however, does hold to
    a personal existence of each soul in a previous state, and
    therefore needs to account for our lack of memory of it.


(_c_) The view sheds no light either upon the origin of sin, or upon God’s
justice in dealing with it, since it throws back the first transgression
to a state of being in which there was no flesh to tempt, and then
represents God as putting the fallen into sensuous conditions in the
highest degree unfavorable to their restoration.


    This theory only increases the difficulty of explaining the origin
    of sin, by pushing back its beginning to a state of which we know
    less than we do of the present. To say that the soul in that
    previous state was only potentially conscious and personal, is to
    deny any real probation, and to throw the blame of sin on God the
    Creator. Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:228—“In modern times,
    the philosophers Kant, Schelling and Schopenhauer have explained
    the bad from an intelligible act of freedom, which (according to
    Schelling and Schopenhauer) also at the same time effectuates the
    temporal existence and condition of the individual soul. But what
    are we to think of as meant by such a mystical deed or act through
    which the subject of it first comes into existence? Is it not
    this, that perhaps under this singular disguise there is concealed
    the simple thought that the origin of the bad lies not so much in
    a _doing_ of the individual freedom as rather in the _rise_ of
    it,—that is to say, in the process of development through which
    the natural man becomes a moral man, and the merely potentially
    rational man becomes an actually rational man?”


(_d_) While this theory accounts for inborn spiritual sin, such as pride
and enmity to God, it gives no explanation of inherited sensual sin, which
it holds to have come from Adam, and the guilt of which must logically be
denied.


    While certain forms of the preëxistence theory are exposed to the
    last objection indicated in the text, Julius Müller claims that
    his own view escapes it; see Doctrine of Sin, 2:393. His theory,
    he says, “would contradict holy Scripture if it derived inborn
    sinfulness _solely_ from this extra-temporal act of the
    individual, without recognizing in this sinfulness the element of
    hereditary depravity in the sphere of the natural life, and its
    connection with the sin of our first parents.” Müller, whose
    trichotomy here determines his whole subsequent scheme, holds only
    the πνεῦμα to have thus fallen in a preëxistent state. The ψυχή
    comes, with the body, from Adam. The tempter only brought man’s
    latent perversity of will into open transgression. Sinfulness, as
    hereditary, does not involve guilt, but the hereditary principle
    is the “medium through which the transcendent self-perversion of
    the spiritual nature of man is transmitted to his whole temporal
    mode of being.” While man is born guilty as to his πνεῦμα, for the
    reason that this πνεῦμα sinned in a preëxistent state, he is also
    born guilty as to his ψυχή, because this was one with the first
    man in his transgression.

    Even upon the most favorable statement of Müller’s view, we fail
    to see how it can consist with the organic unity of the race; for
    in that which chiefly constitutes us men—the πνεῦμα—we are as
    distinct and separate creations as are the angels. We also fail to
    see how, upon this view, Christ can be said to take our nature;
    or, if he takes it, how it can be without sin. See Ernesti,
    Ursprung der Sünde, 2:1-247; Frohschammer, Ursprung der Seele,
    11-17: Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:92-122; Bruch, Lehre der
    Präexistenz, translated in Bib. Sac., 20:681-733. Also Bib. Sac.,
    11:186-191; 12:156; 17:419-427; 20:447; Kahnis, Dogmatik,
    3:250—“This doctrine is inconsistent with the indisputable fact
    that the souls of children are like those of the parents; and it
    ignores the connection of the individual with the race.”


2. The Creatian Theory.


This view was held by Aristotle, Jerome, and Pelagius, and in modern times
has been advocated by most of the Roman Catholic and Reformed theologians.
It regards the soul of each human being as immediately created by God and
joined to the body either at conception, at birth, or at some time between
these two. The advocates of the theory urge in its favor certain texts of
Scripture, referring to God as the Creator of the human spirit, together
with the fact that there is a marked individuality in the child, which
cannot be explained as a mere reproduction of the qualities existing in
the parents.


    Creatianism, as ordinarily held, regards only the body as
    propagated from past generations. Creatianists who hold to
    trichotomy would say, however, that the animal soul, the ψυχή, is
    propagated with the body, while the highest part of man, the
    πνεῦμα, is in each case a direct creation of God,—the πνεῦμα not
    being created, as the advocates of preëxistence believe, ages
    before the body, but rather at the time that the body assumes its
    distinct individuality.

    Aristotle (De Anima) first gives definite expression to this view.
    Jerome speaks of God as “making souls daily.” The scholastics
    followed Aristotle, and through the influence of the Reformed
    church, creatianism has been the prevailing opinion for the last
    two hundred years. Among its best representatives are Turretin,
    Inst., 5:13 (vol. 1:425); Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:65-76; Martensen,
    Dogmatics, 141-148; Liddon, Elements of Religion, 99-106. Certain
    Reformed theologians have defined very exactly God’s method of
    creation. Polanus (5:31:1) says that God breathes the soul into
    boys, forty days, and into girls, eighty days, after conception.
    Göschel (in Herzog, Encyclop., art.: Seele) holds that while
    dichotomy leads to traducianism, trichotomy allies itself to that
    form of creatianism which regards the πνεῦμα as a direct creation
    of God, but the ψυχή as propagated with the body. To the latter
    answers the family name; to the former the Christian name. Shall
    we count George Macdonald as a believer in Preëxistence or in
    Creatianism, when he writes in his Baby’s Catechism: “Where did
    you come from, baby dear? Out of the everywhere into here. Where
    did you get your eyes so blue? Out of the sky, as I came through.
    Where did you get that little tear? I found it waiting when I got
    here. Where did you get that pearly ear? God spoke, and it came
    out to hear. How did they all just come to be you? God thought
    about me, and so I grew.”


Creatianism is untenable for the following reasons:

(_a_) The passages adduced in its support may with equal propriety be
regarded as expressing God’s mediate agency in the origination of human
souls; while the general tenor of Scripture, as well as its
representations of God as the author of man’s body, favor this latter
interpretation.


    Passages commonly relied upon by creatianists are the following:
    _Eccl. 12:7_—“_the spirit returneth unto God who gave it_”; _Is.
    57:16_—“_the souls that I have made_”; _Zech. 12:1_—“_Jehovah ...
    who formeth the spirit of man within him_”; _Heb. 12:9_—“_the
    Father of spirits._” But God is with equal clearness declared to
    be the former of man’s body: see _Ps. 139:13, 14_—“_thou didst
    form my inward parts: Thou didst cover me_ [marg. “_knit me
    together_”] _in my mother’s womb. I will give thanks unto thee;
    for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: Wonderful are thy
    works_”; _Jer. 1:5_—“_I formed thee in the belly._” Yet we do not
    hesitate to interpret these latter passages as expressive of
    mediate, not immediate, creatorship,—God works through natural
    laws of generation and development so far as the production of
    man’s body is concerned. None of the passages first mentioned
    forbid us to suppose that he works through these same natural laws
    in the production of the soul. The truth in creatianism is the
    presence and operation of God in all natural processes. A
    transcendent God manifests himself in all physical begetting.
    Shakespeare: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew
    them how we will.” Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 112—“Creatianism, which
    emphasizes the divine origin of man, is entirely compatible with
    Traducianism, which emphasizes the mediation of natural agencies.
    So for the race as a whole, its origin in a creative activity of
    God is quite consistent with its being a product of natural
    evolution.”


(_b_) Creatianism regards the earthly father as begetting only the body of
his child—certainly as not the father of the child’s highest part. This
makes the beast to possess nobler powers of propagation than man; for the
beast multiplies himself after his own image.


    The new physiology properly views soul, not as something added
    from without, but as the animating principle of the body from the
    beginning and as having a determining influence upon its whole
    development. That children are like their parents, in intellectual
    and spiritual as well as in physical respects, is a fact of which
    the creatian theory gives no proper explanation. Mason, Faith of
    the Gospel, 115—“The love of parents to children and of children
    to parents protests against the doctrine that only the body is
    propagated.” Aubrey Moore, Science and the Faith, 207,—quoted in
    Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893:876—“Instead of the physical derivation
    of the soul, we stand for the spiritual derivation of the body.”
    We would amend this statement by saying that we stand for the
    spiritual derivation of both soul and body, natural law being only
    the operation of spirit, human and divine.


(_c_) The individuality of the child, even in the most extreme cases, as
in the sudden rise from obscure families and surroundings of marked men
like Luther, may be better explained by supposing a law of variation
impressed upon the species at its beginning—a law whose operation is
foreseen and supervised by God.


    The differences of the child from the parent are often
    exaggerated; men are generally more the product of their ancestry
    and of their time than we are accustomed to think. Dickens made
    angelic children to be born of depraved parents, and to grow up in
    the slums. But this writing belongs to a past generation, when the
    facts of heredity were unrecognized. George Eliot’s school is
    nearer the truth; although she exaggerates the doctrine of
    heredity in turn, until all idea of free will and all hope of
    escaping our fate vanish. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 78,
    90—“Separate motives, handed down from generation to generation,
    sometimes remaining latent for great periods, to become suddenly
    manifested under conditions the nature of which is not
    discernible.... Conflict of inheritances [from different
    ancestors] may lead to the institution of variety.”

    Sometimes, in spite of George Eliot, a lily grows out of a
    stagnant pool—how shall we explain the fact? We must remember that
    the paternal and the maternal elements are themselves unlike; the
    union of the two may well produce a third in some respects unlike
    either; as, when two chemical elements unite, the product differs
    from either of the constituents. We must remember also that
    _nature_ is one factor; _nurture_ is another; and that the latter
    is often as potent as the former (see Galton, Inquiries into Human
    Faculty, 77-81). Environment determines to a large extent both the
    fact and the degree of development. Genius is often another name
    for Providence. Yet before all and beyond all we must recognize a
    manifold wisdom of God, which in the very organization of species
    impresses upon it a law of variation, so that at proper times and
    under proper conditions the old is modified in the line of
    progress and advance to something higher. Dante, Purgatory, canto
    vii—“Rarely into the branches of the tree Doth human worth mount
    up; and so ordains He that bestows it, that as his free gift It
    may be called.” Pompilia, the noblest character in Robert
    Browning’s Ring and the Book, came of “a bad lot.” Geo. A. Gordon,
    Christ of To-day, 123-126—“It is mockery to account for Abraham
    Lincoln and Robert Burns and William Shakespeare upon naked
    principles of heredity and environment.... All intelligence and
    all high character are transcendent, and have their source in the
    mind and heart of God. It is in the range of Christ’s
    transcendence of his earthly conditions that we note the complete
    uniqueness of his person.”


(_d_) This theory, if it allows that the soul is originally possessed of
depraved tendencies, makes God the direct author of moral evil; if it
holds the soul to have been created pure, it makes God indirectly the
author of moral evil, by teaching that he puts this pure soul into a body
which will inevitably corrupt it.


    The decisive argument against creatianism is this one, that it
    makes God the author of moral evil. See Kahnis, Dogmatik,
    3:250—“Creatianism rests upon a justly antiquated dualism between
    soul and body, and is irreconcilable with the sinful condition of
    the human soul. The truth in the doctrine is just this only, that
    generation can bring forth an immortal human life only according
    to the power imparted by God’s word, and with the special
    coöperation of God himself.” The difficulty of supposing that God
    immediately creates a pure soul, only to put it into a body that
    will infallibly corrupt it—“sicut vinum in vase acetoso”—has led
    many of the most thoughtful Reformed theologians to modify the
    creatian doctrine by combining it with traducianism.

    Rothe, Dogmatik, 1:249-251, holds to creatianism in a wider
    sense—a union of the paternal and maternal elements under the
    express and determining efficiency of God. Ebrard, Dogmatik,
    1:327-332, regards the soul as new-created, yet by a process of
    mediate creation according to law, which he calls “metaphysical
    generation.” Dorner, System of Doctrine, 3:56, says that the
    individual is not simply a manifestation of the species; God
    applies to the origination of every single man a special creative
    thought and act of will; yet he does this through the species, so
    that it is creation by law,—else the child would be, not a
    continuation of the old species, but the establishment of a new
    one. So in speaking of the human soul of Christ, Dorner says
    (3:340-349) that the soul itself does not owe its origin to Mary
    nor to the species, but to the creative act of God. This soul
    appropriates to itself from Mary’s body the elements of a human
    form, purifying them in the process so far as is consistent with
    the beginning of a life yet subject to development and human
    weakness.

    Bowne, Metaphysics, 500—“The laws of heredity must be viewed
    simply as descriptions of a fact and never as its explanation. Not
    as if ancestors passed on something to posterity, but solely
    because of the inner consistency of the divine action” are
    children like their parents. We cannot regard either of these
    mediating views as self-consistent or intelligible. We pass on
    therefore to consider the traducian theory which we believe more
    fully to meet the requirements of Scripture and of reason. For
    further discussion of creatianism, see Frohschammer, Ursprung der
    Seele, 18-58; Alger, Doctrine of a Future Life, 1-17.


3. The Traducian Theory.


This view was propounded by Tertullian, and was implicitly held by
Augustine. In modern times it has been the prevailing opinion of the
Lutheran Church. It holds that the human race was immediately created in
Adam, and, as respects both body and soul, was propagated from him by
natural generation—all souls since Adam being only mediately created by
God, as the upholder of the laws of propagation which were originally
established by him.


    Tertullian, De Anima: “Tradux peccati, tradux animæ.” Gregory of
    Nyssa: “Man being one, consisting of soul and body, the common
    beginning of his constitution must be supposed also one; so that
    he may not be both older and younger than himself—that in him
    which is bodily being first, and the other coming after” (quoted
    in Crippen, Hist. of Christ. Doct., 80). Augustine, De Pec. Mer.
    et Rem., 3:7—“In Adam all sinned, at the time when in his nature
    all were still that one man”; De Civ. Dei, 13:14—“For we all were
    in that one man, when we all were that one man.... The form in
    which we each should live was not as yet individually created and
    distributed to us, but there already existed the seminal nature
    from which we were propagated.”

    Augustine, indeed, wavered in his statements with regard to the
    origin of the soul, apparently fearing that an explicit and
    pronounced traducianism might involve materialistic consequences;
    yet, as logically lying at the basis of his doctrine of original
    sin, traducianism came to be the ruling view of the Lutheran
    reformers. In his Table Talk, Luther says: “The reproduction of
    mankind is a great marvel and mystery. Had God consulted me in the
    matter, I should have advised him to continue the generation of
    the species by fashioning them out of clay, in the way Adam was
    fashioned; as I should have counseled him also to let the sun
    remain always suspended over the earth, like a great lamp,
    maintaining perpetual light and heat.”

    Traducianism holds that man, as a species, was created in Adam. In
    Adam, the substance of humanity was yet undistributed. We derive
    our immaterial as well as our material being, by natural laws of
    propagation, from Adam,—each individual man after Adam possessing
    a part of the substance that was originated in him. Sexual
    reproduction has for its purpose the keeping of variations within
    limit. Every marriage tends to bring back the individual type to
    that of the species. The offspring represents not one of the
    parents but both. And, as each of these parents represents two
    grandparents, the offspring really represents the whole race.
    Without this conjugation the individual peculiarities would
    reproduce themselves in divergent lines like the shot from a
    shot-gun. Fission needs to be supplemented by conjugation. The use
    of sexual reproduction is to preserve the average individual in
    the face of a progressive tendency to variation. In asexual
    reproduction the offspring start on deviating lines and never mix
    their qualities with those of their mates. Sexual reproduction
    makes the individual the type of the species and gives solidarity
    to the race. See Maupas, quoted by Newman Smith, Place of Death in
    Evolution, 19-22.

    John Milton, in his Christian Doctrine, is a Traducian. He has no
    faith in the notion of a soul separate from and inhabiting the
    body. He believes in a certain corporeity of the soul. Mind and
    thought are rooted in the bodily organism. Soul was not inbreathed
    after the body was formed. The breathing of God into man’s
    nostrils was only the quickening impulse to that which already had
    life. God does not create souls every day. Man is a body-and-soul,
    or a soul-body, and he transmits himself as such. Harris, Moral
    Evolution, 171—The individual man has a great number of ancestors
    as well as a great number of descendants. He is the central point
    of an hour-glass, or a strait between two seas which widen out
    behind and before. How then shall we escape the conclusion that
    the human race was most numerous at the beginning? We must
    remember that other children have the same great-grandparents with
    ourselves; that there have been inter-marriages; and that, after
    all, the generations run on in parallel lines, that the lines
    spread a little in some countries and periods, and narrow a little
    in other countries and periods. It is like a wall covered with
    paper in diamond pattern. The lines diverge and converge, but the
    figures are parallel. See Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:7-94, Hist.
    Doctrine, 2:1-26, Discourses and Essays, 259; Baird, Elohim
    Revealed, 137-151, 335-384; Edwards, Works, 2:483; Hopkins, Works,
    1:289; Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 161; Delitzsch, Bib. Psych.,
    128-142; Frohschammer, Ursprung der Seele, 59-224.


With regard to this view we remark:

(_a_) It seems best to accord with Scripture, which represents God as
creating the species in Adam (Gen. 1:27), and as increasing and
perpetuating it through secondary agencies (1:28; _cf._ 22). Only once is
breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of life (2:7, _cf._ 22; 1 Cor.
11:8. Gen. 4:1; 5:3; 46:26; _cf._ Acts 17:21-26; Heb. 7:10), and after
man’s formation God ceases from his work of creation (Gen. 2:2).


    _Gen. 1:27_—“_And God created man in his own image, in the image
    of God created he him: male and female created he them_”;
    _28_—“_And God blessed them: and God said unto them, Be fruitful,
    and multiply, and replenish the earth_”; _cf._ _22_—of the brute
    creation: “_And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and
    multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply
    on the earth._” _Gen. 2:7_—“_And Jehovah God formed man of the
    dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of
    life; and man became a living soul_”; _cf._ _22_—“_and the rib
    which Jehovah God had taken from the man, made he a woman, and
    brought her unto the man_”; _1 Cor. 11:8_—“_For the man is not of
    the woman; but the woman of the man_” (ἐξ ἀνδρός). _Gen.
    4:1_—“_Eve ... bare Cain_”; _5:3_—“_Adam ... begat a son ...
    Seth_”; _46:26_—“_All the souls that came with Jacob into Egypt,
    that came out of his loins_”; _Acts 17:26_—“_he made of one_
    [“father” or “body”] _every nation of men_”; _Heb. 7:10_—Levi
    “_was yet in the loins of his father, when Melchisedek met him_”;
    _Gen. 2:2_—“_And on the seventh day God finished his work which he
    had made, __ and he rested on the seventh day from all his work
    which he had made._” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:19-29, adduces also
    _John 1:13; 3:6_; _Rom. 1:13; 5:12_; _1 Cor. 15:22_; _Eph. 2:3_;
    _Heb. 12:9_; _Ps. 139:15, 16_. Only Adam had the right to be a
    creatianist. Westcott, Com. on Hebrews, 114—“Levi paying tithes in
    Abraham implies that descendants are included in the ancestor so
    far that his acts have force for them. Physically, at least, the
    dead so rule the living. The individual is not a completely
    self-centred being. He is member in a body. So far traducianism is
    true. But, if this were all, man would be a mere result of the
    past, and would have no individual responsibility. There is an
    element not derived from birth, though it may follow upon it.
    Recognition of individuality is the truth in creatianism. Power of
    vision follows upon preparation of an organ of vision, modified by
    the latter but not created by it. So we have the social unity of
    the race, _plus_ the personal responsibility of the individual,
    the influence of common thoughts _plus_ the power of great men,
    the foundation of hope _plus_ the condition of judgment.”


(_b_) It is favored by the analogy of vegetable and animal life, in which
increase of numbers is secured, not by a multiplicity of immediate
creations, but by the natural derivation of new individuals from a parent
stock. A derivation of the human soul from its parents no more implies a
materialistic view of the soul and its endless division and subdivision,
than the similar derivation of the brute proves the principle of
intelligence in the lower animals to be wholly material.


    God’s method is not the method of endless miracle. God works in
    nature through second causes. God does not create a new vital
    principle at the beginning of existence of each separate apple,
    and of each separate dog. Each of these is the result of a
    self-multiplying force, implanted once for all in the first of its
    race. To say, with Moxom (Baptist Review, 1881:278), that God is
    the immediate author of each new individual, is to deny second
    causes, and to merge nature in God. The whole tendency of modern
    science is in the opposite direction. Nor is there any good reason
    for making the origin of the individual human soul an exception to
    the general rule. Augustine wavered in his traducianism because he
    feared the inference that the soul is divided and subdivided,—that
    is, that it is composed of parts, and is therefore material in its
    nature. But it does not follow that all separation is material
    separation. We do not, indeed, know how the soul is propagated.
    But we know that animal life is propagated, and still that it is
    not material, nor composed of parts. The fact that the soul is not
    material, nor composed of parts, is no reason why it may not be
    propagated also.

    It is well to remember that _substance_ does not necessarily imply
    either _extension_ or _figure_. _Substantia_ is simply that which
    stands under, underlies, supports, or in other words that which is
    the _ground_ of phenomena. The propagation of mind therefore does
    not involve any dividing up, or splitting off, as if the mind were
    a material mass. Flame is propagated, but not by division and
    subdivision. Professor Ladd is a creatianist, together with Lotze,
    whom he quotes, but he repudiates the idea that the mind is
    susceptible of division; see Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 206,
    359-366—“The mind comes from nowhere, for it never was, as mind,
    in space, is not now in space, and cannot be conceived of as
    coming and going in space.... Mind is a growth.... Parents do not
    transmit their minds to their offspring. The child’s mind does not
    exist before it acts. Its activities _are_ its existence.” So we
    might say that flame has no existence before it acts. Yet it may
    owe its existence to a preceding flame. The Indian proverb is: “No
    lotus without a stem.” Hall Caine, in his novel The Manxman, tells
    us that the Deemster of the Isle of Man had two sons. These two
    sons were as unlike each other as are the inside and the outside
    of a bowl. But the bowl was old Deemster himself. Hartley
    Coleridge inherited his father’s imperious desire for stimulants
    and with it his inability to resist their temptation.


(_c_) The observed transmission not merely of physical, but of mental and
spiritual, characteristics in families and races, and especially the
uniformly evil moral tendencies and dispositions which all men possess
from their birth, are proof that in soul, as well as in body, we derive
our being from our human ancestry.


    Galton, in his Hereditary Genius, and Inquiries into Human
    Faculty, furnishes abundant proof of the transmission of mental
    and spiritual characteristics from father to son. Illustrations,
    in the case of families, are the American Adamses, the English
    Georges, the French Bourbons, the German Bachs. Illustrations, in
    the case of races, are the Indians, the Negroes, the Chinese, the
    Jews. Hawthorne represented the introspection and the conscience
    of Puritan New England. Emerson had a minister among his ancestry,
    either on the paternal or the maternal side, for eight generations
    back. Every man is “a chip of the old block.” “A man is an
    omnibus, in which all his ancestors are seated” (O. W. Holmes).
    Variation is one of the properties of living things,—the other is
    transmission. “On a dissecting table, in the membranes of a
    new-born infant’s body, can be seen ‘the drunkard’s tinge.’ The
    blotches on his grand-child’s cheeks furnish a mirror to the old
    debauchee. Heredity is God’s visiting of sin to the third and
    fourth generations.” On heredity and depravity, see Phelps, in
    Bib. Sac., Apr. 1884:254—“When every molecule in the paternal
    brain bears the shape of a point of interrogation, it would border
    on the miraculous if we should find the exclamation-sign of faith
    in the brain-cells of the child.”

    Robert G. Ingersoll said that most great men have great mothers,
    and that most great women have great fathers. Most of the great
    are like mountains, with the valley of ancestors on one side and
    the depression of posterity on the other. Hawthorne’s House of the
    Seven Gables illustrates the principle of heredity. But in his
    Marble Faun and Transformation, Hawthorne unwisely intimates that
    sin is a necessity to virtue, a background or condition of good.
    Dryden, Absalom and Ahithophel, 1:156—“Great wits are sure to
    madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide.”
    Lombroso, The Man of Genius, maintains that genius is a mental
    disease allied to epileptiform mania or the dementia of cranks. If
    this were so, we should infer that civilization is the result of
    insanity, and that, so soon as Napoleons, Dantes and Newtons
    manifest themselves, they should be confined in Genius Asylums.
    Robert Browning, Hohenstiel-Schwangau, comes nearer the truth: “A
    solitary great man’s worth the world. God takes the business into
    his own hands At such time: Who creates the novel flower Contrives
    to guard and give it breathing-room.... ’Tis the great Gardener
    grafts the excellence On wildlings, where he will.”


(_d_) The traducian doctrine embraces and acknowledges the element of
truth which gives plausibility to the creatian view. Traducianism,
properly defined, admits a divine concurrence throughout the whole
development of the human species, and allows, under the guidance of a
superintending Providence, special improvements in type at the birth of
marked men, similar to those which we may suppose to have occurred in the
introduction of new varieties in the animal creation.


    Page-Roberts, Oxford University Sermons: “It is no more unjust
    that man should inherit evil tendencies, than that he should
    inherit good. To make the former impossible is to make the latter
    impossible. To object to the law of heredity, is to object to
    God’s ordinance of society, and to say that God should have made
    men, like the angels, a company, and not a race.” The common moral
    characteristics of the race can only be accounted for upon the
    Scriptural view that “_that which is born of the flesh is flesh_”
    (_John 3:6_). Since propagation is a propagation of soul, as well
    as body, we see that to beget children under improper conditions
    is a crime, and that fœticide is murder. Haeckel, Evolution of
    Man, 2:3—“The human embryo passes through the whole course of its
    development in forty weeks. Each man is really older by this
    period than is usually assumed. When, for example, a child is said
    to be nine and a quarter years old, he is really ten years old.”
    Is this the reason why Hebrews call a child a year old at birth?
    President Edwards prayed for his children and his children’s
    children to the end of time, and President Woolsey congratulated
    himself that he was one of the inheritors of those prayers. R. W.
    Emerson: “How can a man get away from his ancestors?” Men of
    genius should select their ancestors with great care. When begin
    the instruction of a child? A hundred years before he is born. A
    lady whose children were noisy and troublesome said to a Quaker
    relative that she wished she could get a good Quaker governess for
    them, to teach them the quiet ways of the Society of Friends. “It
    would not do them that service,” was the reply; “they should have
    been rocked in a Quaker cradle, if they were to learn Quakerly
    ways.”

    Galton, Natural Inheritance, 104—“The child inherits partly from
    his parents, partly from his ancestry. In every population that
    intermarries freely, when the genealogy of any man is traced far
    backwards, his ancestry will be found to consist of such varied
    elements that they are indistinguishable from the sample taken at
    haphazard from the general population. Galton speaks of the
    tendency of peculiarities to revert to the general type, and says
    that a man’s brother is twice as nearly related to him as his
    father is, and nine times as nearly as his cousin. The mean
    stature of any particular class of men will be the same as that of
    the race; in other words, it will be mediocre. This tells heavily
    against the full hereditary transmission of any rare and valuable
    gift, as only a few of the many children would resemble their
    parents.” We may add to these thoughts of Galton that Christ
    himself, as respects his merely human ancestry, was not so much
    son of Mary, as he was Son of man.

    Brooks, Foundations of Zoölogy, 144-167—In an investigated case,
    “in seven and a half generations the maximum ancestry for one
    person is 382, or for three persons 1146. The names of 452 of
    them, or nearly half, are recorded, and these 452 named ancestors
    are not 452 distinct persons, but only 149, many of them, in the
    remote generations, being common ancestors of all three in many
    lines. If the lines of descent from the unrecorded ancestors were
    interrelated in the same way, as they would surely be in an old
    and stable community, the total ancestry of these three persons
    for seven and a half generations would be 378 persons instead of
    1146. The descendants of many die out. All the members of a
    species descend from a few ancestors in a remote generation, and
    these few are the common ancestors of all. Extinction of family
    names is very common. We must seek in the modern world and not in
    the remote past for an explanation of that diversity among
    individuals which passes under the name of variation. The
    genealogy of a species is not a tree, but a slender thread of very
    few strands, a little frayed at the near end, but of immeasurable
    length. A fringe of loose ends all along the thread may represent
    the animals which having no descendants are now as if they had
    never been. Each of the strands at the near end is important as a
    possible line of union between the thread of the past and that of
    the distant future.”

    Weismann, Heredity, 270, 272, 380, 384, denies Brooks’s theory
    that the male element represents the principle of variation. He
    finds the cause of variation in the union of elements from the two
    parents. Each child unites the hereditary tendencies of two
    parents, and so must be different from either. The third
    generation is a compromise between four different hereditary
    tendencies. Brooks finds the cause of variation in sexual
    reproduction, but he bases his theory upon the transmission of
    acquired characters. This transmission is denied by Weismann, who
    says that the male germ-cell does not play a different part from
    that of the female in the construction of the embryo. Children
    inherit quite as much from the father as from the mother. Like
    twins are derived from the same egg-cell. No two germ-cells
    contain exactly the same combinations of hereditary tendencies.
    Changes in environment and organism affect posterity, not
    directly, but only through other changes produced in its germinal
    matter. Hence efforts to reach high food cannot directly produce
    the giraffe. See Dawson, Modern Ideas of Evolution, 235-239;
    Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems; Ribot, Heredity; Woods,
    Heredity in Royalty. On organic unity in connection with realism,
    see Hodge, in Princeton Rev., Jan. 1865:126-135; Dabney, Theology,
    317-321.



V. The Moral Nature of Man.


By the moral nature of man we mean those powers which fit him for right or
wrong action. These powers are intellect, sensibility, and will, together
with that peculiar power of discrimination and impulsion, which we call
conscience. In order to have moral action, man has intellect or reason, to
discern the difference between right and wrong; sensibility, to be moved
by each of these; free will, to do the one or the other. Intellect,
sensibility, and will, are man’s three faculties. But in connection with
these faculties there is a sort of activity which involves them all, and
without which there can be no moral action, namely, the activity of
conscience. Conscience applies the moral law to particular cases in our
personal experience, and proclaims that law as binding upon us. Only a
rational and sentient being can be truly moral; yet it does not come
within our province to treat of man’s intellect or sensibility in general.
We speak here only of Conscience and of Will.


1. Conscience.


A. Conscience an accompanying knowledge.—As already intimated, conscience
is not a separate faculty, like intellect, sensibility, and will, but
rather a mode in which these faculties act. Like consciousness, conscience
is an accompanying knowledge. Conscience is a knowing of self (including
our acts and states) in connection with a moral standard, or law. Adding
now the element of feeling, we may say that conscience is man’s
consciousness of his own moral relations, together with a peculiar feeling
in view of them. It thus involves the combined action of the intellect and
of the sensibility, and that in view of a certain class of objects, viz.:
right and wrong.


    There is no separate ethical faculty any more than there is a
    separate æsthetic faculty. Conscience is like taste: it has to do
    with moral being and relations, as taste has to do with æsthetic
    being and relations. But the ethical judgment and impulse are,
    like the æsthetic judgment and impulse, the mode in which
    intellect, sensibility and will act with reference to a certain
    class of objects. Conscience deals with the right, as taste deals
    with the beautiful. As consciousness (_con_ and _scio_) is a
    con-knowing, a knowing of our thoughts, desires and volitions in
    connection with a knowing of the self that has these thoughts,
    desires and volitions; so conscience is a con-knowing, a knowing
    of our moral acts and states in connection with a knowing of some
    moral standard or law which is conceived of as our true self, and
    therefore as having authority over us. Ladd, Philosophy of Mind,
    183-185—“The condemnation of self involves self-diremption, double
    consciousness. Without it Kant’s categorical imperative is
    impossible. The one self lays down the law to the other self,
    judges it, threatens it. This is what is meant, when the apostle
    says: ‘_It is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me_’
    (_Rom. 7:17_).”


B. Conscience discriminative and impulsive.—But we need to define more
narrowly both the intellectual and the emotional elements in conscience.
As respects the intellectual element, we may say that conscience is a
power of judgment,—it declares our acts or states to conform, or not to
conform, to law; it declares the acts or states which conform to be
obligatory,—those which do not conform, to be forbidden. In other words,
conscience judges: (1) This is right (or, wrong); (2) I ought (or, I ought
not). In connection with this latter judgment, there comes into view the
emotional element of conscience,—we feel the claim of duty; there is an
inner sense that the wrong must not be done. Thus conscience is (1)
discriminative, and (2) impulsive.


    Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 173—“The one
    distinctive function of conscience is that of authoritative
    self-judgments in the conscious presence of a supreme Personality
    to whom we as persons feel ourselves accountable. It is this
    twofold personal element in every judgment of conscience, _viz._,
    the conscious self-judgment in the presence of the all-judging
    Deity, which has led such writers as Bain and Spencer and Stephen
    to attempt the explanation of the origin and authority of
    conscience as the product of parental training and social
    environment.... Conscience is not prudential nor advisory nor
    executive, but solely judicial. Conscience is the moral reason,
    pronouncing upon moral actions. Consciousness furnishes law;
    conscience pronounces judgments; it says: Thou shalt, Thou shalt
    not. Every man must obey his conscience; if it is not enlightened,
    that is his look-out. The callousing of conscience in this life is
    already a penal infliction.” S. S. Times, Apl. 5, 1902:185—“Doing
    as well as we know how is not enough, unless we know just what is
    right and then do that. God never tells us merely to do our best,
    or according to our knowledge. It is our duty to know what is
    right, and then to do it. Ignorantia legis neminem excusat. We
    have responsibility for knowing preliminary to doing.”


C. Conscience distinguished from other mental processes.—The nature and
office of conscience will be still more clearly perceived if we
distinguish it from other processes and operations with which it is too
often confounded. The term conscience has been used by various writers to
designate either one or all of the following: 1. _Moral intuition_—the
intuitive perception of the difference between right and wrong, as
opposite moral categories. 2. _Accepted law_—the application of the
intuitive idea to general classes of actions, and the declaration that
these classes of actions are right or wrong, apart from our individual
relation to them. This accepted law is the complex product of (_a_) the
intuitive idea, (_b_) the logical intelligence, (_c_) experiences of
utility, (_d_) influences of society and education, and (e) positive
divine revelation. 3. _Judgment_—applying this accepted law to individual
and concrete cases in our own experience, and pronouncing our own acts or
states either past, present, or prospective, to be right or wrong. 4.
_Command_—authoritative declaration of obligation to do the right, or
forbear the wrong, together with an impulse of the sensibility away from
the one, and toward the other. 5. _Remorse_ or _approval_—moral sentiments
either of approbation or disapprobation, in view of past acts or states,
regarded as wrong or right. 6. _Fear_ or _hope_—instinctive disposition of
disobedience to expect punishment, and of obedience to expect reward.


    Ladd, Philos. of Conduct, 70—“The feeling of the ought is primary,
    essential, unique; the judgments as to what one ought are the
    results of environment, education and reflection.” The sentiment
    of justice is not an inheritance of civilized man alone. No Indian
    was ever robbed of his lands or had his government allowance
    stolen from him who was not as keenly conscious of the wrong as in
    like circumstances we could conceive that a philosopher would be.
    The _oughtness_ of the ought is certainly intuitive; the _whyness_
    of the ought (conformity to God) is possibly intuitive also; the
    _whatness_ of the ought is less certainly intuitive. Cutler,
    Beginnings of Ethics, 163, 164—“Intuition tells us _that_ we are
    obliged; _why_ we are obliged, and _what_ we are obliged to, we
    must learn elsewhere.” _Obligation_—that which is binding on a
    man; _ought_ is something owed; _duty_ is something due. The
    intuitive notion of duty (intellect) is matched by the sense of
    obligation (feeling).

    Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 203, 270—“All men have a sense of
    right,—of right to life, and contemporaneously perhaps, but
    certainly afterwards, of right to personal property. And my right
    implies duty in my neighbor to respect it. Then the sense of right
    becomes objective and impersonal. My neighbor’s duty to me implies
    my duty to him. I put myself in his place.” Bowne, Principles of
    Ethics, 156, 188—“First, the feeling of obligation, the idea of a
    right and a wrong with corresponding duties, is universal....
    Secondly, there is a very general agreement in the formal
    principles of action, and largely in the virtues also, such as
    benevolence, justice, gratitude.... Whether we owe anything to our
    neighbor has never been a real question. The practical trouble has
    always lain in the other question: Who is my neighbor? Thirdly,
    the specific contents of the moral ideal are not fixed, but the
    direction in which the ideal lies is generally discernible.... We
    have in ethics the same fact as in intellect—a potentially
    infallible standard, with manifold errors in its apprehension and
    application. Lucretius held that degradation and paralysis of the
    moral nature result from religion. Many claim on the other hand
    that without religion morals would disappear from the earth.”

    Robinson, Princ. and Prac. of Morality, 173—“Fear of an omnipotent
    will is very different from remorse in view of the nature of the
    supreme Being whose law we have violated.” A duty is to be settled
    in accordance with the standard of absolute right, not as public
    sentiment would dictate. A man must be ready to do right in spite
    of what everybody thinks. Just as the decisions of a judge are for
    the time binding on all good citizens, so the decisions of
    conscience, as relatively binding, must always be obeyed. They are
    presumptively right and they are the only present guide of action.
    Yet man’s present state of sin makes it quite possible that the
    decisions which are relatively right may be absolutely wrong. It
    is not enough to take one’s time from the watch; the watch may go
    wrong; there is a prior duty of regulating the watch by
    astronomical standards. Bishop Gore: “Man’s first duty is, not to
    _follow_ his conscience, but to _enlighten_ his conscience.”
    Lowell says that the Scythians used to eat their grandfathers out
    of humanity. Paine, Ethnic Trinities, 300—“Nothing is so stubborn
    or so fanatical as a wrongly instructed conscience, as Paul showed
    in his own case by his own confession” (_Acts 26:9_—“_I verily
    thought with myself that I ought to do many things contrary to the
    name of Jesus of Nazareth_”).


D. Conscience the moral judiciary of the soul.—From what has been
previously said, it is evident that only 3. and 4. are properly included
under the term conscience. Conscience is the moral judiciary of the
soul—the power within of judgment and command. Conscience must judge
according to the law given to it, and therefore, since the moral standard
accepted by the reason may be imperfect, its decisions, while relatively
just, may be absolutely unjust.—1. and 2. belong to the _moral reason_,
but not to conscience proper. Hence the duty of enlightening and
cultivating the moral reason, so that conscience may have a proper
standard of judgment.—5. and 6. belong to the sphere of _moral sentiment_,
and not to conscience proper. The office of conscience is to “bear
witness” (Rom. 2:15).


    In _Rom. 2:15_—“_they show the work of the law written in their
    hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith, and their
    thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing them_”—we have
    conscience clearly distinguished both from the law and the
    perception of law on the one hand, and from the moral sentiments
    of approbation and disapprobation on the other. Conscience does
    not furnish the law, but it bears witness with the law which is
    furnished by other sources. It is not “that power of mind by which
    moral law is discovered to each individual” (Calderwood, Moral
    Philosophy, 77), nor can we speak of “Conscience, the Law” (as
    Whewell does in his Elements of Morality, 1:259-266). Conscience
    is not the law-book, in the court room, but it is the judge,—whose
    business is, not to make law, but to decide cases according to the
    law given to him.

    As conscience is not legislative, so it is not retributive; as it
    is not the law-book, so it is not the sheriff. We say, indeed, in
    popular language, that conscience scourges or chastises, but it is
    only in the sense in which we say that the judge punishes,—_i.
    e._, through the sheriff. The moral sentiments are the
    sheriff,—they carry out the decisions of conscience, the judge;
    but they are not themselves conscience, any more than the sheriff
    is the judge.

    Only this doctrine, that conscience does not discover law, can
    explain on the one hand the fact that men are bound to follow
    their consciences, and on the other hand the fact that their
    consciences so greatly differ as to what is right or wrong in
    particular cases. The truth is, that conscience is uniform and
    infallible, in the sense that it always decides rightly according
    to the law given it. Men’s decisions vary, only because the moral
    reason has presented to the conscience different standards by
    which to judge.

    Conscience can be educated only in the sense of acquiring greater
    facility and quickness in making its decisions. Education has its
    chief effect, not upon the conscience, but upon the moral reason,
    in rectifying its erroneous, or imperfect standards of judgment.
    Give conscience a right law by which to judge, and its decisions
    will be uniform, and absolutely as well as relatively just. We are
    bound, not only to “follow our conscience,” but to have a right
    conscience to follow,—and to follow it, not as one follows the
    beast he drives, but as the soldier follows his commander. Robert
    J. Burdette: “Following conscience as a guide is like following
    one’s nose. It is important to get the nose pointed right before
    it is safe to follow it. A man can keep the approval of his own
    conscience in very much the same way that he can keep directly
    behind his nose, and go wrong all the time.”

    Conscience is the con-knowing of a particular act or state, as
    coming under the law accepted by the reason as to right and wrong;
    and the judgment of conscience subsumes this act or state under
    that general standard. Conscience cannot _include_ the law—cannot
    itself _be_ the law,—because reason only knows, never _con_-knows.
    Reason says _scio_; only judgment says _conscio_.

    This view enables us to reconcile the intuitional and the
    empirical theories of morals. Each has its element of truth. The
    original sense of right and wrong is intuitive,—no education could
    ever impart the idea of the difference between right and wrong to
    one who had it not. But what classes of things _are_ right or
    wrong, we learn by the exercise of our logical intelligence, in
    connection with experiences of utility, influences of society and
    tradition, and positive divine revelation. Thus our moral reason,
    through a combination of intuition and education, of internal and
    external information as to general principles of right and wrong,
    furnishes the standard according to which conscience may judge the
    particular cases which come before it.

    This moral reason may become depraved by sin, so that the light
    becomes darkness (_Mat. 6:22, 23_) and conscience has only a
    perverse standard by which to judge. The “_weak_” conscience (_1
    Cor. 8:12_) is one whose standard of judgment is yet imperfect;
    the conscience “_branded_” (Rev. Vers.) or “_seared_” (A. V.) “_as
    with a hot iron_” (_1 Tim. 4:2_) is one whose standard has been
    wholly perverted by practical disobedience. The word and the
    Spirit of God are the chief agencies in rectifying our standards
    of judgment, and so of enabling conscience to make absolutely
    right decisions. God can so unite the soul to Christ, that it
    becomes partaker on the one hand of his satisfaction to justice
    and is thus “_sprinkled from an evil conscience_” (_Heb. 10:22_),
    and on the other hand of his sanctifying power and is thus enabled
    in certain respects to obey God’s command and to speak of a “_good
    conscience_” (_1 Pet. 3:16_—of single act; _3:21_—of state)
    instead of an “_evil conscience_” (_Heb. 10:22_) or a conscience
    “_defiled_” (_Tit. 1:15_) by sin. Here the “_good conscience_” is
    the conscience which has been obeyed by the will, and the “_evil
    conscience_” the conscience which has been disobeyed; with the
    result, in the first case, of approval from the moral sentiments,
    and, in the second case, of disapproval.


E. Conscience in its relation to God as law-giver.—Since conscience, in
the proper sense, gives uniform and infallible judgment that the right is
supremely obligatory, and that the wrong must be forborne at every cost,
it can be called an echo of God’s voice, and an indication in man of that
which his own true being requires.


    Conscience has sometimes been described as the voice of God in the
    soul, or as the personal presence and influence of God himself.
    But we must not identify conscience with God. D. W. Faunce:
    “Conscience is not God,—it is only a part of one’s self. To build
    up a religion about one’s own conscience, as if it were God, is
    only a refined selfishness—a worship of one part of one’s self by
    another part of one’s self.” In The Excursion, Wordsworth speaks
    of conscience as “God’s most intimate presence in the soul And his
    most perfect image in the world.” But in his Ode to Duty he more
    discreetly writes: “Stern daughter of the voice of God! O Duty! if
    that name thou love, Who art a light to guide, a rod To check the
    erring, and reprove, Thou who art victory and law When empty
    terrors overawe, From vain temptations dost set free And calmst
    the weary strife of frail humanity!” Here is an allusion to the
    Hebrew Bath Kol. “The Jews say that the Holy Spirit spoke during
    the Tabernacle by Urim and Thummim, under the first Temple by the
    Prophets, and under the second Temple by the Bath Kol—a divine
    intimation as inferior to the oracular voice proceeding from the
    mercy seat as a daughter is supposed to be inferior to her mother.
    It is also used in the sense of an approving conscience. In this
    case it is the echo of the voice of God in those who by obeying
    hear” (Hershon’s Talmudic Miscellany, 2, note). This phrase, “the
    echo of God’s voice,” is a correct description of conscience, and
    Wordsworth probably had it in mind when he spoke of duty as “the
    daughter of the voice of God.” Robert Browning describes
    conscience as “the great beacon-light God sets in all.... The
    worst man upon earth ... knows in his conscience more Of what
    right is, than arrives at birth In the best man’s acts that we bow
    before.” Jackson, James Martineau, 154—The sense of obligation is
    “a piercing ray of the great Orb of souls.” On Wordsworth’s
    conception of conscience, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 365-368.

    Since the activity of the immanent God reveals itself in the
    normal operations of our own faculties, conscience might be also
    regarded as man’s true self over against the false self which we
    have set up against it. Theodore Parker defines conscience as “our
    consciousness of the conscience of God.” In his fourth year, says
    Chadwick, his biographer (pages 12, 13, 185), young Theodore saw a
    little spotted tortoise and lifted his hand to strike. All at once
    something checked his arm, and a voice within said clear and loud:
    “It is wrong.” He asked his mother what it was that told him it
    was wrong. She wiped a tear from her eye with her apron, and
    taking him in her arms said: “Some men call it conscience, but I
    prefer to call it the voice of God in the soul of man. If you
    listen and obey it, then it will speak clearer and clearer, and
    will always guide you right; but if you turn a deaf ear and
    disobey, then it will fade out little by little, and will leave
    you all in the dark and without a guide. Your life depends on your
    hearing this little voice.” R. T. Smith, Man’s Knowledge of Man
    and of God, 87, 171—“Man has conscience, as he has talents.
    Conscience, no more than talent, makes him good. He is good, only
    as he follows conscience and uses talent.... The relation between
    the terms consciousness and conscience, which are in fact but
    forms of the same word, testifies to the fact that it is in the
    action of conscience that man’s consciousness of himself is
    chiefly experienced.”

    The conscience of the regenerate man may have such right
    standards, and its decisions may be followed by such uniformly
    right action, that its voice, though it is not itself God’s voice,
    is yet the very echo of God’s voice. The renewed conscience may
    take up into itself, and may express, the witness of the Holy
    Spirit (_Rom. 9:1_—“_I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my
    conscience bearing witness with me in the Holy Spirit_”; _cf._
    _8:16_—“_the Spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit, that
    we are children of God_”). But even when conscience judges
    according to imperfect standards, and is imperfectly obeyed by the
    will, there is a spontaneity in its utterances and a sovereignty
    in its commands. It declares that whatever is right must be done.
    The imperative of conscience is a “categorical imperative” (Kant).
    It is independent of the human will. Even when disobeyed, it still
    asserts its authority. Before conscience, every other impulse and
    affection of man’s nature is called to bow.


F. Conscience in its relation to God as holy.—Conscience is not an
original authority. It points to something higher than itself. The
“authority of conscience” is simply the authority of the moral law, or
rather, the authority of the personal God, of whose nature the law is but
a transcript. Conscience, therefore, with its continual and supreme demand
that the right should be done, furnishes the best witness to man of the
existence of a personal God, and of the supremacy of holiness in him in
whose image we are made.


    In knowing self in connection with moral law, man not only gets
    his best knowledge of self, but his best knowledge of that other
    self opposite to him, namely, God. Gordon, Christ of To-day,
    236—“The conscience is the true Jacob’s ladder, set in the heart
    of the individual and reaching unto heaven; and upon it the angels
    of self-reproach and self-approval ascend and descend.” This is of
    course true if we confine our thoughts to the mandatory element in
    revelation. There is a higher knowledge of God which is given only
    in grace. Jacob’s ladder symbolizes the Christ who publishes not
    only the gospel but the law, and not only the law but the gospel.
    Dewey, Psychology, 344—“Conscience is intuitive, not in the sense
    that it enunciates universal laws and principles, for it lays down
    no laws. Conscience is a name for the experience of personality
    that any given act is in harmony or in discord with a truly
    realized personality.” Because obedience to the dictates of
    conscience is always relatively right, Kant could say that “an
    erring conscience is a chimæra.” But because the law accepted by
    conscience may be absolutely wrong, conscience may in its
    decisions greatly err from the truth. S. S. Times: “Saul before
    his conversion was a conscientious wrong doer. His spirit and
    character was commendable, while his conduct was reprehensible.”
    We prefer to say that Saul’s zeal for the law was a zeal to make
    the law subservient to his own pride and honor.

    Horace Bushnell said that the first requirement of a great
    ministry is a great conscience. He did not mean the punitive,
    inhibitory conscience merely, but rather the discovering,
    arousing, inspiring conscience, that sees at once the great things
    to be done, and moves toward them with a shout and a song. This
    unbiased and pure conscience is inseparable from the sense of its
    relation to God and to God’s holiness. Shakespeare, Henry VI, 2d
    Part, 3:2—“What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted?
    Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just; And he but naked,
    though locked up in steel, Whose conscience with injustice is
    corrupted.” Huxley, in his lecture at Oxford in 1893, admits and
    even insists that ethical practice must be and should be in
    opposition to evolution; that the methods of evolution do not
    account for ethical man and his ethical progress. Morality is not
    a product of the same methods by which lower orders have advanced
    in perfection of organization, namely, by the struggle for
    existence and survival of the fittest. Human progress is moral, is
    in freedom, is under the law of love, is different in kind from
    physical evolution. James Russell Lowell: “In vain we call old
    notions fudge, And bend our conscience to our dealing: The ten
    commandments will not budge, And stealing will continue stealing.”

    R. T. Smith, Man’s Knowledge of Man and of God, 161—“Conscience
    lives in human nature like a rightful king, whose claim can never
    be forgotten by his people, even though they dethrone and misuse
    him, and whose presence on the seat of judgment can alone make the
    nation to be at peace with itself.” Seth, Ethical Principles,
    424—“The Kantian theory of autonomy does not tell the whole story
    of the moral life. Its unyielding Ought, its categorical
    Imperative, issues not merely from the depths of our own nature,
    but from the heart of the universe itself. We are
    self-legislative; but we reënact the law already enacted by God;
    we recognize, rather than constitute, the law of our own being.
    The moral law is an echo, within our own souls, of the voice of
    the Eternal, _‘__whose offspring we are__’__ (Acts 17:28)_.”

    Schenkel, Christliche Dogmatik, 1:135-155—“The conscience is the
    organ by which the human spirit finds God in itself and so becomes
    aware of itself in him. Only in conscience is man conscious of
    himself as eternal, as distinct from God, yet as normally bound to
    be determined wholly by God. When we subject ourselves wholly to
    God, conscience gives us peace. When we surrender to the world the
    allegiance due only to God, conscience brings remorse. In this
    latter case we become aware that while God is in us, we are no
    longer in God. Religion is exchanged for ethics, the relation of
    communion for the relation of separation. In conscience alone man
    distinguishes himself absolutely from the brute. Man does not make
    conscience, but conscience makes man. Conscience feels every
    separation from God as an injury to self. Faith is the relating of
    the self-consciousness to the God-consciousness, the becoming sure
    of our own personality, in the absolute personality of God. Only
    in faith does conscience come to itself. But by sin this
    faith-consciousness may be turned into law-consciousness. Faith
    affirms God _in_ us; Law affirms God _outside_ of us.” Schenkel
    differs from Schleiermacher in holding that religion is not
    feeling but conscience, and that it is not a sense of dependence
    on the world, but a sense of dependence on God. Conscience
    recognizes a God distinct from the universe, a moral God, and so
    makes an unmoral religion impossible.

    Hopkins, Outline Study of Man, 283-285, Moral Science, 49, Law of
    Love, 41—“Conscience is the moral consciousness of man in view of
    his own actions as related to moral law. It is a double knowledge
    of self and of the law. Conscience is not the whole of the moral
    nature. It presupposes the moral reason, which recognizes the
    moral law and affirms its universal obligation for all moral
    beings. It is the office of conscience to bring man into personal
    relation to this law. It sets up a tribunal within him by which
    his own actions are judged. Not conscience, but the moral reason,
    judges of the conduct of others. This last is _science_, but not
    _conscience_.”

    Peabody, Moral Philos., 41-60—“Conscience not a source, but a
    means, of knowledge. Analogous to consciousness. A judicial
    faculty. Judges according to the law before it. Verdict (verum
    dictum) always relatively right, although, by the absolute
    standard of right, it may be wrong. Like all perceptive faculties,
    educated by use (not by increase of knowledge only, for man may
    act worse, the more knowledge he has). For absolutely right
    decisions, conscience is dependent upon knowledge. To recognize
    conscience as _legislator_ (as well as judge), is to fail to
    recognize any objective standard of right.” The Two Consciences,
    46, 47—“Conscience the Law, and Conscience the Witness. The latter
    is the true and proper Conscience.”

    H. B. Smith, System of Christ. Theology, 178-191—“The unity of
    conscience is not in its being one faculty or in its performing
    one function, but in its having one _object_, its relation to one
    idea, viz., _right_.... The term ‘conscience’ no more designates a
    special faculty than the term ‘religion’ does (or than the
    ‘æsthetic sense’).... The existence of conscience proves a moral
    law above us; it leads logically to a Moral Governor; ... it
    implies an essential distinction between right and wrong, an
    immutable morality; ... yet needs to be enlightened; ... men may
    be conscientious in iniquity; ... conscience is not righteousness;
    ... this may only show the greatness of the depravity, having
    conscience, and yet ever disobeying it.”

    On the New Testament passages with regard to conscience, see
    Hofmann, Lehre von dem Gewissen, 30-38; Kähler, Das Gewissen,
    225-293. For the view that conscience is primarily the cognitive
    or intuitional power of the soul, see Calderwood, Moral
    Philosophy, 77; Alexander, Moral Science, 20; McCosh, Div. Govt.,
    297-312; Talbot, Ethical Prolegomena, in Bap. Quar., July,
    1877:257-274; Park, Discourses, 260-296; Whewell, Elements of
    Morality, 1:259-266. On the whole subject of conscience, see
    Mansel, Metaphysics, 158-170; Martineau, Religion and Materialism,
    45—“The discovery of duty is as distinctly relative to an
    objective Righteousness as the perception of form to an external
    space”; also Types, 2:27-30—“We first judge ourselves; then
    others”; 53, 54, 74, 103—“Subjective morals are as absurd as
    subjective mathematics.” The best brief treatment of the whole
    subject is that of E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of
    Morality, 26-78. See also Wayland, Moral Science, 49; Harless,
    Christian Ethics, 45, 60; H. N. Day, Science of Ethics, 17; Janet,
    Theory of Morals, 264, 348; Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, 62; _cf._
    Schwegler, Hist. Philosophy, 233; Haven, Mor. Philos., 41;
    Fairchild, Mor. Philos., 75; Gregory, Christian Ethics, 71;
    Passavant, Das Gewissen; Wm. Schmid, Das Gewissen.


2. Will.


A. Will defined.—Will is the soul’s power to choose between motives and to
direct its subsequent activity according to the motive thus chosen,—in
other words, the soul’s power to choose both an end and the means to
attain it. The choice of an ultimate end we call immanent preference; the
choice of means we call executive volition.


    In this definition we part company with Jonathan Edwards, Freedom
    of the Will, in Works, vol. 2. He regards the will as the soul’s
    power to act according to motive, _i. e._, to act out its nature,
    but he denies the soul’s power to choose between motives, _i. e._,
    to initiate a course of action contrary to the motive which has
    been previously dominant. Hence he is unable to explain how a holy
    being, like Satan or Adam, could ever fall. If man has no power to
    change motives, to break with the past, to begin a new course of
    action, he has no more freedom than the brute. The younger Edwards
    (Works, 1:483) shows what his father’s doctrine of the will
    implies, when he says: “Beasts therefore, according to the measure
    of their intelligence, are as free as men. Intelligence, and not
    liberty, is the only thing wanting to constitute them moral
    agents.” Yet Jonathan Edwards, determinist as he was, in his
    sermon on Pressing into the Kingdom of God (Works, 4:381), urges
    the use of means, and appeals to the sinner as if he had the power
    of choosing between the motives of self and of God. He was
    unconsciously making a powerful appeal to the will, and the human
    will responded in prolonged and mighty efforts; see Allen,
    Jonathan Edwards, 109.

    For references, and additional statements with regard to the will
    and its freedom, see chapter on Decrees, pages 361, 362, and
    article by A. H. Strong, in Baptist Review, 1883:219-242, and
    reprinted in Philosophy and Religion, 114-128. In the remarks upon
    the Decrees, we have intimated our rejection of the Arminian
    liberty of indifference, or the doctrine that the will can act
    without motive. See this doctrine advocated in Peabody, Moral
    Philosophy, 1-9. But we also reject the theory of determinism
    propounded by Jonathan Edwards (Freedom of the Will, in Works,
    vol. 2), which, as we have before remarked, identifies sensibility
    with the will, regards affections as the efficient causes of
    volitions, and speaks of the connection between motive and action
    as a necessary one. Hazard, Man a Creative First Cause, and The
    Will, 407—“Edwards gives to the controlling cause of volition in
    the past the name of motive. He treats the inclination as a
    motive, but he also makes inclination synonymous with choice and
    will, which would make will to be only the soul willing—and
    therefore the cause of its own act.” For objections to the
    Arminian theory, see H. B. Smith, Review of Whedon, in Faith and
    Philosophy, 359-399; McCosh, Divine Government, 263-318, esp. 312;
    E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 109-137;
    Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:115-147.

    James, Psychology, 1:139—“Consciousness is primarily a selecting
    agency.” 2:393—“Man possesses all the instincts of animals, and a
    great many more besides. Reason, _per se_, can inhibit no
    impulses; the only thing that can neutralize an impulse is an
    impulse the other way. Reason may however make an inference which
    will excite the imagination to let loose the impulse the other
    way.” 549—“Ideal or moral action is action in the line of the
    greatest resistance.” 562—“Effort of attention is the essential
    phenomenon of will.” 567—“The terminus of the psychological
    process is volition; the point to which the will is directly
    applied is always an idea.” 568—“Though attention is the first
    thing in volition, express consent to the reality of what is
    attended to is an additional and distinct phenomenon. We say not
    only: It is a reality; but we also say: ‘Let it be a reality.’ ”
    571—“Are the duration and intensity of this effort fixed functions
    of the object, or are they not? We answer, _No_, and so we
    maintain freedom of the will.” 584—“The soul presents nothing,
    creates nothing, is at the mercy of material forces for all
    possibilities, and, by reinforcing one and checking others, it
    figures not as an _epiphenomenon_, but as something from which the
    play gets moral support.” Alexander, Theories of the Will,
    201-214, finds in Reid’s Active Powers of the Human Mind the most
    adequate empirical defense of indeterminism.


B. Will and other faculties.—(_a_) We accept the threefold division of
human faculties into intellect, sensibility, and will. (_b_) Intellect is
the soul knowing; sensibility is the soul feeling (desires, affections);
will is the soul choosing (end or means). (_c_) In every act of the soul,
all the faculties act. Knowing involves feeling and willing; feeling
involves knowing and willing; willing involves knowing and feeling. (_d_)
Logically, each latter faculty involves the preceding action of the
former; the soul must know before feeling; must know and feel before
willing. (_e_) Yet since knowing and feeling are activities, neither of
these is possible without willing.


    Socrates to Theætetus: “It would be a singular thing, my lad, if
    each of us was, as it were, a wooden horse, and within us were
    seated many separate senses. For manifestly these senses unite
    into one nature, call it the soul or what you will. And it is with
    this central form, through the organs of sense, that we perceive
    sensible objects.” Dewey, Psychology, 21—“Knowledge and feeling
    are partial aspects of the self, and hence more or less abstract,
    while will is complete, comprehending both aspects.... While the
    universal element is knowledge, the individual element is feeling,
    and the relation which connects them into one concrete content is
    will.” 364—“There is conflict of desires or motives. Deliberation
    is the comparison of desires; choice is the decision in favor of
    one. This desire is then the strongest because the whole force of
    the self is thrown into it.” 411—“The man determines himself by
    setting up either good or evil as a motive to himself, and he sets
    up either, as he will have himself be. There is no thought without
    will, for thought implies inhibition.” Ribot, Diseases of the
    Will, 73, cites the case of Coleridge, and his lack of power to
    inhibit scattering and useless ideas; 114—“Volition plunges its
    roots into the profoundest depths of the individual, and beyond
    the individual, into the species and into all species.”

    As God is not mere nature but originating force, so man is chiefly
    will. Every other act of the soul has will as an element. Wundt:
    “Jedes Denken ist ein Wollen.” There is no perception, and there
    is no thought, without attention, and attention is an act of the
    will. Hegelians and absolute idealists like Bradley, (see Mind,
    July, 1886), deny that attention is an active function of the
    self. They regard it as a necessary consequence of the more
    interesting character of preceding ideas. Thus all power to alter
    character is denied to the agent. This is an exact reversal of the
    facts of consciousness, and it would leave no will in God or man.
    T. H. Green says that the self makes the motives by identifying
    itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another, but
    that the self has no power of alternative choice in thus
    identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than
    another; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310. James Seth, Freedom of
    Ethical Postulate: “The only hope of finding a place for real free
    will is in another than the Humian, empirical or psychological
    account of the moral person or self. Hegel and Green bring will
    again under the law of necessity. But personality is ultimate.
    Absolute uniformity is entirely unproved. We contend for a power
    of free and incalculable initiation in the self, and this it is
    necessary to maintain in the interests of morality.” Without will
    to attend to pertinent material and to reject the impertinent, we
    can have no _science_; without will to select and combine the
    elements of imagination, we can have no _art_; without will to
    choose between evil and good, we can have no _morality_. Ælfric,
    A. D. 900: “The verb ‘to will’ has no imperative, for that the
    will must be always free.”


C. Will and permanent states.—(_a_) Though every act of the soul involves
the action of all the faculties, yet in any particular action one faculty
may be more prominent than the others. So we speak of acts of intellect,
of affection, of will. (_b_) This predominant action of any single faculty
produces effects upon the other faculties associated with it. The action
of will gives a direction to the intellect and to the affections, as well
as a permanent bent to the will itself. (_c_) Each faculty, therefore, has
its permanent states as well as its transient acts, and the will may
originate these states. Hence we speak of voluntary affections, and may
with equal propriety speak of voluntary opinions. These permanent
voluntary states we denominate character.


    I “make up” my mind. Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, 152—“I will the
    influential ideas, feelings and desires, rather than allow these
    ideas, feelings and desires to influence—not to say, determine
    me.” All men can say with Robert Browning’s Paracelsus: “I have
    subdued my life to the one purpose Whereto I ordained it.” “Sow an
    act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character;
    sow a character, and you reap a destiny.” Tito, in George Eliot’s
    Romola, and Markheim in R. L. Stevenson’s story of that name, are
    instances of the gradual and almost imperceptible fixation in evil
    ways which results from seemingly slight original decisions of the
    will; see art. on Tito Melema, by Julia H. Gulliver, in New World,
    Dec. 1895:688—“Sin lies in the choice of the ideas that shall
    frequent the moral life, rather than of the actions that shall
    form the outward life.... The pivotal point of the moral life is
    the intent involved in attention.... Sin consists, not only in the
    motive, but in the making of the motive.” By every decision of the
    will in which we turn our thought either toward or away from an
    object of desire, we set nerve-tracts in operation, upon which
    thought may hereafter more or less easily travel. “Nothing makes
    an inroad, without making a road.” By slight efforts of attention
    to truth which we know ought to influence us, we may “_make level
    in the desert a highway for our God_” (_Is. 40:3_), or render the
    soul a hard trodden ground impervious to “_the word of the
    kingdom_” (_Mat. 13:19_).

    The word “character” meant originally the mark of the engraver’s
    tool upon the metal or the stone. It came then to signify the
    collective result of the engraver’s work. The use of the word in
    morals implies that every thought and act is chiseling itself into
    the imperishable substance of the soul. J. S. Mill: “A character
    is a completely fashioned will.” We may talk therefore of a
    “generic volition” (Dewey). There is a permanent bent of the will
    toward good or toward evil. Reputation is man’s shadow, sometimes
    longer, sometimes shorter, than himself. Character, on the other
    hand, is the man’s true self—“what a man is in the dark” (Dwight
    L. Moody). In this sense, “purpose is the autograph of mind.” Duke
    of Wellington: “Habit a second nature? Habit is ten times nature!”
    When Macbeth says: “If ’twere done when ’tis done, Then ’twere
    well ’twere done quickly,” the trouble is that when ’tis done, it
    is only begun. Robert Dale Owen gives us the fundamental principle
    of socialism in the maxim: “A man’s character is made for him, not
    by him.” Hence he would change man’s diet or his environment, as a
    means of forming man’s character. But Jesus teaches that what
    defiles comes not from without but from within (_Mat. 15:18_).
    Because character is the result of will, the maxim of Heraclitus
    is true: ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων—man’s character is his destiny. On
    habit, see James, Psychology, 1:122-127.


D. Will and motives.—(_a_) The permanent states just mentioned, when they
have been once determined, also influence the will. Internal views and
dispositions, and not simply external presentations, constitute the
strength of motives. (_b_) These motives often conflict, and though the
soul never acts without motive, it does notwithstanding choose between
motives, and so determines the end toward which it will direct its
activities. (_c_) Motives are not _causes_, which compel the will, but
_influences_, which persuade it. The power of these motives, however, is
proportioned to the strength of will which has entered into them and has
made them what they are.


    “Incentives come from the soul’s self: the rest avail not.” The
    same wind may drive two ships in opposite directions, according as
    they set their sails. The same external presentation may result in
    George Washington’s refusing, and Benedict Arnold’s accepting, the
    bribe to betray his country. Richard Lovelace of Canterbury:
    “Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds
    innocent and quiet take That for a hermitage.” Jonathan Edwards
    made motives to be _efficient_ causes, when they are only _final_
    causes. We must not interpret motive as if it were locomotive. It
    is always a man’s fault when he becomes a drunkard: drink never
    takes to a man; the man takes to drink. Men who deny demerit are
    ready enough to claim merit. They hold others responsible, if not
    themselves. Bowne: “Pure arbitrariness and pure necessity are
    alike incompatible with reason. There must be a law of reason in
    the mind with which volition cannot tamper, and there must also be
    the power to determine ourselves accordingly.” Bowne, Principles
    of Ethics, 135—“If necessity is a universal thing, then the belief
    in freedom is also necessary. All grant freedom of thought, so
    that it is only executive freedom that is denied.” Bowne, Theory
    of Thought and Knowledge, 239-244—“Every system of philosophy must
    invoke freedom for the solution of the problem of error, or make
    shipwreck of reason itself.... Our faculties are made for truth,
    but they may be carelessly used, or wilfully misused, and thus
    error is born.... We need not only laws of thought, but
    self-control in accordance with them.”

    The will, in choosing _between_ motives, chooses _with_ a motive,
    namely, the motive chosen. Fairbairn, Philos. Christian Religion,
    76—“While motives may be necessary, they need not necessitate. The
    will selects motives; motives do not select the will. Heredity and
    environment do not cancel freedom, they only condition it. Thought
    is transcendence as regards the phenomena of space; will is
    transcendence as regards the phenomena of time; this double
    transcendence involves the complete supernatural character of
    man.” New World, 1892:152—“It is not the character, but the self
    that has the character, to which the ultimate moral decision is
    due.” William Ernest Henly, Poems, 119—“It matters not how strait
    the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master
    of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”

    Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:54—“A being is free, in so far
    as the inner centre of its life, from which it acts, is
    conditioned by self-determination. It is not enough that the
    deciding agent in an act be the man himself, his own nature, his
    distinctive character. In order to have accountability, we must
    have more than this; we must prove that this, his distinctive
    nature and character, springs from his own volition, and that it
    is itself the product of freedom in moral development. _Matt.
    12:33_—‘_make the tree good, and its fruit good_’—combines both.
    Acts depend upon nature; but nature again depends upon the primary
    decisions of the will (‘_make the tree good_’). Some determinism
    is not denied; but it is partly limited [by the will’s remaining
    power of choice] and partly traced back to a former
    self-determining.” _Ibid._, 67—“If freedom be the self-determining
    of the will from that which is undetermined, Determinism is found
    wanting,—because in its most spiritual form, though it grants a
    self-determination of the will, it is only such a one as springs
    from a determinateness already present; and Indifferentism is
    found wanting too, because while it maintains indeterminateness as
    presupposed in every act of will, it does not recognize an actual
    self-determining on the part of the will, which, though it be a
    self-determining, yet begets determinateness of character.... We
    must, therefore, hold the doctrine of a _conditional_ and
    _limited_ freedom.”


E. Will and contrary choice.—(_a_) Though no act of pure will is possible,
the soul may put forth single volitions in a direction opposed to its
previous ruling purpose, and thus far man has the power of a contrary
choice (Rom. 7:18—“to will is present with me”). (_b_) But in so far as
will has entered into and revealed itself in permanent states of intellect
and sensibility and in a settled bent of the will itself, man cannot by a
single act reverse his moral state, and in this respect has not the power
of a contrary choice. (_c_) In this latter case he can change his
character only indirectly, by turning his attention to considerations
fitted to awaken opposite dispositions, and by thus summoning up motives
to an opposite course.


    There is no such thing as an act of pure will. Peters,
    Willenswelt, 126—“Jedes Wollen ist ein Etwas wollen”—“all willing
    is a willing of some thing”; it has an object which the mind
    conceives, which awakens the sensibility, and which the will
    strives to realize. Cause without alternative is not true cause.
    J. F. Watts: “We know causality only as we know will, _i. e._,
    where of two possibles it makes one actual. A cause may therefore
    have more than one certain effect. In the external material world
    we cannot find _cause_, but only _antecedent_. To construct a
    theory of the will from a study of the material universe is to
    seek the living among the dead. Will is power to _make_ a
    decision, not to _be made_ by decisions, to decide between
    motives, and not to be determined by motives. Who conducts the
    trial between motives? Only the self.” While we agree with the
    above in its assertion of the certainty of nature’s sequences, we
    object to its attribution even to nature of anything like
    necessity. Since nature’s laws are merely the habits of God, God’s
    causality in nature is the regularity, not of necessity, but of
    freedom. We too are free at the strategic points. Automatic as
    most of our action is, there are times when we know ourselves to
    have power of initiative; when we put under our feet the motives
    which have dominated us in the past; when we mark out new courses
    of action. In these critical times we assert our manhood; but for
    them we would be no better than the beasts that perish. “Unless
    above himself he can erect himself, How mean a thing is man!”

    Will, with no remaining power of contrary choice, may be brute
    will, but it is not free will. We therefore deny the relevancy of
    Herbert Spencer’s argument, in his Data of Ethics, and in his
    Psychology, 2:503—“Psychical changes either conform to law, or
    they do not. If they do not conform to law, no science of
    Psychology is possible. If they do conform to law, there cannot be
    any such thing as free will.” Spinoza also, in his Ethics, holds
    that the stone, as it falls, would if it were conscious think
    itself free, and with as much justice as man; for it is doing that
    to which its constitution leads it; but no more can be said for
    him. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, xiii—“To try to
    collect the ‘data of ethics’ when there is no recognition of man
    as a personal agent, capable of freely originating the conduct and
    the states of will for which he is morally responsible, is labor
    lost.” Fisher, chapter on the Personality of God, in Grounds of
    Theistic and Christian Belief—“Self-determination, as the very
    term signifies, is attended with an irresistible conviction that
    the direction of the will is self-imparted.... That the will is
    free, that is, not constrained by causes exterior, which is
    _fatalism_—and not a mere spontaneity, confined to one path by a
    force acting from within, which is _determinism_—is immediately
    evident to every unsophisticated mind. We can initiate action by
    an efficiency which is neither irresistibly controlled by motives,
    nor determined, without any capacity of alternative action, by a
    proneness inherent in its nature.... Motives have an _influence_,
    but influence is not to be confounded with _causal_ efficiency.”

    Talbot, on Will and Free Will, Bap. Rev., July, 1882—“Will is
    neither a power of unconditioned self-determination—which is not
    freedom, but an aimless, irrational, fatalistic power; nor pure
    spontaneity—which excludes from will all law but its own; but it
    is rather a power of originating action—a power which is limited
    however by inborn dispositions, by acquired habits and
    convictions, by feelings and social relations.” Ernest Naville, in
    Rev. Chrétienne, Jan. 1878:7—“Our liberty does not consist in
    producing an action of which it is the only source. It consists in
    choosing between two preëxistent impulses. It is _choice_, not
    _creation_, that is our destiny—a drop of water that can choose
    whether it will go into the Rhine or the Rhone. Gravity carries it
    down,—it chooses only its direction. Impulses do not come from the
    will, but from the sensibility; but free will chooses between
    these impulses.” Bowne, Metaphysics, 169—“Freedom is not a power
    of acting without, or apart from, motives, but simply a power of
    choosing an end or law, and of governing one’s self accordingly.”
    Porter, Moral Science, 77-111—Will is “not a power to choose
    without motive.” It “does not exclude motives to the contrary.”
    Volition “supposes two or more objects between which election is
    made. It is an act of preference, and to prefer implies that one
    motive is chosen to the exclusion of another.... To the conception
    and the act two motives at least are required.” Lyall, Intellect,
    Emotions, and Moral Nature, 581, 592—“The will follows reasons,
    inducements—but it is not _caused_. It obeys or acts under
    inducement, but it does so sovereignly. It exhibits the phenomena
    of activity, in relation to the very motive it obeys. It obeys it,
    rather than another. It determines, in reference to it, that this
    is the very motive it will obey. There is undoubtedly this
    phenomenon exhibited: the will obeying—but elective, active, in
    its obedience. If it be asked how this is possible—how the will
    can be under the influence of motive, and yet possess an
    intellectual activity—we reply that this is one of those ultimate
    phenomena which must be admitted, while they cannot be explained.”


F. Will and responsibility.—(_a_) By repeated acts of will put forth in a
given moral direction, the affections may become so confirmed in evil or
in good as to make previously certain, though not necessary, the future
good or evil action of the man. Thus, while the will is free, the man may
be the “bondservant of sin” (John 8:31-36) or the “servant of
righteousness” (Rom. 6:15-23; _cf._ Heb. 12-23—“spirits of just men made
perfect”). (_b_) Man is responsible for all effects of will, as well as
for will itself; for voluntary affections, as well as for voluntary acts;
for the intellectual views into which will has entered, as well as for the
acts of will by which these views have been formed in the past or are
maintained in the present (2 Pet. 3:5—“wilfully forget”).


    Ladd, Philosophy of Knowledge, 415—“The self stands between the
    two laws of Nature and of Conscience, and, under perpetual
    limitations from both, exercises its choice. Thus it becomes more
    and more enslaved by the one, or more and more free by habitually
    choosing to follow the other. Our conception of causality
    according to the laws of nature, and our conception of the other
    causality of freedom, are both derived from one and the same
    experience of the self. There arises a seeming antinomy only when
    we hypostatize each severally and apart from the other.” R. T.
    Smith, Man’s Knowledge of Man and of God, 69—“Making a _will_ is
    significant. Here the action of will is limited by conditions: the
    amount of the testator’s property, the number of his relatives,
    the nature of the objects of bounty within his knowledge.”

    Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 349-407—“Action without motives,
    or contrary to all motives, would be irrational action. Instead of
    being free, it would be like the convulsions of epilepsy. Motives
    = sensibilities. Motive is not _cause_; does not determine; is
    only influence. Yet determination is always made under the
    influence of motives. Uniformity of action is not to be explained
    by any law of uniform influence of motives, but by _character_ in
    the will. By its choice, will forms in itself a character; by
    action in accordance with this choice, it confirms and develops
    the character. Choice modifies sensibilities, and so modifies
    motives. Volitional action expresses character, but also forms and
    modifies it. Man may change his choice; yet intellect,
    sensibility, motive, habit, remain. Evil choice, having formed
    intellect and sensibility into accord with itself, must be a
    powerful hindrance to fundamental change by new and contrary
    choice; and gives small ground to expect that man left to himself
    ever will make the change. After will has acquired character by
    choices, its determinations are not transitions from complete
    indeterminateness or indifference, but are more or less
    expressions of character already formed. The theory that
    indifference is essential to freedom implies that will never
    acquires character; that voluntary action is atomistic; that every
    act is disintegrated from every other; that character, if
    acquired, would be incompatible with freedom. Character is a
    choice, yet a choice which persists, which modifies sensibility
    and intellect, and which influences subsequent determinations.”

    My freedom then is freedom within limitations. Heredity and
    environment, and above all the settled dispositions which are the
    product of past acts of will, render a large part of human action
    practically automatic. The deterministic theory is valid for
    perhaps nine-tenths of human activity. Mason, Faith of the Gospel,
    118, 119—“We naturally will with a bias toward evil. To act
    according to the perfection of nature would be true freedom. And
    this man has lost. He recognizes that he is not his true self. It
    is only with difficulty that he works toward his true self again.
    By the fall of Adam, the will, which before was conditioned but
    free, is now not only conditioned but enslaved. Nothing but the
    action of grace can free it.” Tennyson, In Memoriam, Introduction:
    “Our wills are ours, we know not how; Our wills are ours, to make
    them thine.” Studying the action of the sinful will alone, one
    might conclude that there is no such thing as freedom. Christian
    ethics, in distinction from naturalistic ethics, reveals most
    clearly the degradation of our nature, at the same time that it
    discloses the remedy in Christ: “_If therefore the Son shall make
    you free, ye shall be free indeed_” (_John 8:36_).

    Mind, Oct. 1882:567—“Kant seems to be in quest of the phantasmal
    freedom which is supposed to consist in the absence of
    determination by motives. The error of the determinists from which
    this idea is the recoil, involves an equal abstraction of the man
    from his thoughts, and interprets the relation between the two as
    an instance of the mechanical causality which exists between two
    things in nature. The point to be grasped in the controversy is
    that a man and his motives are one, and that consequently he is in
    every instance self-determined.... Indeterminism is tenable only
    if an ego can be found which is not an ego already determinate;
    but such an ego, though it may be logically distinguished and
    verbally expressed, is not a factor in psychology.” Morell, Mental
    Philosophy, 390—“Motives determine the will, and so _far_ the will
    is not free; but the man governs the motives, allowing them a less
    or a greater power of influencing his life, and so _far_ the man
    is a free agent.” Santayana: “A free man, because he is free, may
    make himself a slave; but once a slave, because he is a slave, he
    cannot make himself free.” Sidgwick, Method of Ethics, 51,
    65—“This almost overwhelming cumulative proof [of necessity]
    seems, however, more than balanced by a single argument on the
    other side: the immediate affirmation of consciousness in the
    moment of deliberate volition. It is impossible for me to think,
    at each moment, that my volition is completely determined by my
    formed character and the motives acting upon it. The opposite
    conviction is so strong as to be absolutely unshaken by the
    evidence brought against it. I cannot believe it to be illusory.”


G. Inferences from this view of the will.—(_a_) We can be responsible for
the voluntary evil affections with which we are born, and for the will’s
inherited preference of selfishness, only upon the hypothesis that we
originated these states of the affections and will, or had a part in
originating them. Scripture furnishes this explanation, in its doctrine of
Original Sin, or the doctrine of a common apostasy of the race in its
first father, and our derivation of a corrupted nature by natural
generation from him. (_b_) While there remains to man, even in his present
condition, a natural power of will by which he may put forth transient
volitions externally conformed to the divine law and so may to a limited
extent modify his character, it still remains true that the sinful bent of
his affections is not directly under his control; and this bent
constitutes a motive to evil so constant, inveterate, and powerful, that
it actually influences every member of the race to reäffirm his evil
choice, and renders necessary a special working of God’s Spirit upon his
heart to ensure his salvation. Hence the Scripture doctrine of
Regeneration.


    There is such a thing as “psychical automatism” (Ladd, Philos.
    Mind, 169). Mother: “Oscar, why can’t you be good?” “Mamma, it
    makes me so tired!” The wayward four-year-old is a type of
    universal humanity. Men are born morally tired, though they have
    energy enough of other sorts. The man who sins may lose all
    freedom, so that his soul becomes a seething mass of eructant
    evil. T. C. Chamberlain: “Conditions may make choices run rigidly
    in one direction and give as fixed uniformity as in physical
    phenomena. Put before a million typical Americans the choice
    between a quarter and a dime, and rigid uniformity of results can
    be safely predicted.” Yet Dr. Chamberlain not only grants but
    claims liberty of choice. Romanes, Mind and Motion,
    155-160—“Though volitions are largely determined by other and
    external causes, it does not follow that they are determined
    _necessarily_, and this makes all the difference between the
    theories of will as bond or free. Their intrinsic character as
    first causes protects them from being coerced by these causes and
    therefore from becoming only the mere effects of them. The
    condition to the effective operation of a _motive_—as
    distinguished from a _motor_—is the acquiescence of the first
    cause upon whom that motive is operating.” Fichte: “If any one
    adopting the dogma of necessity should remain virtuous, we must
    seek the cause of his goodness elsewhere than in the innocuousness
    of his doctrine. Upon the supposition of free will alone can duty,
    virtue, and morality have any existence.” Lessing: “Kein Mensch
    muss müssen.” Delitzsch: “Der Mensch, wie er jetzt ist, ist
    wahlfrei, aber nicht machtfrei.”

    Kant regarded freedom as an exception to the law of natural
    causality. But this freedom is not phenomenal but noumenal, for
    causality is not a category of noumena. From this freedom we get
    our whole idea of personality, for personality is freedom of the
    whole soul from the mechanism of nature. Kant treated scornfully
    the determinism of Leibnitz. He said it was the freedom of a
    turnspit, which when once wound up directed its own movements, _i.
    e._, was merely automatic. Compare with this the view of Baldwin,
    Psychology, Feeling and Will, 373—“Free choice is a synthesis, the
    outcome of which is in every case conditioned upon its elements,
    but in no case caused by them. A logical inference is conditioned
    upon its premises, but it is not caused by them. Both inference
    and choice express the nature of the conscious principle and the
    unique method of its life.... The motives do not grow into
    volitions, nor does the volition stand apart from the motives. The
    motives are partial expressions, the volition is a total
    expression, of the same existence.... Freedom is the expression of
    one’s self conditioned by past choices and present environment.”
    Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:4—“Refrain to-night, And that shall lend a
    kind of easiness To the next abstinence: the next more easy: For
    use can almost change the stamp of nature, And either curb the
    devil or throw him out With wondrous potency.” 3:2—“Purpose is but
    the slave to memory; Of violent birth but poor validity.”
    4:7—“That we would do, We should do when we would; for this
    _would_ changes And hath abatements and delays as many As there
    are tongues, are hands, are accidents.” Goethe: “Von der Gewalt
    die alle Wesen bindet, Befreit der Mensch sich der sich
    überwindet.”

    Scotus Novanticus (Prof. Laurie of Edinburgh), Ethica, 287—“The
    chief good is fulness of life achieved through law by the action
    of will as reason on sensibility.... Immorality is the letting
    loose of feeling, in opposition to the idea and the law in it; it
    is individuality in opposition to personality.... In immorality,
    will is defeated, the personality overcome, and the subject
    volitionizes just as a dog volitionizes. The subject takes
    possession of the personality and uses it for its natural
    desires.” Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, 456, quotes Ribot,
    Diseases of the Will, 133—“Will is not the cause of anything. It
    is like the verdict of a jury, which is an effect, without being a
    cause. It is the highest force which nature has yet developed—the
    last consummate blossom of all her marvellous works.” Yet Maudsley
    argues that the mind itself has power to prevent insanity. This
    implies that there is an owner of the instrument endowed with
    power and responsibility to keep it in order. Man can do much, but
    God can do more.


H. Special objections to the deterministic theory of the will.—Determinism
holds that man’s actions are uniformly determined by motives acting upon
his character, and that he has no power to change these motives or to act
contrary to them. This denial that the will is free has serious and
pernicious consequences in theology. On the one hand, it weakens even if
it does not destroy man’s conviction with regard to responsibility, sin,
guilt and retribution, and so obscures the need of atonement; on the other
hand, it weakens if it does not destroy man’s faith in his own power as
well as in God’s power of initiating action, and so obscures the
possibility of atonement.


    Determinism is exemplified in Omar Kháyyám’s Rubáiyát: “With
    earth’s first clay they did the last man knead, And there of the
    last harvest sowed the seed; And the first morning of creation
    wrote What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.” William James,
    Will to Believe, 145-183, shows that determinism involves
    pessimism or subjectivism—good and evil are merely means of
    increasing knowledge. The result of subjectivism is in theology
    antinomianism; in literature romanticism; in practical life
    sensuality or sensualism, as in Rousseau, Renan and Zola. Hutton,
    review of Clifford in Contemp. Thoughts and Thinkers, 1:254—“The
    determinist says there would be no moral quality in actions that
    did not express previous tendency, _i. e._, a man is responsible
    only for what he cannot help doing. No effort against the grain
    will be made by him who believes that his interior mechanism
    settles for him whether he shall make it or no.” Royce, World and
    Individual, 2:342—“Your unique voices in the divine symphony are
    no more the voices of moral agents than are the stones of a
    mosaic.” The French monarch announced that all his subjects should
    be free to choose their own religion, but he added that nobody
    should choose a different religion from the king’s. “Johnny, did
    you give your little sister the choice between those two apples?”
    “Yes, Mamma; I told her she could have the little one or none, and
    she chose the little one.” Hobson’s choice was always the choice
    of the last horse in the row. The bartender with revolver in hand
    met all criticisms upon the quality of his liquor with the remark:
    “You’ll drink that whisky, and you’ll like it too!”

    Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 22—“There must be implicitly
    present to primitive man the sense of freedom, since his fetichism
    largely consists in attributing to inanimate objects the
    spontaneity which he finds in himself.” Freedom does not
    contradict conservation of energy. Professor Lodge, in Nature,
    March 26, 1891—“Although expenditure of energy is needed to
    increase the speed of matter, none is needed to alter its
    direction.... The rails that guide a train do not propel it, nor
    do they retard it; they have no essential effect upon its energy
    but a guiding effect.” J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir.
    Freedom, 170-203—“Will does not create force but directs it. A
    very small force is able to guide the action of a great one, as in
    the steering of a modern steamship.” James Seth, in Philos. Rev.,
    3:285, 286—“As life is not energy but a determiner of the paths of
    energy, so the will is a cause, in the sense that it controls and
    directs the channels which activity shall take.” See also James
    Seth, Ethical Principles, 345-388, and Freedom as Ethical
    Postulate, 9—“The philosophical proof of freedom must be the
    demonstration of the inadequacy of the categories of science: its
    philosophical disproof must be the demonstration of the adequacy
    of such scientific categories.” Shadworth Hodgson: “Either liberty
    is true, and then the categories are insufficient, or the
    categories are sufficient, and then liberty is a delusion.” Wagner
    is the composer of determinism; there is no freedom or guilt;
    action is the result of influence and environment; a mysterious
    fate rules all. Life: “The views upon heredity Of scientists
    remind one That, shape one’s conduct as one may, One’s future is
    behind one.”

    We trace willing in God back, not to motives and antecedents, but
    to his infinite personality. If man is made in God’s image, why we
    may not trace man’s willing also back, not to motives and
    antecedents, but to his finite personality? We speak of God’s
    fiat, but we may speak of man’s fiat also. Napoleon: “There shall
    be no Alps!” Dutch William III: “I may fall, but shall fight every
    ditch, and die in the last one!” When God energizes the will, it
    becomes indomitable. _Phil. 4:13_—“_I can do all things in him
    that strengtheneth me._” Dr. E. G. Robinson was theoretically a
    determinist, and wrongly held that the highest conceivable freedom
    is to act out one’s own nature. He regarded the will as only the
    nature in movement. Will is self-determining, not in the sense
    that will determines the self, but in the sense that self
    determines the will. The will cannot be compelled, for unless
    self-determined it is no longer will. Observation, history and
    logic, he thought, lead to necessitarianism. But consciousness, he
    conceded, testifies to freedom. Consciousness must be trusted,
    though we cannot reconcile the two. The will is as great a mystery
    as is the doctrine of the Trinity. Single volitions, he says, are
    often directly in the face of the current of a man’s life. Yet he
    held that we have no consciousness of the power of a contrary
    choice. Consciousness can testify only to what springs out of the
    moral nature, not to the moral nature itself.

    Lotze, Religionsphilosophie, section 61—“An indeterminate choice
    is of course incomprehensible and inexplicable, for if it were
    comprehensible and explicable by the human intellect, if, that is,
    it could be seen to follow necessarily from the preëxisting
    conditions, it from the nature of the case could not be a morally
    free choice at all.... But we cannot comprehend any more how the
    mind can move the muscles, nor how a moving stone can set another
    stone in motion, nor how the Absolute calls into existence our
    individual selves.” Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 308-327, gives an
    able exposé of the deterministic fallacies. He cites Martineau and
    Balfour in England, Renouvier and Fonsegrive in France, Edward
    Zeller, Kuno Fischer and Saarschmidt in Germany, and William James
    in America, as recent advocates of free will.

    Martineau, Study, 2:227—“Is there not a Causal Self, over and
    above the Caused Self, or rather the Caused State and contents of
    the self left as a deposit from previous behavior? Absolute
    idealism, like Green’s, will not recognize the existence of this
    Causal Self”; Study of Religion, 2:195-324, and especially
    240—“Where two or more rival preconceptions enter the field
    together, they cannot compare themselves _inter se_: they need and
    meet a superior: it rests with the mind itself to decide. The
    decision will not be _unmotived_, for it will have its reasons. It
    will not be unconformable to the characteristics of the mind, for
    it will express its preferences. But none the less is it issued by
    a free cause that elects among the conditions, and is not elected
    by them.” 241—“So far from admitting that different effects cannot
    come from the same cause. I even venture on the paradox that
    nothing is a proper cause which is limited to one effect.”
    309—“Freedom, in the sense of option, and will, as the power of
    deciding an alternative, have no place in the doctrines of the
    German schools.” 311—“The whole illusion of Necessity springs from
    the attempt to fling out, for contemplation in the field of
    Nature, the creative new beginnings centered in personal subjects
    that transcend it.”

    See also H. B. Smith, System of Christ. Theol., 236-251; Mansel,
    Proleg. Log., 113-155, 270-278, and Metaphysics, 366; Gregory,
    Christian Ethics, 60; Abp. Manning, in Contem. Rev., Jan.
    1871:468; Ward, Philos. of Theism, 1:287-352; 2:1-79, 274-349; Bp.
    Temple, Bampton Lect., 1884:69-96; Row, Man not a Machine, in
    Present Day Tracts, 5: no. 30; Richards, Lectures on Theology,
    97-153; Solly, The Will, 167-203; William James, The Dilemma of
    Determinism, in Unitarian Review, Sept. 1884, and in The Will to
    Believe, 145-183; T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 90-159;
    Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310; Bradley, in Mind, July, 1886;
    Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 70-101; Illingworth,
    Divine Immanence, 229-254; Ladd, Philos. of Conduct, 133-188. For
    Lotze’s view of the Will, see his Philos. of Religion, 95-106, and
    his Practical Philosophy, 35-50.




Chapter II. The Original State Of Man.


In determining man’s original state, we are wholly dependent upon
Scripture. This represents human nature as coming from God’s hand, and
therefore “very good” (Gen. 1:31). It moreover draws a parallel between
man’s first state and that of his restoration (Col. 3:10; Eph. 4:24). In
interpreting these passages, however, we are to remember the twofold
danger, on the one hand of putting man so high that no progress is
conceivable, on the other hand of putting him so low that he could not
fall. We shall the more easily avoid these dangers by distinguishing
between the essentials and the incidents of man’s original state.


    _Gen. 1:31_—“_And God saw everything that he had made, and,
    behold, it was very good_”; _Col. 3:10_—“_the new man, that is
    being renewed unto knowledge after the image of him that created
    him_”; _Eph. 4:24_—“_the new man that after God hath been created
    in righteousness and holiness of truth._”

    Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:337-399—“The original state must be (1)
    a contrast to sin; (2) a parallel to the state of restoration.
    Difficulties in the way of understanding it: (1) What lives in
    regeneration is something foreign to our present nature (‘_it is
    no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me_’—_Gal. 2:20_); but
    the original state was something native. (2) It was a state of
    childhood. We cannot fully enter into childhood, though we see it
    about us, and have ourselves been through it. The original state
    is yet more difficult to reproduce to reason. (3) Man’s external
    circumstances and his organization have suffered great changes, so
    that the present is no sign of the past. We must recur to the
    Scriptures, therefore, as well-nigh our only guide.” John Caird,
    Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:164-195, points out that ideal
    perfection is to be looked for, not at the outset, but at the
    final stage of the spiritual life. If man were wholly finite, he
    would not know his finitude.

    Lord Bacon: “The sparkle of the purity of man’s first estate.”
    Calvin: “It was monstrous impiety that a son of the earth should
    not be satisfied with being made after the similitude of God,
    unless he could also be equal with him.” Prof. Hastings: “The
    truly natural is not the real, but the ideal. Made in the image of
    God—between that beginning and the end stands God made in the
    image of man.” On the general subject of man’s original state, see
    Zöckler, 3:283-290; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:215-243;
    Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:267-276; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 374-375;
    Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:92-116.



I. Essentials of Man’s Original State.


These are summed up in the phrase “the image of God.” In God’s image man
is said to have been created (Gen. 1:26, 27). In what did this image of
God consist? We reply that it consisted in 1. Natural likeness to God, or
personality; 2. Moral likeness to God, or holiness.


    _Gen. 1:26, 27_—“_And God said, Let us make man in our image,
    after our likeness.... And God created man in his own image, in
    the image of God created he him._” It is of great importance to
    distinguish clearly between the two elements embraced in this
    image of God, the natural and the moral. By virtue of the first,
    man possessed certain _faculties_ (intellect, affection, will); by
    virtue of the second, he had _right tendencies_ (bent, proclivity,
    disposition). By virtue of the first, he was invested with certain
    _powers_; by virtue of the second, a certain _direction_ was
    imparted to these powers. As created in the natural image of God,
    man had a moral _nature_; as created in the moral image of God,
    man had a holy _character_. The first gave him _natural_ ability;
    the second gave him _moral_ ability. The Greek Fathers emphasized
    the first element, or _personality_; the Latin Fathers emphasized
    the second element, or _holiness_. See Orr, God’s Image in Man.

    As the Logos, or divine Reason, Christ Jesus, dwells in humanity
    and constitutes the principle of its being, humanity shares with
    Christ in the image of God. That image is never wholly lost. It is
    completely restored in sinners when the Spirit of Christ gains
    control of their wills and they merge their life in his. To those
    who accused Jesus of blasphemy, he replied by quoting the words of
    _Psalm 82:6_—“_I said, Ye are gods_”—words spoken of imperfect
    earthly rulers. Thus, in _John 10:34-36_, Jesus, who constitutes
    the very essence of humanity, justifies his own claim to divinity
    by showing that even men who represent God are also in a minor
    sense “_partakers of the divine nature_” (_2 Pet. 1:4_). Hence the
    many legends, in heathen religions, of the divine descent of man.
    _1 Cor. 11:3_—“_the head of every man is Christ._” In every man,
    even the most degraded, there is an image of God to be brought
    out, as Michael Angelo saw the angel in the rough block of marble.
    This natural _worth_ does not imply _worthiness_; it implies only
    capacity for redemption. “The abysmal depths of personality,”
    which Tennyson speaks of, are sounded, as man goes down in thought
    successively from individual sins to sin of the heart and to
    race-sin. But “the deeper depth is out of reach To all, O God, but
    thee.” From this deeper depth, where man is rooted and grounded in
    God, rise aspirations for a better life. These are not due to the
    man himself, but to Christ, the immanent God, who ever works
    within him. Fanny J. Crosby: “Rescue the perishing, Care for the
    dying.... Down in the human heart, crushed by the tempter,
    Feelings lie buried that grace can restore; Touched by a loving
    heart, wakened by kindness, Chords that were broken will vibrate
    once more.”


1. Natural likeness to God, or personality.


Man was created a personal being, and was by this personality
distinguished from the brute. By personality we mean the twofold power to
know self as related to the world and to God, and to determine self in
view of moral ends. By virtue of this personality, man could at his
creation choose which of the objects of his knowledge—self, the world, or
God—should be the norm and centre of his development. This natural
likeness to God is inalienable, and as constituting a capacity for
redemption gives value to the life even of the unregenerate (Gen. 9:6; 1
Cor. 11:7; James 3:9).


    For definitions of personality, see notes on the Anthropological
    Argument, page 82; on Pantheism, pages 104, 105; on the
    Attributes, pages 252-254; and on the Person of Christ, in Part
    VI. Here we may content ourselves with the formula: Personality =
    self-consciousness + self-determination. _Self_-consciousness and
    _self_-determination, as distinguished from the consciousness and
    determination of the brute, involve all the higher mental and
    moral powers which constitute us men. Conscience is but a mode of
    their activity. Notice that the term “image” does not, in man,
    imply _perfect_ representation. Only Christ is the “_very image_”
    of God (_Heb. 1:3_), the “_image of the invisible God_” (_Col.
    1:15_—on which see Lightfoot). Christ is the image of God
    absolutely and archetypally; man, only relatively and
    derivatively. But notice also that, since God is Spirit, man made
    in God’s image cannot be a material thing. By virtue of his
    possession of this first element of the image of God, namely,
    personality, materialism is excluded.

    This first element of the divine image man can never lose until he
    ceases to be man. Even insanity can only obscure this natural
    image,—it cannot destroy it. St. Bernard well said that it could
    not be burned out, even in hell. The lost piece of money (_Luke
    15:8_) still bore the image and superscription of the king, even
    though it did not know it, and did not even know that it was lost.
    Human nature is therefore to be reverenced, and he who destroys
    human life is to be put to death: _Gen. 9:6_—“_for in the image of
    God made he man_”; _1 Cor. 11:7_—“_a man indeed ought not to have
    his head veiled, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God_”;
    _James 3:9_—even men whom we curse “_are made after the likeness
    of God_”; _cf._ _Ps. 8:5_—“_thou hast made him but little lower
    than God_”; _1 Pet. 2:17_—“_Honor all men._” In the being of every
    man are continents which no Columbus has ever yet discovered,
    depths of possible joy or sorrow which no plummet has ever yet
    sounded. A whole heaven, a whole hell, may lie within the compass
    of his single soul. If we could see the meanest real Christian as
    he will be in the great hereafter, we should bow before him as
    John bowed before the angel in the Apocalypse, for we should not
    be able to distinguish him from God (_Rev. 22:8, 9_).

    Sir William Hamilton: “On earth there is nothing great but man; In
    man there is nothing great but mind.” We accept this dictum only
    if “mind” can be understood to include man’s moral powers together
    with the right direction of those powers. Shakespeare, Hamlet,
    2:2—“What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how
    infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable!
    in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!”
    Pascal: “Man is greater than the universe; the universe may crush
    him, but it does not know that it crushes him.” Whiton, Gloria
    Patri, 94—“God is not only the Giver but the Sharer of my life. My
    natural powers are that part of God’s power which is lodged with
    me in trust to keep and use.” Man can be an _instrument_ of God,
    without being an _agent_ of God. “Each man has his place and value
    as a reflection of God and of Christ. Like a letter in a word, or
    a word in a sentence, he gets his meaning from his context; but
    the sentence is meaningless without him; rays from the whole
    universe converge in him.” John Howe’s Living Temple shows the
    greatness of human nature in its first construction and even in
    its ruin. Only a noble ship could make so great a wreck.
    Aristotle, Problem, sec. 30—“No excellent soul is exempt from a
    mixture of madness.” Seneca, De Tranquillitate Animi, 15—“There is
    no great genius without a tincture of madness.”

    Kant: “So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or
    in that of any other, in every case as an _end_, and never as a
    _means_ only.” If there is a divine element in every man, then we
    have no right to _use_ a human being merely for our own pleasure
    or profit. In receiving him we receive Christ, and in receiving
    Christ we receive him who sent Christ (_Mat. 10:40_). Christ is
    the vine and all men are his natural branches, cutting themselves
    off only when they refuse to bear fruit, and condemning themselves
    to the burning only because they destroy, so far as they can
    destroy, God’s image in them, all that makes them worth preserving
    (_John 15:1-6_). Cicero: “Homo mortalis deus.” This possession of
    natural likeness to God, or personality, involves boundless
    possibilities of good or ill, and it constitutes the natural
    foundation of the love for man which is required of us by the law.
    Indeed it constitutes the reason why Christ should die. Man was
    worth redeeming. The woman whose ring slipped from her finger and
    fell into the heap of mud in the gutter, bared her white arm and
    thrust her hand into the slimy mass until she found her ring; but
    she would not have done this if the ring had not contained a
    costly diamond. The lost piece of money, the lost sheep, the lost
    son, were worth effort to seek and to save (_Luke 15_). But, on
    the other hand, it is folly when man, made in the image of God,
    “blinds himself with clay.” The man on shipboard, who playfully
    tossed up the diamond ring which contained his whole fortune, at
    last to his distress tossed it overboard. There is a “_merchandise
    of souls_” (_Rev. 18:13_) and we must not juggle with them.

    Christ’s death for man, by showing the worth of humanity, has
    recreated ethics. “Plato defended infanticide as under certain
    circumstances permissible. Aristotle viewed slavery as founded in
    the nature of things. The reason assigned was the essential
    inferiority of nature on the part of the enslaved.” But the divine
    image in man makes these barbarities no longer possible to us.
    Christ sometimes looked upon men with anger, but he never looked
    upon them with contempt. He taught the woman, he blessed the
    child, he cleansed the leper, he raised the dead. His own death
    revealed the infinite worth of the meanest human soul, and taught
    us to count all men as brethren for whose salvation we may well
    lay down our lives. George Washington answered the salute of his
    slave. Abraham Lincoln took off his hat to a negro who gave him
    his blessing as he entered Richmond; but a lady who had been
    brought up under the old regime looked from a window upon the
    scene with unspeakable horror. Robert Burns, walking with a
    nobleman in Edinburgh, met an old townsfellow from Ayr and stopped
    to talk with him. The nobleman, kept waiting, grew restive, and
    afterward reproved Burns for talking to a man with so bad a coat.
    Burns replied: “I was not talking to the coat,—I was talking to
    the man.” Jean Ingelow: “The street and market place Grow holy
    ground: each face—Pale faces marked with care, Dark, toilworn
    brows—grows fair. King’s children are all these, though want and
    sin Have marred their beauty, glorious within. We may not pass
    them but with reverent eye.” See Porter, Human Intellect, 393,
    394, 401; Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 2:42; Philippi, Glaubenslehre,
    2:343.


2. Moral likeness to God, or holiness.


In addition to the powers of self-consciousness and self-determination
just mentioned, man was created with such a direction of the affections
and the will, as constituted God the supreme end of man’s being, and
constituted man a finite reflection of God’s moral attributes. Since
holiness is the fundamental attribute of God, this must of necessity be
the chief attribute of his image in the moral beings whom he creates. That
original righteousness was essential to this image, is also distinctly
taught in Scripture (Eccl. 7:29; Eph. 4:24; Col. 3:10).


    Besides the possession of natural powers, the image of God
    involves the possession of right moral tendencies. It is not
    enough to say that man was created in a state of innocence. The
    Scripture asserts that man had a righteousness like God’s: _Eccl.
    7:29_—“_God made man upright_”; _Eph. 4:24_—“_the new man, that
    after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of
    truth_”—here Meyer says: “κατὰ Θεόν, ‘_after God_,’ _i. e._, _ad
    exemplum Dei_, after the pattern of God (_Gal. 4:28_—κατὰ Ἰσαάκ,
    ‘after Isaac’ = as Isaac was). This phrase makes the creation of
    the new man a parallel to that of our first parents, who were
    created after God’s image; they too, before sin came into
    existence through Adam, were sinless—‘_in righteousness and
    holiness of truth_.’ ” On N. T. “truth” = rectitude, see Wendt,
    Teaching of Jesus, 1:257-260.

    Meyer refers also, as a parallel passage, to _Col. 3:10_—“_the new
    man, that is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of him
    that created him._” Here the “_knowledge_” referred to is that
    knowledge of God which is the source of all virtue, and which is
    inseparable from holiness of heart. “Holiness has two sides or
    phases: (1) it is perception and knowledge; (2) it is inclination
    and feeling” (Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:97). On _Eph. 4:24_ and _Col.
    3:10_, the classical passages with regard to man’s original state,
    see also the Commentaries of DeWette, Rückert, Ellicott, and
    compare _Gen. 5:3_—“_And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years,
    and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image,_” _i. e._,
    in his own sinful likeness, which is evidently contrasted with the
    “_likeness of God_” (_verse 1_) in which he himself had been
    created (An. Par. Bible). _2 Cor. 4:4_—“_Christ, who is the image
    of God_”—where the phrase “_image of God_” is not simply the
    _natural_, but also the _moral_, image. Since Christ is the image
    of God primarily in his holiness, man’s creation in the image of
    God must have involved a holiness like Christ’s, so far as such
    holiness could belong to a being yet untried, that is, so far as
    respects man’s tastes and dispositions prior to moral action.

    “Couldst thou in vision see Thyself the man God meant, Thou
    nevermore couldst be The man thou art—content.” Newly created man
    had right moral tendencies, as well as freedom from actual fault.
    Otherwise the communion with God described in Genesis would not
    have been possible. Goethe: “Unless the eye were sunlike, how
    could it see the sun?” Because a holy disposition accompanied
    man’s innocence, he was capable of obedience, and was guilty when
    he sinned. The loss of this moral likeness to God was the chief
    calamity of the Fall. Man is now “the glory and the scandal of the
    universe.” He has defaced the image of God in his nature, even
    though that image, in its natural aspect, is ineffaceable (E. H.
    Johnson).

    The dignity of human nature consists, not so much in what man is,
    as in what God meant him to be, and in what God means him yet to
    become, when the lost image of God is restored by the union of
    man’s soul with Christ. Because of his future possibilities, the
    meanest of mankind is sacred. The great sin of the second table of
    the decalogue is the sin of despising our fellow man. To cherish
    contempt for others can have its root only in idolatry of self and
    rebellion against God. Abraham Lincoln said well that “God must
    have liked common people,—else he would not have made so many of
    them.” Regard for the image of God in man leads also to kind and
    reverent treatment even of those lower animals in which so many
    human characteristics are foreshadowed. Bradford, Heredity and
    Christian Problems, 166—“The current philosophy says: The fittest
    will survive; let the rest die. The religion of Christ says: That
    maxim as applied to men is just, only as regards their
    characteristics, of which indeed only the fittest should survive.
    It does not and cannot apply to the men themselves, since all men,
    being children of God, are supremely fit. The very fact that a
    human being is sick, weak, poor, an outcast, and a vagabond, is
    the strongest possible appeal for effort toward his salvation. Let
    individuals look upon humanity from the point of view of Christ,
    and they will not be long in finding ways in which environment can
    be caused to work for righteousness.”


This original righteousness, in which the image of God chiefly consisted,
is to be viewed:

(_a_) Not as constituting the substance or essence of human nature,—for in
this case human nature would have ceased to exist as soon as man sinned.


    Men every day change their tastes and loves, without changing the
    essence or substance of their being. When sin is called a
    “nature,” therefore (as by Shedd, in his Essay on “Sin a Nature,
    and that Nature Guilt”), it is only in the sense of being
    something inborn (_natura_, from _nascor_). Hereditary tastes may
    just as properly be denominated a “nature” as may the substance of
    one’s being. Moehler, the greatest modern Roman Catholic critic of
    Protestant doctrine, in his Symbolism, 58, 59, absurdly holds
    Luther to have taught that by the Fall man lost his essential
    nature, and that another essence was substituted in its room.
    Luther, however, is only rhetorical when he says: “It is the
    nature of man to sin; sin constitutes the essence of man; the
    nature of man since the Fall has become quite changed; original
    sin is that very thing which is born of father and mother; the
    clay out of which we are formed is damnable; the fœtus in the
    maternal womb is sin; man as born of his father and mother,
    together with his whole essence and nature, is not only a sinner
    but sin itself.”


(_b_) Nor as a _gift_ from without, foreign to human nature, and added to
it after man’s creation,—for man is said to have possessed the divine
image by the fact of creation, and not by subsequent bestowal.


    As men, since Adam, are born with a sinful nature, that is, with
    tendencies away from God, so Adam was created with a holy nature,
    that is, with tendencies toward God. Moehler says: “God cannot
    give a man actions.” We reply: “No, but God can give man
    dispositions; and he does this at the first creation, as well as
    at the new creation (regeneration).”


(_c_) But rather, as an original direction or tendency of man’s affections
and will, still accompanied by the power of evil choice, and so, differing
from the perfected holiness of the saints, as instinctive affection and
child-like innocence differ from the holiness that has been developed and
confirmed by experience of temptation.


    Man’s original righteousness was not immutable or indefectible;
    there was still the possibility of sinning. Though the first man
    was fundamentally good, he still had the power of choosing evil.
    There was a bent of the affections and will toward God, but man
    was not yet confirmed in holiness. Man’s love for God was like the
    germinal filial affection in the child, not developed, yet
    sincere—“caritas puerilis, non virilis.”


(_d_) As a moral disposition, moreover, which was propagable to Adam’s
descendants, if it continued, and which, though lost to him and to them,
if Adam sinned, would still leave man possessed of a natural likeness to
God which made him susceptible of God’s redeeming grace.


    Hooker (Works, ed. Keble, 2:683) distinguishes between aptness and
    ableness. The latter, men have lost; the former, they retain,—else
    grace could not work in us, more than in the brutes. Hase: “Only
    enough likeness to God remained to remind man of what he had lost,
    and enable him to feel the hell of God’s forsaking.” The moral
    likeness to God can be restored, but only by God himself. God
    secures this to men by making “_the light of the gospel of the
    glory of Christ, who is the image of God, ... dawn upon them_” (_2
    Cor. 4:4_). Pusey made _Ps. 72:6_—“_He will come down like rain
    upon the mown grass_”—the image of a world hopelessly dead, but
    with a hidden capacity for receiving life. Dr. Daggett: “Man is a
    ‘_son of the morning_’ (_Is. 14:12_), fallen, yet arrested midway
    between heaven and hell, a prize between the powers of light and
    darkness.” See Edwards, Works, 2:19, 20, 381-390; Hopkins, Works,
    1:162; Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:50-66; Augustine, De Civitate Dei,
    14:11.


In the light of the preceding investigation, we may properly estimate two
theories of man’s original state which claim to be more Scriptural and
reasonable:


A. The image of God as including only personality.


This theory denies that any positive determination to virtue inhered
originally in man’s nature, and regards man at the beginning as simply
possessed of spiritual powers, perfectly adjusted to each other. This is
the view of Schleiermacher, who is followed by Nitzsch, Julius Müller, and
Hofmann.


    For the view here combated, see Schleiermacher, Christl. Glaube,
    sec. 60; Nitzsch, System of Christian Doctrine, 201; Julius
    Müller, Doct. of Sin, 2:113-133, 350-357; Hofmann, Schriftbeweis,
    1:287-291; Bib. Sac., 7:409-425. Julius Müller’s theory of the
    Fall in a preëxistent state makes it impossible for him to hold
    here that Adam was possessed of moral likeness to God. The origin
    of his view of the image of God renders it liable to suspicion.
    Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 113—“The original state of man was that of
    child-like innocence or morally indifferent naturalness, which had
    in itself indeed the possibility (_Anlage_) of ideal development,
    but in such a way that its realization could be reached only by
    struggle with its natural opposite. The image of God was already
    present in the original state, but only as the possibility
    (_Anlage_) of real likeness to God—the endowment of reason which
    belonged to human personality. The _reality_ of a spirit like that
    of God has appeared first in the _second_ Adam, and has become the
    principle of the kingdom of God.”

    Raymond (Theology, 2:43, 132) is an American representative of the
    view that the image of God consists in mere personality: “The
    image of God in which man was created did not consist in an
    inclination and determination of the will to holiness.” This is
    maintained upon the ground that such a moral likeness to God would
    have rendered it impossible for man to fall,—to which we reply
    that Adam’s righteousness was not immutable, and the bias of his
    will toward God did not render it impossible for him to sin.
    Motives do not compel the will, and Adam at least had a certain
    power of contrary choice. E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology,
    119-122, also maintains that the image of God signified only that
    personality which distinguished man from the brute. Christ, he
    says, carries forward human nature to a higher point, instead of
    merely restoring what is lost. “_Very good_” (_Gen. 1:31_) does
    not imply moral perfection,—this cannot be the result of creation,
    but only of discipline and will. Man’s original state was only one
    of untried innocence. Dr. Robinson is combating the view that the
    first man was at his creation possessed of a developed character.
    He distinguishes between character and the germs of character.
    These germs he grants that man possessed. And so he defines the
    image of God as a constitutional predisposition toward a course of
    right conduct. This is all the perfection which we claim for the
    first man. We hold that this predisposition toward the good can
    properly be called character, since it is the germ from which all
    holy action springs.


In addition to what has already been said in support of the opposite view,
we may urge against this theory the following objections:

(_a_) It is contrary to analogy, in making man the author of his own
holiness; our sinful condition is not the product of our individual wills,
nor is our subsequent condition of holiness the product of anything but
God’s regenerating power.


    To hold that Adam was created undecided, would make man, as
    Philippi says, in the highest sense his own creator. But morally,
    as well as physically, man is God’s creature. In regeneration it
    is not sufficient for God to give _power_ to decide for good; God
    must give new _love_ also. If this be so in the new creation, God
    could give love in the first creation also. Holiness therefore is
    creatable. “_Underived_ holiness is possible only in God; in its
    origin, it is _given_ both to angels and men.” Therefore we pray:
    “_Create in me a clean heart_” (_Ps. 51:10_); “_Incline my heart
    unto thy testimonies_” (_Ps. 119:36_). See Edwards, Eff. Grace,
    sec. 43-51; Kaftan, Dogmatik, 290—“If Adam’s perfection was not a
    moral perfection, then his sin was no real moral corruption.” The
    _animus_ of the theory we are combating seems to be an
    unwillingness to grant that man, either in his first creation or
    in his new creation, owes his holiness to God.


(_b_) The knowledge of God in which man was originally created logically
presupposes a direction toward God of man’s affections and will, since
only the holy heart can have any proper understanding of the God of
holiness.


    “Ubi caritas, ibi claritas.” Man’s heart was originally filled
    with divine love, and out of this came the knowledge of God. We
    know God only as we love him, and this love comes not from our own
    single volition. No one loves by command, because no one can give
    himself love. In Adam love was an inborn impulse, which he could
    affirm or deny. Compare _1 Cor. 8:3_—“_if any man loveth God, the
    same_ [God] _is known by him_”; _1 John 4:8_—“_He that loveth not
    knoweth not God._” See other Scripture references on pages 3, 4.


(_c_) A likeness to God in mere personality, such as Satan also possesses,
comes far short of answering the demands of the Scripture, in which the
ethical conception of the divine nature so overshadows the merely natural.
The image of God must be, not simply ability to be like God, but actual
likeness.


    God could never create an intelligent being evenly balanced
    between good and evil—“on the razor’s edge”—“on the fence.” The
    preacher who took for his text “_Adam, where art thou?_” had for
    his first head: “It is every man’s business to be somewhere;” for
    his second: “Some of you are where you ought not to be;” and for
    his third: “Get where you ought to be, as soon as possible.” A
    simple capacity for good or evil is, as Augustine says, already
    sinful. A man who is neutral between good and evil is already a
    violator of that law, which requires likeness to God in the bent
    of his nature. Delitzsch, Bib. Psychol., 45-84—“Personality is
    only the basis of the divine image,—it is not the image itself.”
    Bledsoe says there can be no created virtue or viciousness. Whedon
    (On the Will, 388) objects to this, and says rather: “There can be
    no created moral desert, good or evil. Adam’s nature as created
    was pure and excellent, but there was nothing meritorious until he
    had freely and rightly exercised his will with full power to the
    contrary.” We add: There was nothing meritorious even then. For
    substance of these objections, see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:346.
    Lessing said that the character of the Germans was to have no
    character. Goethe partook of this cosmopolitan characterlessness
    (Prof. Seely). Tennyson had Goethe in view when he wrote in The
    Palace of Art: “I sit apart, holding no form of creed, but
    contemplating all.” And Goethe is probably still alluded to in the
    words: “A glorious devil, large in heart and brain, That did love
    beauty only, Or if good, good only for its beauty”; see A. H.
    Strong, The Great Poets and their Theology, 331; Robert Browning,
    Christmas Eve: “The truth in God’s breast Lies trace for trace
    upon ours impressed: Though he is so bright, and we so dim, We are
    made in his image to witness him.”


B. The image of God as consisting simply in man’s natural capacity for
religion.


This view, first elaborated by the scholastics, is the doctrine of the
Roman Catholic Church. It distinguishes between the image and the likeness
of God. The former (צלם—Gen. 1:26) alone belonged to man’s nature at its
creation. The latter (דמות) was the product of his own acts of obedience.
In order that this obedience might be made easier and the consequent
likeness to God more sure, a third element was added—an element not
belonging to man’s nature—namely, a supernatural gift of special grace,
which acted as a curb upon the sensuous impulses, and brought them under
the control of reason. Original righteousness was therefore not a natural
endowment, but a joint product of man’s obedience and of God’s
supernatural grace.


    Roman Catholicism holds that the white paper of man’s soul
    received two impressions instead of one. Protestantism sees no
    reason why both impressions should not have been given at the
    beginning. Kaftan, in Am. Jour. Theology, 4:708, gives a good
    statement of the Roman Catholic view. It holds that the supreme
    good transcends the finite mind and its powers of comprehension.
    Even at the first it was beyond man’s created nature. The _donum
    superadditum_ did not inwardly and personally belong to him. Now
    that he has lost it, he is entirely dependent on the church for
    truth and grace. He does not receive the truth because it is this
    and no other, but because the church tells him that it is the
    truth.

    The Roman Catholic doctrine may be roughly and pictorially stated
    as follows: As created, man was morally naked, or devoid of
    positive righteousness (_pura naturalia_, or _in puris
    naturalibus_). By obedience he obtained as a reward from God
    (_donum supernaturale_, or _superadditum_) a suit of clothes or
    robe of righteousness to protect him, so that he became clothed
    (_vestitus_). This suit of clothes, however, was a sort of magic
    spell of which he could be divested. The adversary attacked him
    and stripped him of his suit. After his sin he was one despoiled
    (_spoliatus_). But his condition after differed from his condition
    before this attack, only as a stripped man differs from a naked
    man (_spoliatus a nudo_). He was now only in the same state in
    which he was created, with the single exception of the weakness he
    might feel as the result of losing his customary clothing. He
    could still earn himself another suit,—in fact, he could earn two
    or more, so as to sell, or give away, what he did not need for
    himself. The phrase _in puris naturalibus_ describes the original
    state, as the phrase _spoliatus a nudo_ describes the difference
    resulting from man’s sin.


Many of the considerations already adduced apply equally as arguments
against this view. We may say, however, with reference to certain features
peculiar to the theory:

(_a_) No such distinction can justly be drawn between the words צלם and
דםות. The addition of the synonym simply strengthens the expression, and
both together signify “the very image.”

(_b_) Whatever is denoted by either or both of these words was bestowed
upon man in and by the fact of creation, and the additional hypothesis of
a supernatural gift not originally belonging to man’s nature, but
subsequently conferred, has no foundation either here or elsewhere in
Scripture. Man is said to have been created in the image and likeness of
God, not to have been afterwards endowed with either of them.

(_c_) The concreated opposition between sense and reason which this theory
supposes is inconsistent with the Scripture declaration that the work of
God’s hands “was very good” (Gen. 1:31), and transfers the blame of
temptation and sin from man to God. To hold to a merely negative
innocence, in which evil desire was only slumbering, is to make God author
of sin by making him author of the constitution which rendered sin
inevitable.

(_d_) This theory directly contradicts Scripture by making the effect of
the first sin to have been a weakening but not a perversion of human
nature, and the work of regeneration to be not a renewal of the affections
but merely a strengthening of the natural powers. The theory regards that
first sin as simply despoiling man of a special gift of grace and as
putting him where he was when first created—still able to obey God and to
coöperate with God for his own salvation,—whereas the Scripture represents
man since the fall as “dead through ... trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1),
as incapable of true obedience (Rom. 8:7—“not subject to the law of God,
neither indeed can it be”), and as needing to be “created in Christ Jesus
for good works” (Eph. 2:10).


    At few points in Christian doctrine do we see more clearly than
    here the large results of error which may ultimately spring from
    what might at first sight seem to be only a slight divergence from
    the truth. Augustine had rightly taught that in Adam the _posse
    non peccare_ was accompanied by a _posse peccare_, and that for
    this reason man’s holy disposition needed the help of divine grace
    to preserve its integrity. But the scholastics wrongly added that
    this original disposition to righteousness was not the outflow of
    man’s nature as originally created, but was the gift of grace. As
    this later teaching, however, was by some disputed, the Council of
    Trent (sess. 5, cap. 1) left the matter more indefinite, simply
    declaring man: “Sanctitatem et justitiam in qua _constitutus
    fuerat_, amisisse.” The Roman Catechism, however (1:2:19),
    explained the phrase “constitutus fuerat” by the words: “Tum
    originalis justitiæ admirabile donum _addidit_.” And Bellarmine
    (De Gratia, 2) says plainly: “Imago, quæ est ipsa natura mentis et
    voluntatis, a solo Deo fieri potuit; similitudo autem, quæ in
    virtute et probitate consistit, _a nobis quoque_ Deo adjuvante
    perficitur.”... (5) “Integritas illa ... non fuit naturalis ejus
    conditio, sed supernaturalis evectio.... Addidisse homini donum
    quoddam insigne, justitiam videlicet originalem, qua veluti aureo
    quodam fræno pars inferior parti superiori subjecta contineretur.”

    Moehler (Symbolism, 21-35) holds that the religious faculty—the
    “image of God”; the pious exertion of this faculty—the “likeness
    of God.” He seems to favor the view that Adam received “this
    supernatural gift of a holy and blessed communion with God at a
    later period than his creation, _i. e._, only when he had prepared
    himself for its reception and by his own efforts had rendered
    himself worthy of it.” He was created “just” and acceptable to
    God, even without communion with God or help from God. He became
    “holy” and enjoyed communion with God, only when God rewarded his
    obedience and bestowed the _supernaturale donum_. Although Moehler
    favors this view and claims that it is permitted by the standards,
    he also says that it is not definitely taught. The quotations from
    Bellarmine and the Roman Catechism above make it clear that it is
    the prevailing doctrine of the Roman Catholic church.

    So, to quote the words of Shedd, “the Tridentine theology starts
    with Pelagianism and ends with Augustinianism. Created without
    character, God subsequently endows man with character.... The
    Papal idea of creation differs from the Augustinian in that it
    involves imperfection. There is a disease and languor which
    require a subsequent and supernatural act to remedy.” The
    Augustinian and Protestant conception of man’s original state is
    far nobler than this. The ethical element is not a later addition,
    but is man’s true nature—essential to God’s idea of him. The
    normal and original condition of man (_pura naturalia_) is one of
    grace and of the Spirit’s indwelling—hence, of direction toward
    God.

    From this original difference between Roman Catholic and
    Protestant doctrine with regard to man’s original state result
    diverging views as to sin and as to regeneration. The Protestant
    holds that, as man was possessed by creation of moral likeness to
    God, or holiness, so his sin robbed his nature of its integrity,
    deprived it of essential and concreated advantages and powers, and
    substituted for these a positive corruption and tendency to evil.
    Unpremeditated evil desire, or concupiscence, is original sin; as
    concreated love for God constituted man’s original righteousness.
    No man since the fall has original righteousness, and it is man’s
    sin that he has it not. Since without love to God no act, emotion,
    or thought of man can answer the demands of God’s law, the
    Scripture denies to fallen man all power of himself to know,
    think, feel, or do aright. His nature therefore needs a
    new-creation, a resurrection from death, such as God only, by his
    mighty Spirit, can work; and to this work of God man can
    contribute nothing, except as power is first given him by God
    himself.

    According to the Roman Catholic view, however, since the image of
    God in which man was created included only man’s religious
    faculty, his sin can rob him only of what became subsequently and
    adventitiously his. Fallen man differs from unfallen only as
    _spoliatus a nudo_. He loses only a sort of magic spell, which
    leaves him still in possession of all his essential powers.
    Unpremeditated evil desire, or concupiscence, is not sin; for this
    belonged to his nature even before he fell. His sin has therefore
    only put him back into the natural state of conflict and
    concupiscence, ordered by God in the concreated opposition of
    sense and reason. The sole qualification is this, that, having
    made an evil decision, his will is weakened. “Man does not need
    resurrection from death, but rather a crutch to help his lameness,
    a tonic to reinforce his feebleness, a medicine to cure his
    sickness.” He is still able to turn to God; and in regeneration
    the Holy Spirit simply awakens and strengthens the natural ability
    slumbering in the natural man. But even here, man must yield to
    the influence of the Holy Spirit; and regeneration is effected by
    uniting his power to the divine. In baptism the guilt of original
    sin is remitted, and everything called sin is taken away. No
    baptized person has any further process of regeneration to
    undergo. Man has not only strength to coöperate with God for his
    own salvation, but he may even go beyond the demands of the law
    and perform works of supererogation. And the whole sacramental
    system of the Roman Catholic Church, with its salvation by works,
    its purgatorial fires, and its invocation of the saints, connects
    itself logically with this erroneous theory of man’s original
    state.

    See Dorner’s Augustinus, 116; Perrone, Prælectiones Theologicæ,
    1:737-748; Winer, Confessions, 79, 80; Dorner, History Protestant
    Theology, 38, 39, and Glaubenslehre, 1:51; Van Oosterzee,
    Dogmatics, 376; Cunningham, Historical Theology, 1:516-586; Shedd,
    Hist. Doctrine, 2:140-149.



II. Incidents of Man’s Original State.


1. Results of man’s possession of the divine image.


(_a_) Reflection of this divine image in man’s physical form.—Even in
man’s body were typified those higher attributes which chiefly constituted
his likeness to God. A gross perversion of this truth, however, is the
view which holds, upon the ground of Gen. 2:7, and 3:8, that the image of
God consists in bodily resemblance to the Creator. In the first of these
passages, it is not the divine image, but the body, that is formed of
dust, and into this body the soul that possesses the divine image is
breathed. The second of these passages is to be interpreted by those other
portions of the Pentateuch in which God is represented as free from all
limitations of matter (Gen. 11:5; 18:15).


    The spirit presents the divine image immediately: the body,
    mediately. The scholastics called the soul the image of God
    _proprie_; the body they called the image of God _significative_.
    Soul is the direct reflection of God; body is the reflection of
    that reflection. The _os sublime_ manifests the dignity of the
    endowments within. Hence the word “upright,” as applied to moral
    condition; one of the first impulses of the renewed man is to
    physical purity. Compare Ovid, Metaph., bk. 1, Dryden’s transl.:
    “Thus while the mute creation downward bend Their sight, and to
    their earthly mother tend, Man looks aloft, and with erected eyes
    Beholds his own hereditary skies.” (Ἄνθρωπος, from ἀνά, ἄνω,
    suffix _tra_, and ὢψ, with reference to the upright posture.)
    Milton speaks of “the human face divine.” S. S. Times, July 28,
    1900—“Man is the only erect being among living creatures. He alone
    looks up naturally and without effort. He foregoes his birthright
    when he looks only at what is on a level with his eyes and
    occupies himself only with what lies in the plane of his own
    existence.”

    Bretschneider (Dogmatik, 1:682) regards the Scripture as teaching
    that the image of God consists in bodily resemblance to the
    Creator, but considers this as only the imperfect method of
    representation belonging to an early age. So Strauss,
    Glaubenslehre, 1:687. They refer to _Gen. 2:7_—“_And Jehovah God
    formed man of the dust of the ground_”; _3:8_—“_Jehovah God
    walking in the garden._” But see _Gen. 11:5_—“_And Jehovah came
    down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men
    builded_”; _Is. 66:1_—“_Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my
    footstool_”; _1 K. 8:27_—“_behold, heaven and the heaven of
    heavens cannot contain thee._” On the Anthropomorphites, see
    Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 1:103, 308, 491. For answers to
    Bretschneider and Strauss, see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:364.


(_b_) Subjection of the sensuous impulses to the control of the
spirit.—Here we are to hold a middle ground between two extremes. On the
one hand, the first man possessed a body and a spirit so fitted to each
other that no conflict was felt between their several claims. On the other
hand, this physical perfection was not final and absolute, but relative
and provisional. There was still room for progress to a higher state of
being (Gen. 3:22).


    Sir Henry Watton’s Happy Life: “That man was free from servile
    bands Of hope to rise or fear to fall, Lord of himself if not of
    lands, And having nothing yet had all.” Here we hold to the
    _æquale temperamentum_. There was no disease, but rather the joy
    of abounding health. Labor was only a happy activity. God’s
    infinite creatorship and fountainhead of being was typified in
    man’s powers of generation. But there was no concreated opposition
    of sense and reason, nor an imperfect physical nature with whose
    impulses reason was at war. With this moderate Scriptural
    doctrine, contrast the exaggerations of the Fathers and of the
    scholastics. Augustine says that Adam’s reason was to ours what
    the bird’s is to that of the tortoise; propagation in the unfallen
    state would have been without concupiscence, and the new-born
    child would have attained perfection at birth. Albertus Magnus
    thought the first man would have felt no pain, even though he had
    been stoned with heavy stones. Scotus Erigena held that the male
    and female elements were yet undistinguished. Others called
    sexuality the first sin. Jacob Boehme regarded the intestinal
    canal, and all connected with it, as the consequence of the Fall;
    he had the fancy that the earth was transparent at the first and
    cast no shadow,—sin, he thought, had made it opaque and dark;
    redemption would restore it to its first estate and make night a
    thing of the past. South, Sermons, 1:24, 25—“Man came into the
    world a philosopher.... Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam.”
    Lyman Abbott tells us of a minister who assured his congregation
    that Adam was acquainted with the telephone. But God educates his
    children, as chemists educate their pupils, by putting them into
    the laboratory and letting them work. Scripture does not represent
    Adam as a walking encyclopædia, but as a being yet inexperienced;
    see _Gen. 3:22_—“_Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know
    good and evil_”; _1 Cor. 15:46_—“_that is not first which is
    spiritual, but that which is natural; then that which is
    spiritual._” On this last text, see Expositor’s Greek Testament.


(_c_) Dominion over the lower creation.—Adam possessed an insight into
nature analogous to that of susceptible childhood, and therefore was able
to name and to rule the brute creation (Gen. 2:19). Yet this native
insight was capable of development into the higher knowledge of culture
and science. From Gen. 1:26 (_cf._ Ps. 8:5-8), it has been erroneously
inferred that the image of God in man consists in dominion over the brute
creation and the natural world. But, in this verse, the words “let them
have dominion” do not define the image of God, but indicate the result of
possessing that image. To make the image of God consist in this dominion,
would imply that only the divine omnipotence was shadowed forth in man.


    _Gen. 2:19_—“_Jehovah God formed every beast of the field, and
    every bird of the heavens; and brought them unto the man to see
    what he would call them_”; _20_—“_And the man gave names to all
    cattle_”; _Gen. 1:26_—“_Let us make man in our image, after our
    likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and
    over the birds of the heavens, and over the cattle_”; _cf._ _Ps.
    8:5-8_—“_thou hast made him but little lower than God, And
    crownest him with glory and honor. Thou makest him to have
    dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things
    under his feet: All sheep and oxen, Yea, and the beasts of the
    field._” Adam’s naming the animals implied insight into their
    nature; see Porter, Hum. Intellect, 393, 394, 401. On man’s
    original dominion over (1) self, (2) nature, (3) fellow-man, see
    Hopkins, Scriptural Idea of Man, 105.

    Courage and a good conscience have a power over the brute
    creation, and unfallen man can well be supposed to have dominated
    creatures which had no experience of human cruelty. Rarey tamed
    the wildest horses by his steadfast and fearless eye. In Paris a
    young woman was hypnotized and put into a den of lions. She had no
    fear of the lions and the lions paid not the slightest attention
    to her. The little daughter of an English officer in South Africa
    wandered away from camp and spent the night among lions.
    “Katrina,” her father said when he found her, “were you not afraid
    to be alone here?” “No, papa,” she replied, “the big dogs played
    with me and one of them lay here and kept me warm.” MacLaren, in
    S. S. Times, Dec. 23, 1893—“The dominion over all creatures
    results from likeness to God. It is not then a mere right to use
    them for one’s own material advantage, but a viceroy’s authority,
    which the holder is bound to employ for the honor of the true
    King.” This principle gives the warrant and the limit to
    vivisection and to the killing of the lower animals for food
    (_Gen. 9:2, 3._).

    Socinian writers generally hold the view that the image of God
    consisted simply in this dominion. Holding a low view of the
    nature of sin, they are naturally disinclined to believe that the
    fall has wrought any profound change in human nature. See their
    view stated in the Racovian Catechism, 21. It is held also by the
    Arminian Limborch, Theol. Christ., ii, 24:2, 3, 11. Upon the basis
    of this interpretation of Scripture, the Encratites held, with
    Peter Martyr, that women do not possess the divine image at all.


(_d_) Communion with God.—Our first parents enjoyed the divine presence
and teaching (Gen. 2:16). It would seem that God manifested himself to
them in visible form (Gen. 3:8). This companionship was both in kind and
degree suited to their spiritual capacity, and by no means necessarily
involved that perfected vision of God which is possible to beings of
confirmed and unchangeable holiness (Mat. 5:8; 1 John 3:2).


    _Gen. 2:16_—“_And Jehovah God commanded the man_”; _3:8_—“_And
    they heard the voice of Jehovah God walking in the garden in the
    cool of the day_”; _Mat. 5:8_—“_Blessed are the pure in heart: for
    they shall see God_”; _1 John 3:2_—“_We know that, if he shall be
    manifested, we shall be like him; for we shall see him even as he
    is_”; _Rev. 22:4_—“_and they shall see his his face._”


2. Concomitants of man’s possession of the divine image.


(_a_) Surroundings and society fitted to yield happiness and to assist a
holy development of human nature (Eden and Eve). We append some recent
theories with regard to the creation of Eve and the nature of Eden.


    Eden—pleasure, delight. Tennyson: “When high in Paradise By the
    four rivers the first roses blew.” Streams were necessary to the
    very existence of an oriental garden. Hopkins, Script. Idea of
    Man, 107—“Man includes woman. Creation of _a_ man without a woman
    would not have been the creation of man. Adam called her name Eve
    but God called their name Adam.” Mat. Henry: “Not out of his head
    to top him, nor out of his feet to be trampled on by him; but out
    of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected by
    him, and near his heart to be beloved.” Robert Burns says of
    nature: “Her ’prentice hand she tried on man, And then she made
    the lasses, O!” Stevens, Pauline Theology, 329—“In the natural
    relations of the sexes there is a certain reciprocal dependence,
    since it is not only true that woman was made from man, but that
    man is born of woman (_1 Cor. 11:11, 12_).” Of the Elgin marbles
    Boswell asked: “Don’t you think them indecent?” Dr. Johnson
    replied: “No, sir; but your question is.” Man, who in the adult
    state possesses twelve pairs of ribs, is found in the embryonic
    state to have thirteen or fourteen. Dawson, Modern Ideas of
    Evolution, 148—“Why does not the male man lack one rib? Because
    only the individual skeleton of Adam was affected by the taking of
    the rib.... The unfinished vertebral arches of the skin-fibrous
    layer may have produced a new individual by a process of budding
    or gemmation.”

    H. H. Bawden suggests that the account of Eve’s creation may be
    the “pictorial summary” of an actual phylogenetic evolutionary
    process by which the sexes were separated or isolated from a
    common hermaphroditic ancestor or ancestry. The mesodermic portion
    of the organism in which the urinogenital system has its origin
    develops later than the ectodermic or the endodermic portions. The
    word “rib” may designate this mesodermic portion. Bayard Taylor,
    John Godfrey’s Fortunes, 392, suggests that a genius is
    hermaphroditic, adding a male element to the woman, and a female
    element to the man. Professor Loeb, Am. Journ. Physiology, Vol.
    III, no. 3, has found that in certain chemical solutions prepared
    in the laboratory, approximately the concentration of sea-water,
    the unfertilized eggs of the sea-urchin will mature without the
    intervention of the spermatozoön. Perfect embryos and normal
    individuals are produced under these conditions. He thinks it
    probable that similar parthenogenesis may be produced in higher
    types of being. In 1900 he achieved successful results on
    Annelids, though it is doubtful whether he produced anything more
    than normal _larvæ_. These results have been criticized by a
    European investigator who is also a Roman priest. Prof. Loeb wrote
    a rejoinder in which he expressed surprise that a representative
    of the Roman church did not heartily endorse his conclusions,
    since they afford a vindication of the doctrine of the immaculate
    conception.

    H. H. Bawden has reviewed Prof. Loeb’s work in the Psychological
    Review, Jan. 1900. Janósik has found segmentation in the
    unfertilized eggs of mammalians. Prof. Loeb considers it possible
    that only the ions of the blood prevent the parthenogenetic origin
    of embryos in mammals, and thinks it not improbable that by a
    transitory change in these ions it will be possible to produce
    complete parthenogenesis in these higher types. Dr. Bawden goes on
    to say that “both parent and child are dependent upon a common
    source of energy. The universe is one great organism, and there is
    no inorganic or non-organic matter, but differences only in
    degrees of organization. Sex is designed only secondarily for the
    perpetuation of species; primarily it is the bond or medium for
    the connection and interaction of the various parts of this great
    organism, for maintaining that degree of heterogeneity which is
    the prerequisite of a high degree of organization. By means of the
    growth of a lifetime I have become an essential part in a great
    organic system. What I call my individual personality represents
    simply the focusing, the flowering of the universe at one finite
    concrete point or centre. Must not then my personality continue as
    long as that universal system continues? And is immortality
    conceivable if the soul is something shut up within itself,
    unshareable and unique? Are not the many foci mutually
    interdependent, instead of mutually exclusive? We must not then
    conceive of an immortality which means the continued existence of
    an individual cut off from that social context which is really
    essential to his very nature.”

    J. H. Richardson suggests in the Standard, Sept. 10, 1901, that
    the first chapter of Genesis describes the creation of the
    spiritual part of man only—that part which was made in the image
    of God—while the second chapter describes the creation of man’s
    body, the animal part, which may have been originated by a process
    of evolution. S. W. Howland, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1903:121-128,
    supposes Adam and Eve to have been twins, joined by the ensiform
    cartilage or breast-bone, as were the Siamese Chang and Eng. By
    violence or accident this cartilage was broken before it hardened
    into bone, and the two were separated until puberty. Then Adam saw
    Eve coming to him with a bone projecting from her side
    corresponding to the hollow in his own side, and said: “She is
    bone of my bone; she must have been taken from my side when I
    slept.” This tradition was handed down to his posterity. The Jews
    have a tradition that Adam was created double-sexed, and that the
    two sexes were afterwards separated. The Hindus say that man was
    at first of both sexes and divided himself in order to people the
    earth. In the Zodiac of Dendera, Castor and Pollux appear as man
    and woman, and these twins, some say, were called Adam and Eve.
    The Coptic name for this sign is _Pi Mahi_, “the United.” Darwin,
    in the postscript to a letter to Lyell, written as early as July,
    1850, tells his friend that he has “a pleasant genealogy for
    mankind,” and describes our remotest ancestor as “an animal which
    breathed water, had a swim-bladder, a great swimming tail, an
    imperfect skull, and was undoubtedly a hermaphrodite.”

    Matthew Arnold speaks of “the freshness of the early world.”
    Novalis says that “all philosophy begins in homesickness.”
    Shelley, Skylark: “We look before and after, And pine for what is
    not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our
    sweetest songs are those That tell of saddest thought.”—“The
    golden conception of a Paradise is the poet’s guiding thought.”
    There is a universal feeling that we are not now in our natural
    state; that we are far away from home; that we are exiles from our
    true habitation. Keble, Groans of Nature: “Such thoughts, the
    wreck of Paradise, Through many a dreary age, Upbore whate’er of
    good or wise Yet lived in bard or sage.” Poetry and music echo the
    longing for some possession lost. Jessica in Shakespeare’s
    Merchant of Venice: “I am never merry when I hear sweet music.”
    All true poetry is forward-looking or backward-looking prophecy,
    as sculpture sets before us the original or the resurrection body.
    See Isaac Taylor, Hebrew Poetry, 94-101; Tyler, Theol. of Greek
    Poets, 225, 226.

    Wellhausen, on the legend of a golden age, says: “It is the
    yearning song which goes through all the peoples: having attained
    the historical civilization, they feel the worth of the goods
    which they have sacrificed for it.” He regards the golden age as
    only an ideal image, like the millennial kingdom at the end. Man
    differs from the beast in this power to form ideals. His
    destination _to_ God shows his descent _from_ God. Hegel in a
    similar manner claimed that the Paradisaic condition is only an
    ideal conception underlying human development. But may not the
    traditions of the gardens of Brahma and of the Hesperides embody
    the world’s recollection of an historical fact, when man was free
    from external evil and possessed all that could minister to
    innocent joy? The “golden age” of the heathen was connected with
    the hope of restoration. So the use of the doctrine of man’s
    original state is to convince men of the high ideal once realized,
    properly belonging to man, now lost, and recoverable, not by man’s
    own powers, but only through God’s provision in Christ. For
    references in classic writers to a golden age, see Luthardt,
    Compendium, 115. He mentions the following: Hesiod, Works and
    Days, 109-208; Aratus, Phenom., 100-184; Plato, Tim., 233; Vergil,
    Ec., 4, Georgics, 1:135, Æneid, 8:314.


(_b_) Provisions for the trying of man’s virtue.—Since man was not yet in
a state of confirmed holiness, but rather of simple childlike innocence,
he could be made perfect only through temptation. Hence the “tree of the
knowledge of good and evil” (Gen 2:9). The one slight command best tested
the spirit of obedience. Temptation did not necessitate a fall, If
resisted, it would strengthen virtue. In that case, the _posse non
peccare_ would have become the _non posse peccare_.


    Thomasius: “That evil is a necessary transition-point to good, is
    Satan’s doctrine and philosophy.” The tree was mainly a tree of
    probation. It is right for a father to make his son’s title to his
    estate depend upon the performance of some filial duty, as
    Thaddeus Stevens made his son’s possession of property conditional
    upon his keeping the temperance-pledge. Whether, besides this, the
    tree of knowledge was naturally hurtful or poisonous, we do not
    know.


(_c_) Opportunity of securing physical immortality.—The body of the first
man was in itself mortal (1 Cor. 15:45). Science shows that physical life
involves decay and loss. But means were apparently provided for checking
this decay and preserving the body’s youth. This means was the “tree of
life” (Gen. 2:9). If Adam had maintained his integrity, the body might
have been developed and transfigured, without intervention of death. In
other words, the _posse non mori_ might have become a _non posse mori_.


    The tree of life was symbolic of communion with God and of man’s
    dependence upon him. But this, only because it had a physical
    efficacy. It was sacramental and memorial to the soul, because it
    sustained the life of the body. Natural immortality without
    holiness would have been unending misery. Sinful man was therefore
    shut out from the tree of life, till he could be prepared for it
    by God’s righteousness. Redemption and resurrection not only
    restore that which was lost, but give what man was originally
    created to attain: _1 Cor. 15:45_—“_The first man Adam became a
    living soul. The last man Adam became a life-giving spirit_”;
    _Rev. 22:14_—“_Blessed are they that wash their robes, that they
    may have the right to come to the tree of life._”


The conclusions we have thus reached with regard to the incidents of man’s
original state are combated upon two distinct grounds:

1st. The facts bearing upon man’s prehistoric condition point to a
development from primitive savagery to civilization. Among these facts may
be mentioned the succession of implements and weapons from stone to bronze
and iron; the polyandry and communal marriage systems of the lowest
tribes; the relics of barbarous customs still prevailing among the most
civilized.


    For the theory of an originally savage condition of man, see Sir
    John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, and Origin of Civilization: “The
    primitive condition of mankind was one of utter barbarism”; but
    especially L. H. Morgan, Ancient Society, who divides human
    progress into three great periods, the savage, the barbarian, and
    the civilized. Each of the two former has three states, as
    follows: I. Savage: 1. Lowest state, marked by attainment of
    speech and subsistence upon roots. 2. Middle state, marked by
    fish-food and fire. 3. Upper state, marked by use of the bow and
    hunting. II. Barbarian: 1. Lower state, marked by invention and
    use of pottery. 2. Middle state, marked by use of domestic
    animals, maize, and building stone. 3. Upper state, marked by
    invention and use of iron tools. III. Civilized man next appears,
    with the introduction of the phonetic alphabet and writing. J. S.
    Stuart-Glennie, Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1892:844, defines civilization
    as “enforced social organization, with written records, and hence
    intellectual development and social progress.”


With regard to this view we remark:

(_a_) It is based upon an insufficient induction of facts.—History shows a
law of degeneration supplementing and often counteracting the tendency to
development. In the earliest times of which we have any record, we find
nations in a high state of civilization; but in the case of every nation
whose history runs back of the Christian era—as for example, the Romans,
the Greeks, the Egyptians—the subsequent progress has been downward, and
no nation is known to have recovered from barbarism except as the result
of influence from without.


    Lubbock seems to admit that cannibalism was not primeval; yet he
    shows a general tendency to take every brutal custom as a sample
    of man’s first state. And this, in spite of the fact that many
    such customs have been the result of corruption. Bride-catching,
    for example, could not possibly have been primeval, in the strict
    sense of that term. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:48, presents a far
    more moderate view. He favors a theory of development, but with
    degeneration “as a secondary action largely and deeply affecting
    the development of civilization.” So the Duke of Argyll, Unity of
    Nature: “Civilization and savagery are both the results of
    evolutionary development; but the one is a development in the
    upward, the latter in the downward direction; and for this reason,
    neither civilization nor savagery can rationally be looked upon as
    the primitive condition of man.” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:467—“As
    plausible an argument might be constructed out of the
    deterioration and degradation of some of the human family to prove
    that man may have evolved downward into an anthropoid ape, as that
    which has been constructed to prove that he has been evolved
    upward from one.”

    Modern nations fall far short of the old Greek perception and
    expression of beauty. Modern Egyptians, Bushmen, Australians, are
    unquestionably degenerate races. See Lankester, Degeneration. The
    same is true of Italians and Spaniards, as well as of Turks.
    Abyssinians are now polygamists, though their ancestors were
    Christians and monogamists. The physical degeneration of portions
    of the population of Ireland is well known. See Mivart, Lessons
    from Nature, 146-160, who applies to the savage-theory the tests
    of language, morals, and religion, and who quotes Herbert Spencer
    as saying: “Probably most of them [savages], if not all of them,
    had ancestors in higher states, and among their beliefs remain
    some which were evolved during those higher states.... It is quite
    possible, and I believe highly probable, that retrogression has
    been as frequent as progression.” Spencer, however, denies that
    savagery is always caused by lapse from civilization.

    Bib. Sac., 6:715; 29:282—“Man as a moral being does not tend to
    rise but to fall, and that with a geometric progress, except he be
    elevated and sustained by some force from without and above
    himself. While man once civilized may advance, yet moral ideas are
    apparently never developed from within.” Had savagery been man’s
    primitive condition, he never could have emerged. See Whately,
    Origin of Civilization, who maintains that man needed not only a
    divine Creator, but a divine Instructor. Seelye, Introd. to A
    Century of Dishonor, 3—“The first missionaries to the Indians in
    Canada took with them skilled laborers to teach the savages how to
    till their fields, to provide them with comfortable homes,
    clothing, and food. But the Indians preferred their wigwams,
    skins, raw flesh, and filth. Only as Christian influences taught
    the Indian his inner need, and how this was to be supplied, was he
    led to wish and work for the improvement of his outward condition
    and habits. Civilization does not reproduce itself. It must first
    be kindled, and it can then be kept alive only by a power
    genuinely Christian.” So Wallace, in Nature, Sept. 7, 1876, vol.
    14:408-412.

    Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 149-168, shows that
    evolution does not necessarily involve development as regards
    particular races. There is degeneration in all the organic orders.
    As regards man, he may be evolving in some directions, while in
    others he has degenerated. Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the
    Atonement, 245, speaks of “Prof. Clifford as pointing to the
    history of human progress and declaring that mankind is a risen
    and not a fallen race. There is no real contradiction between
    these two views. God has not let man go because man has rebelled
    against him. Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” The
    humanity which was created in Christ and which is upheld by his
    power has ever received reinforcements of its physical and mental
    life, in spite of its moral and spiritual deterioration. “Some
    shrimps, by the adjustment of their bodily parts, go onward to the
    higher structure of the lobsters and crabs; while others, taking
    up the habit of dwelling in the gills of fishes, sink downward
    into a state closely resembling that of the worms.” Drummond,
    Ascent of Man: “When a boy’s kite comes down in our garden, we do
    not hold that it originally came from the clouds. So nations went
    up, before they came down. There is a national gravitation. The
    stick age preceded the stone age, but has been lost.” Tennyson:
    “Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good, And Reversion ever
    dragging Evolution in the mud.” Evolution often becomes
    devolution, if not devilution. A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the
    Spirit, 104—“The Jordan is the fitting symbol of our natural life,
    rising in a lofty elevation, and from pure springs, but plunging
    steadily down till it pours itself into that Dead Sea from which
    there is no outlet.”


(_b_) Later investigations have rendered it probable that the stone age of
some localities was contemporaneous with the bronze and iron ages of
others, while certain tribes and nations, instead of making progress from
one to the other, were never, so far back as we can trace them, without
the knowledge and use of the metals. It is to be observed, moreover, that
even without such knowledge and use man is not necessarily a barbarian,
though he may be a child.


    On the question whether the arts of civilization can be lost, see
    Arthur Mitchell, Past in the Present, 219: Rude art is often the
    debasement of a higher, instead of being the earlier; the rudest
    art in a nation may coëxist with the highest; cave-life may
    accompany high civilization. Illustrations from modern Scotland,
    where burial of a cock for epilepsy, and sacrifice of a bull, were
    until very recently extant. Certain arts have unquestionably been
    lost, as glass-making and iron-working in Assyria (see Mivart,
    referred to above). The most ancient men do not appear to have
    been inferior to the latest, either physically or intellectually.
    Rawlinson: “The explorers who have dug deep into the Mesopotamian
    mounds, and have ransacked the tombs of Egypt, have come upon no
    certain traces of savage man in those regions which a wide-spread
    tradition makes the cradle of the human race.” The Tyrolese
    peasants show that a rude people may be moral, and a very simple
    people may be highly intelligent. See Southall, Recent Origin of
    Man, 386-449; Schliemann, Troy and her Remains, 274.

    Mason, Origins of Invention, 110, 124, 128—“There is no evidence
    that a stone age ever existed in some regions. In Africa, Canada,
    and perhaps Michigan, the metal age was as old as the stone age.”
    An illustration of the mathematical powers of the savage is given
    by Rev. A. E. Hunt in an account of the native arithmetic of
    Murray Islands, Torres Straits. “Netat” (one) and “neis” (two) are
    the only numerals, higher numbers being described by combinations
    of these, as “neis-netat” for three, “neis-i-neis” for four, etc.,
    or by reference to one of the fingers, elbows or other parts of
    the body. A total of thirty-one could be counted by the latter
    method. Beyond this all numbers were “many,” as this was the limit
    reached in counting before the introduction of English numerals,
    now in general use in the islands.

    Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 171—“It is commonly supposed
    that the direction of the movement [in the variation of species]
    is ever upward. The fact is on the contrary that in a large number
    of cases, perhaps in the aggregate in more than half, the change
    gives rise to a form which, by all the canons by which we
    determine relative rank, is to be regarded as regressive or
    degradational.... Species, genera, families, and orders have all,
    like the individuals of which they are composed, a period of decay
    in which the gain won by infinite toil and pains is altogether
    lost in the old age of the group.” Shaler goes on to say that in
    the matter of variation successes are to failures as 1 to 100,000,
    and if man be counted the solitary distinguished success, then the
    proportion is something like 1 to 100,000,000. No species that
    passes away is ever reinstated. If man were now to disappear,
    there is no reason to believe that by any process of change a
    similar creature would be evolved, however long the animal kingdom
    continued to exist. The use of these successive chances to produce
    man is inexplicable except upon the hypothesis of an infinite
    designing Wisdom.


(_c_) The barbarous customs to which this view looks for support may
better be explained as marks of broken-down civilization than as relics of
a primitive and universal savagery. Even if they indicated a former state
of barbarism, that state might have been itself preceded by a condition of
comparative culture.


    Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Rev. Sept., 1882:194—“There is no cruel
    treatment of females among animals. If man came from the lower
    animals, then he cannot have been originally savage; for you find
    the most of this cruel treatment among savages.” Tylor instances
    “street Arabs.” He compares street Arabs to a ruined house, but
    savage tribes to a builder’s yard. See Duke of Argyll, Primeval
    Man, 129, 133; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 223;
    McLennan, Studies in Ancient History. Gulick, in Bib. Sac., July,
    1892:517—“Cannibalism and infanticide are unknown among the
    anthropoid apes. These must be the results of degradation. Pirates
    and slavetraders are not men of low and abortive intelligence, but
    men of education who deliberately throw off all restraint, and who
    use their powers for the destruction of society.”

    Keane, Man, Past and Present, 40, quotes Sir H. H. Johnston, an
    administrator who has had a wider experience of the natives of
    Africa than any man living, as saying that “the tendency of the
    negro for several centuries past has been an actual retrograde
    one—return toward the savage and even the brute. If he had been
    cut off from the immigration of the Arab and the European, the
    purely Negroid races, left to themselves, so far from advancing
    towards a higher type of humanity, might have actually reverted by
    degrees to a type no longer human.” Ratzel’s History of Mankind:
    “We assign no great antiquity to Polynesian civilization. In New
    Zealand it is a matter of only some centuries back. In newly
    occupied territories, the development of the population began upon
    a higher level and then fell off. The Maoris’ decadence resulted
    in the rapid impoverishment of culture, and the character of the
    people became more savage and cruel. Captain Cook found objects of
    art worshiped by the descendants of those who produced them.”

    Recent researches have entirely discredited L. H. Morgan’s theory
    of an original brutal promiscuity of the human race. Ritchie,
    Darwin and Hegel, 6, note—“The theory of an original promiscuity
    is rendered extremely doubtful by the habits of many of the higher
    animals.” E. B. Tylor, in 19th Century, July, 1906—“A sort of
    family life, lasting for the sake of the young, beyond a single
    pairing season, exists among the higher manlike apes. The male
    gorilla keeps watch and ward over his progeny. He is the antetype
    of the house-father. The matriarchal system is a later device for
    political reasons, to bind together in peace and alliance tribes
    that would otherwise be hostile. But it is an artificial system
    introduced as a substitute for and in opposition to the natural
    paternal system. When the social pressure is removed, the
    maternalized husband emancipates himself, and paternalism begins.”
    Westermarck, History of Human Marriage: “Marriage and the family
    are thus intimately connected with one another; it is for the
    benefit of the young that male and female continue to live
    together. Marriage is therefore rooted in the family, rather than
    the family in marriage.... There is not a shred of genuine
    evidence for the notion that promiscuity ever formed a general
    stage in the social history of mankind. The hypothesis of
    promiscuity, instead of belonging to the class of hypotheses which
    are scientifically permissible, has no real foundation, and is
    essentially unscientific.” Howard, History of Matrimonial
    Institutions: “Marriage or pairing between one man and one woman,
    though the union be often transitory and the rule often violated,
    is the typical form of sexual union from the infancy of the human
    race.”


(_d_) The well-nigh universal tradition of a golden age of virtue and
happiness may be most easily explained upon the Scripture view of an
actual creation of the race in holiness and its subsequent apostasy.


    For references in classic writers to a golden age, see Luthardt,
    Compendium der Dogmatik, 115; Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion,
    1:205—“In Hesiod we have the legend of a golden age under the
    lordship of Chronos, when man was free from cares and toils, in
    untroubled youth and cheerfulness, with a superabundance of the
    gifts which the earth furnished of itself; the race was indeed not
    immortal, but it experienced death even as a soft sleep.” We may
    add that capacity for religious truth depends upon moral
    conditions. Very early races therefore have a purer faith than the
    later ones. Increasing depravity makes it harder for the later
    generations to exercise faith. The wisdom-literature may have been
    very early instead of very late, just as monotheistic ideas are
    clearer the further we go back. Bixby, Crisis in Morals,
    171—“Precisely because such tribes [Australian and African
    savages] have been deficient in average moral quality, have they
    failed to march upward on the road of civilization with the rest
    of mankind, and have fallen into these bog holes of savage
    degradation.” On petrified civilizations, see Henry George,
    Progress and Poverty, 433-439—“The law of human progress, what is
    it but the moral law?” On retrogressive development in nature, see
    Weismann, Heredity, 2:1-30. But see also Mary E. Case, “Did the
    Romans Degenerate?” in Internat. Journ. Ethics. Jan. 1893:165-182,
    in which it is maintained that the Romans made constant advances
    rather. Henry Sumner Maine calls the Bible the most important
    single document in the history of sociology, because it exhibits
    authentically the early development of society from the family,
    through the tribe, into the nation,—a progress learned only by
    glimpses, intervals, and survivals of old usages in the literature
    of other nations.


2nd. That the religious history of mankind warrants us in inferring a
necessary and universal law of progress, in accordance with which man
passes from fetichism to polytheism and monotheism,—this first theological
stage, of which fetichism, polytheism, and monotheism are parts, being
succeeded by the metaphysical stage, and that in turn by the positive.


    This theory is propounded by Comte, in his Positive Philosophy,
    English transl., 25, 26, 515-636—“Each branch of our knowledge
    passes successively through three different theoretical
    conditions: the Theological, or fictitious; the Metaphysical, or
    abstract; and the Scientific, or positive.... The first is the
    necessary point of departure of the human understanding; and the
    third is its fixed and definite state. The second is merely a
    state of transition. In the theological state, the human mind,
    seeking the essential nature of beings, the first and final
    causes, the origin and purpose, of all effects—in short, absolute
    knowledge—supposes all phenomena to be produced by the immediate
    action of supernatural beings. In the metaphysical state, which is
    only a modification of the first, the mind supposes, instead of
    supernatural beings, abstract forces, veritable entities, that is,
    personified abstractions, inherent in all beings, and capable of
    producing all phenomena. What is called the explanation of
    phenomena is, in this stage, a mere reference of each to its
    proper entity. In the final, the positive state, the mind has
    given over the vain search after absolute notions, the origin and
    destination of the universe, and the causes of phenomena, and
    applies itself to the study of their laws—that is, their
    invariable relations of succession and resemblance.... The
    theological system arrived at its highest perfection when it
    substituted the providential action of a single Being for the
    varied operations of numerous divinities. In the last stage of the
    metaphysical system, men substituted one great entity, Nature, as
    the cause of all phenomena, instead of the multitude of entities
    at first supposed. In the same way the ultimate perfection of the
    positive system would be to represent all phenomena as particular
    aspects of a single general fact—such as Gravitation, for
    instance.”


This assumed law of progress, however, is contradicted by the following
facts:

(_a_) Not only did the monotheism of the Hebrews precede the great
polytheistic systems of antiquity, but even these heathen religions are
purer from polytheistic elements, the further back we trace them; so that
the facts point to an original monotheistic basis for them all.


    The gradual deterioration of all religions, apart from special
    revelation and influence from God, is proof that the purely
    evolutionary theory is defective. The most natural supposition is
    that of a primitive revelation, which little by little receded
    from human memory. In Japan, Shinto was originally the worship of
    Heaven. The worship of the dead, the deification of the Mikado,
    etc., were a corruption and aftergrowth. The Mikado’s ancestors,
    instead of coming from heaven, came from Korea. Shinto was
    originally a form of monotheism. Not one of the first emperors was
    deified after death. Apotheosis of the Mikados dated from the
    corruption of Shinto through the importation of Buddhism. Andrew
    Lang, in his Making of Religion, advocates primitive monotheism.
    T. G. Pinches, of the British Museum, 1894, declares that, as in
    the earliest Egyptian, so in the early Babylonian records, there
    is evidence of a primitive monotheism. Nevins, Demon-Possession,
    170-173, quotes W. A. P. Martin, President of the Peking
    University, as follows: “China, India, Egypt and Greece all agree
    in the monotheistic type of their early religion. The Orphic
    Hymns, long before the advent of the popular divinities,
    celebrated the _Pantheos_, the universal God. The odes compiled by
    Confucius testify to the early worship of Shangte, the Supreme
    Ruler. The Vedas speak of ‘one unknown true Being, all-present,
    all-powerful, the Creator, Preserver and Destroyer of the
    Universe.’ And in Egypt, as late as the time of Plutarch, there
    were still vestiges of a monotheistic worship.”

    On the evidences of an original monotheism, see Max Müller, Chips,
    1:337; Rawlinson, in Present Day Tracts, 2: no. 11; Legge,
    Religions of China, 8, 11; Diestel, in Jahrbuch für deutsche
    Theologie, 1860, and vol. 5:669; Philip Smith, Anc. Hist. of East,
    65, 195; Warren, on the Earliest Creed of Mankind, in the Meth.
    Quar. Rev., Jan. 1884.


(_b_) “There is no proof that the Indo-Germanic or Semitic stocks ever
practiced fetich worship, or were ever enslaved by the lowest types of
mythological religion, or ascended from them to somewhat higher” (Fisher).


    See Fisher, Essays on Supernat. Origin of Christianity, 545;
    Bartlett, Sources of History in the Pentateuch, 36-115. Herbert
    Spencer once held that fetichism was primordial. But he afterwards
    changed his mind, and said that the facts proved to be exactly the
    opposite when he had become better acquainted with the ideas of
    savages; see his Principles of Sociology, 1:343. Mr. Spencer
    finally traced the beginnings of religion to the worship of
    ancestors. But in China no ancestor has ever become a god; see
    Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 304-313. And unless man had an inborn
    sense of divinity, he could deify neither ancestors nor ghosts.
    Professor Hilprecht of Philadelphia says: “As the attempt has
    recently been made to trace the pure monotheism of Israel to
    Babylonian sources, I am bound to declare this an absolute
    impossibility, on the basis of my fourteen years’ researches in
    Babylonian cuneiform inscriptions. The faith of Israel’s chosen
    people is: ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord.’ And
    this faith could never have proceeded from the Babylonian mountain
    of gods, that charnel-house full of corruption and dead men’s
    bones.”


(_c_) Some of the earliest remains of man yet found show, by the burial of
food and weapons with the dead, that there already existed the idea of
spiritual beings and of a future state, and therefore a religion of a
higher sort than fetichism.


    Idolatry proper regards the idol as the symbol and representative
    of a spiritual being who exists apart from the material object,
    though he manifests himself through it. Fetichism, however,
    identifies the divinity with the material thing, and worships the
    stock or stone; spirit is not conceived of as existing apart from
    body. Belief in spiritual beings and a future state is therefore
    proof of a religion higher in kind than fetichism. See Lyell,
    Antiquity of Man, quoted in Dawson, Story of Earth and Man, 384;
    see also 368, 372, 386—“Man’s capacities for degradation are
    commensurate with his capacities for improvement” (Dawson). Lyell,
    in his last edition, however, admits the evidence from the
    Aurignac cave to be doubtful. See art. by Dawkins, in Nature,
    4:208.


(_d_) The theory in question, in making theological thought a merely
transient stage of mental evolution, ignores the fact that religion has
its root in the intuitions and yearnings of the human soul, and that
therefore no philosophical or scientific progress can ever abolish it.
While the terms theological, metaphysical, and positive may properly mark
the order in which the ideas of the individual and the race are acquired,
positivism errs in holding that these three phases of thought are mutually
exclusive, and that upon the rise of the later the earlier must of
necessity become extinct.


    John Stuart Mill suggests that “personifying” would be a much
    better term than “theological” to designate the earliest efforts
    to explain physical phenomena. On the fundamental principles of
    Positivism, see New Englander, 1873:323-386; Diman, Theistic
    Argument, 338—“Three coëxistent states are here confounded with
    three successive stages of human thought; three aspects of things
    with three epochs of time. Theology, metaphysics, and science must
    always exist side by side, for all positive science rests on
    metaphysical principles, and theology lies behind both. All are as
    permanent as human reason itself.” Martineau, Types, 1:487—“Comte
    sets up mediæval Christianity as the typical example of evolved
    monotheism, and develops it out of the Greek and Roman polytheism
    which it overthrew and dissipated. But the religion of modern
    Europe notoriously does not descend from the same source as its
    civilization and is no continuation of the ancient culture,”—it
    comes rather from Hebrew sources; Essays, Philos. and Theol.,
    1:24, 62—“The Jews were always a disobliging people; what business
    had they to be up so early in the morning, disturbing the house
    ever so long before M. Comte’s bell rang to prayers?” See also
    Gillett, God in Human Thought, 1:17-23; Rawlinson, in Journ.
    Christ. Philos., April, 1883:353; Nineteenth Century, Oct.
    1886:473-490.




Chapter III. Sin, Or Man’s State Of Apostasy.



Section I.—The Law Of God.


As preliminary to a treatment of man’s state of apostasy, it becomes
necessary to consider the nature of that law of God, the transgression of
which is sin. We may best approach the subject by inquiring what is the
true conception of


I. Law in General.


1. Law is an expression of _will_.

The essential idea of law is that of a general expression of will enforced
by power. It implies: (_a_) A lawgiver, or authoritative will. (_b_)
Subjects, or beings upon whom this will terminates. (_c_) A general
command, or expression of this will. (_d_) A power, enforcing the command.

These elements are found even in what we call natural law. The phrase “law
of nature” involves a self-contradiction, when used to denote a mode of
action or an order of sequence behind which there is conceived to be no
intelligent and ordaining will. Physics derives the term “law” from
jurisprudence, instead of jurisprudence deriving it from physics. It is
first used of the relations of voluntary agents. Causation in our own
wills enables us to see something besides mere antecedence and consequence
in the world about us. Physical science, in her very use of the word
“law,” implicitly confesses that a supreme Will has set general rules
which control the processes of the universe.


    Wayland, Moral Science, 1, unwisely defines law as “a mode of
    existence or order of sequence,” thus leaving out of his
    definition all reference to an ordaining will. He subsequently
    says that law presupposes an establisher, but in his definition
    there is nothing to indicate this. We insist, on the other hand,
    that the term “law” itself includes the idea of force and cause.
    The word “law” is from “lay” (German _legen_),—something laid
    down; German _Gesetz_, from _setzen_,—something set or
    established; Greek νόμος, from νέμω,—something assigned or
    apportioned; Latin _lex_, from _lego_,—something said or spoken.

    All these derivations show that man’s original conception of law
    is that of something proceeding from volition. Lewes, in his
    Problems of Life and Mind, says that the term “law” is so
    suggestive of a giver and impresser of law, that it ought to be
    dropped, and the word “method” substituted. The merit of Austin’s
    treatment of the subject is that he “rigorously limits the term
    ‘law’ to the commands of a superior”; see John Austin, Province of
    Jurisprudence, 1:88-93, 220-223. The defects of his treatment we
    shall note further on.

    J. S. Mill: “It is the custom, wherever they [scientific men] can
    trace regularity of any kind, to call the general proposition
    which expresses the nature of that regularity, a law; as when in
    mathematics we speak of the law of the successive terms of a
    converging series. But the expression ‘law of nature’ is generally
    employed by scientific men with a sort of tacit reference to the
    original sense of the word ‘law,’ namely, the expression of the
    will of a superior—the superior in this case being the Ruler of
    the universe.” Paley, Nat. Theology, chap. 1—“It is a perversion
    of language to assign any _law_ as the efficient operative cause
    of anything. A law presupposes an agent; this is only the mode
    according to which an agent proceeds; it implies a power, for it
    is the order according to which that power acts. Without this
    agent, without this power, which are both distinct from itself,
    the law does nothing.” “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” “Rules do
    not fulfill themselves, any more than a statute-book can quell a
    riot” (Martineau, Types, 1:367).

    Charles Darwin got the suggestion of natural selection, not from
    the study of lower plants and animals, but from Malthus on
    Population; see his Life and Letters, Vol. I, autobiographical
    chapter. Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, 2:248-252—“The
    conception of natural law rests upon the analogy of civil law.”
    Ladd, Philosophy of Knowledge, 333—“Laws are only the more or less
    frequently repeated and uniform modes of the behavior of things”;
    Philosophy of Mind, 122—“To be, to stand in relation, to be
    self-active, to act upon other being, to obey law, to be a cause,
    to be a permanent subject of states, to be the same to-day as
    yesterday, to be identical, to be one,—all these and all similar
    conceptions, together with the proofs that they are valid for real
    beings, are affirmed of physical realities, or projected into
    them, only on a basis of self-knowledge, envisaging and affirming
    the reality of mind. Without psychological insight and
    philosophical training, such terms or their equivalents are
    meaningless in physics. And because writers on physics do not in
    general have this insight and this training, in spite of their
    utmost endeavors to treat physics as an empirical science without
    metaphysics, they flounder and blunder and contradict themselves
    hopelessly whenever they touch upon fundamental matters.” See
    President McGarvey’s Criticism on James Lane Allen’s Reign of Law:
    “It is not in the nature of law to reign. To reign is an act which
    can be literally affirmed only of persons. A man may reign; a God
    may reign; a devil may reign; but a law cannot reign. If a law
    could reign, we should have no gambling in New York and no open
    saloons on Sunday. There would be no false swearing in courts of
    justice, and no dishonesty in politics. It is men who reign in
    these matters—the judges, the grand jury, the sheriff and the
    police. They may reign according to law. Law cannot reign even
    over those who are appointed to execute the law.”


2. Law is a _general_ expression of will.

The characteristic of law is generality. It is addressed to substances or
persons in classes. Special legislation is contrary to the true theory of
law.


    When the Sultan of Zanzibar orders his barber to be beheaded
    because the latter has cut his master, this order is not properly
    a law. To be a law it must read: “Every barber who cuts his
    majesty shall thereupon be decapitated.” _Einmal ist keinmal_ =
    “Once is no custom.” Dr. Schurman suggests that the word _meal_
    (Mahl) means originally _time_ (_mal_ in _einmal_). The
    measurement of time among ourselves is astronomical; among our
    earliest ancestors it was gastronomical, and the reduplication
    _mealtime_ = the ding-dong of the dinner bell. The Shah of Persia
    once asked the Prince of Wales to have a man put to death in order
    that he might see the English method of execution. When the Prince
    told him that this was beyond his power, the Shah wished to know
    what was the use of being a king if he could not kill people at
    his pleasure. Peter the Great suggested a way out of the
    difficulty. He desired to see keelhauling. When informed that
    there was no sailor liable to that penalty, he replied: “That does
    not matter,—take one of my suite.” Amos, Science of Law, 33,
    34—“Law eminently deals in general rules.” It knows not persons or
    personality. It must apply to more than one case. “The
    characteristic of law is generality, as that of morality is
    individual application.” Special legislation is the bane of good
    government; it does not properly fall within the province of the
    law-making power; it savors of the caprice of despotism, which
    gives commands to each subject at will. Hence our more advanced
    political constitutions check lobby influence and bribery, by
    prohibiting special legislation in all cases where general laws
    already exist.


3. Law implies _power to enforce_.

It is essential to the existence of law, that there be power to enforce.
Otherwise law becomes the expression of mere wish or advice. Since
physical substances and forces have no intelligence and no power to
resist, the four elements already mentioned exhaust the implications of
the term “law” as applied to nature. In the case of rational and free
agents, however, law implies in addition: (_e_) Duty or obligation to
obey; and (_f_) Sanctions, or pains and penalties for disobedience.


    “Law that has no penalty is not law but advice, and the government
    in which infliction does not follow transgression is the reign of
    rogues or demons.” On the question whether any of the punishments
    of civil law are legal sanctions, except the punishment of death,
    see N. W. Taylor, Moral Govt., 2:367-387. Rewards are motives, but
    they are not sanctions. Since public opinion may be conceived of
    as inflicting penalties for violation of her will, we speak
    figuratively of the laws of society, of fashion, of etiquette, of
    honor. Only so far as the community of nations can and does by
    sanctions compel obedience, can we with propriety assert the
    existence of international law. Even among nations, however, there
    may be moral as well as physical sanctions. The decision of an
    international tribunal has the same sanction as a treaty, and if
    the former is impotent, the latter also is. Fines and imprisonment
    do not deter decent people from violations of law half so
    effectively as do the social penalties of ostracism and disgrace,
    and it will be the same with the findings of an international
    tribunal. Diplomacy without ships and armies has been said to be
    law without penalty. But exclusion from civilized society is
    penalty. “In the unquestioning obedience to fashion’s decrees, to
    which we all quietly submit, we are simply yielding to the
    pressure of the persons about us. No one adopts a style of dress
    because it is reasonable, for the styles are often most
    unreasonable; but we meekly yield to the most absurd of them
    rather than resist this force and be called eccentric. So what we
    call public opinion is the most mighty power to-day known, whether
    in society or in politics.”


4. Law expresses and demands _nature_.

The will which thus binds its subjects by commands and penalties is an
expression of the nature of the governing power, and reveals the normal
relations of the subjects to that power. Finally, therefore, law (_g_) Is
an expression of the nature of the lawgiver; and (_h_) Sets forth the
condition or conduct in the subjects which is requisite for harmony with
that nature. Any so-called law which fails to represent the nature of the
governing power soon becomes obsolete. All law that is permanent is a
transcript of the facts of being, a discovery of what is and must be, in
order to harmony between the governing and the governed; in short,
positive law is just and lasting only as it is an expression and
republication of the law of nature.


    Diman, Theistic Argument, 106, 107: John Austin, although he
    “rigorously limited the term law to the commands of a superior,”
    yet “rejected Ulpian’s explanation of the law of nature, and
    ridiculed as fustian the celebrated description in Hooker.” This
    we conceive to be the radical defect of Austin’s conception. The
    Will from which natural law proceeds is conceived of after a
    deistic fashion, instead of being immanent in the universe.
    Lightwood, in his Nature of Positive Law, 78-90, criticizes
    Austin’s definition of law as command, and substitutes the idea of
    law as custom. Sir Henry Maine’s Ancient Law has shown us that the
    early village communities had customs which only gradually took
    form as definite laws. But we reply that custom is not the
    ultimate source of anything. Repeated acts of will are necessary
    to constitute custom. The first customs are due to the commanding
    will of the father in the patriarchal family. So Austin’s
    definition is justified. Collective morals (_mores_) come from
    individual duty (_due_); law originates in will; Martineau, Types,
    2:18, 19. Behind this will, however, is something which Austin
    does not take account of, namely, the nature of things as
    constituted by God, as revealing the universal Reason, and as
    furnishing the standard to which all positive law, if it would be
    permanent, must conform.

    See Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, book 1, sec. 14—“Laws are the
    necessary relations arising from the nature of things.... There is
    a primitive Reason, and laws are the relations subsisting between
    it and different beings, and the relations of these to one
    another.... These rules are a fixed and invariable relation....
    Particular intelligent beings may have laws of their own making,
    but they have some likewise that they never made.... To say that
    there is nothing just or unjust but what is commanded or forbidden
    by positive laws, is the same as saying that before the describing
    of a circle all the radii were not equal. We must therefore
    acknowledge relations antecedent to the positive law by which they
    were established.” Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, 169-172—“By the
    science of law is meant systematic knowledge of the principles of
    the law of nature—from which positive law takes its rise—which is
    forever the same, and carries its sure and unchanging obligations
    over all nations and throughout all ages.”

    It is true even of a despot’s law, that it reveals his nature, and
    shows what is requisite in the subject to constitute him in
    harmony with that nature. A law which does not represent the
    nature of things, or the real relations of the governor and the
    governed, has only a nominal existence, and cannot be permanent.
    On the definition and nature of law, see also Pomeroy, in
    Johnson’s Encyclopædia, art.: Law; Ahrens, Cours de Droit Naturel,
    book 1, sec. 14; Lorimer, Institutes of Law, 256, who quotes from
    Burke: “All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory.
    They may alter the mode and application, but have no power over
    the substance of original justice”; Lord Bacon: “Regula enim legem
    (ut acus nautica polos) indicat, non statuit.” Duke of Argyll,
    Reign of Law, 64; H. C. Carey, Unity of Law.

    Fairbairn, in Contemp. Rev., Apl. 1895:473—“The Roman jurists draw
    a distinction between _jus naturale_ and _jus civile_, and they
    used the former to affect the latter. The _jus civile_ was
    statutory, established and fixed law, as it were, the actual legal
    environment; the _jus naturale_ was ideal, the principle of
    justice and equity immanent in man, yet with the progress of his
    ethical culture growing ever more articulate.” We add the fact
    that _jus_ in Latin and _Recht_ in German have ceased to mean
    merely abstract right, and have come to denote the legal system in
    which that abstract right is embodied and expressed. Here we have
    a proof that Christ is gradually moralizing the world and
    translating law into life. E. G. Robinson: “Never a government on
    earth made its own laws. Even constitutions simply declare laws
    already and actually existing. Where society falls into anarchy,
    the _lex talionis_ becomes the prevailing principle.”


II. The Law of God in Particular.


The law of God is a general expression of the divine will enforced by
power. It has two forms: Elemental Law and Positive Enactment.

1. _Elemental Law_, or law inwrought into the elements, substances, and
forces of the rational and irrational creation. This is twofold:

A. The expression of the divine will in the constitution of the material
universe;—this we call physical, or natural law. Physical law is not
necessary. Another order of things is conceivable. Physical order is not
an end in itself; it exists for the sake of moral order. Physical order
has therefore only a relative constancy, and God supplements it at times
by miracle.


    Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 210—“The laws of nature
    represent no necessity, but are only the orderly forms of
    procedure of some Being back of them.... Cosmic uniformities are
    God’s methods in freedom.” Philos. of Theism, 73—“Any of the
    cosmic laws, from gravitation on, might conceivably have been
    lacking or altogether different.... No trace of necessity can be
    found in the Cosmos or in its laws.” Seth, Hegelianism and
    Personality: “Nature is not necessary. Why put an island where it
    is, and not a mile east or west? Why connect the smell and shape
    of the rose, or the taste and color of the orange? Why do H2O form
    water? No one knows.” William James: “The parts seem shot at us
    out of a pistol.” Rather, we would say, out of a shotgun.
    Martineau, Seat of Authority, 33—“Why undulations in one medium
    should produce sound, and in another light; why one speed of
    vibration should give red color, and another blue, can be
    explained by no reason of necessity. Here is selecting will.”

    Brooks, Foundations of Zoölogy, 126—“So far as the philosophy of
    evolution involves belief that nature is determinate, or due to a
    necessary law of universal progress or evolution, it seems to me
    to be utterly unsupported by evidence and totally unscientific.”
    There is no power to deduce anything whatever from homogeneity.
    Press the button and law does the rest? Yes, but what presses the
    button? The solution crystalises when shaken? Yes, but what shakes
    it? Ladd, Philos. of Knowledge, 310—“The directions and velocities
    of the stars fall under no common principles that astronomy can
    discover. One of the stars—‘1830 Groombridge’—is flying through
    space at a rate many times as great as it could attain if it had
    fallen through infinite space through all eternity toward the
    entire physical universe.... Fluids contract when cooled and
    expand when heated,—yet there is the well known exception of water
    at the degree of freezing.” 263—“Things do not appear to be
    mathematical all the way through. The system of things may be a
    Life, changing its modes of manifestation according to immanent
    ideas, rather than a collection of rigid entities, blindly subject
    in a mechanical way to unchanging laws.”

    Augustine: “Dei voluntas rerum natura est.” Joseph Cook: “The laws
    of nature are the habits of God.” But Campbell, Atonement,
    Introd., xxvi, says there is this difference between the laws of
    the moral universe and those of the physical, namely, that we do
    not trace the existence of the former to an act of will, as we do
    the latter. “To say that God has given existence to goodness, as
    he has to the laws of nature, would be equivalent to saying that
    he has given existence to himself.” Pepper, Outlines of Syst.
    Theol., 91—“Moral law, unlike natural law, is a standard of action
    to be adopted or rejected in the exercise of rational freedom, _i.
    e._, of moral agency.” See also Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:531.

    Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Rev., Sept. 1882:190—“In moral law
    there is enforcement by punishment only—never by power, for this
    would confound moral law with physical, and obedience can never be
    produced or secured by power. In physical law, on the contrary,
    enforcement is wholly by power, and punishment is impossible. So
    far as man is free, he is not subject to law at all, in its
    physical sense. Our wills are free _from_ law, as enforced by
    _power_; but are free _under_ law, as enforced by _punishment_.
    Where law prevails in the same sense as in the material world,
    there can be no freedom. Law does not prevail when we reach the
    region of choice. We hold to a power in the mind of man
    originating a free choice. Two objects or courses of action,
    between which choice is to be made, are presupposed: (1) A
    uniformity or set of uniformities implying a force by which the
    uniformity is produced [physical or natural law]; (2) A command,
    addressed to free and intelligent beings, that can be obeyed or
    disobeyed, and that has connected with it rewards or punishments”
    [moral law]. See also Wm. Arthur, Difference between Physical and
    Moral Law.


B. The expression of the divine will in the constitution of rational and
free agents;—this we call moral law. This elemental law of our moral
nature, with which only we are now concerned, has all the characteristics
mentioned as belonging to law in general. It implies: (_a_) A divine
Law-giver, or ordaining Will. (_b_) Subjects, or moral beings upon whom
the law terminates. (_c_) General command, or expression of this will in
the moral constitution of the subjects. (_d_) Power, enforcing the
command. (_e_) Duty, or obligation to obey. (_f_) Sanctions, or pains and
penalties for disobedience.

All these are of a loftier sort than are found in human law. But we need
especially to emphasize the fact that this law (_g_) Is an expression of
the moral nature of God, and therefore of God’s holiness, the fundamental
attribute of that nature; and that it (_h_) Sets forth absolute conformity
to that holiness, as the normal condition of man. This law is inwrought
into man’s rational and moral being. Man fulfills it, only when in his
moral as well as his rational being he is the image of God.


    Although the will from which the moral law springs is an
    expression of the nature of God, and a necessary expression of
    that nature in view of the existence of moral beings, it is none
    the less a personal will. We should be careful not to attribute to
    law a personality of its own. When Plutarch says: “Law is king
    both of mortal and immortal beings,” and when we say: “The law
    will take hold of you,” “The criminal is in danger of the law,” we
    are simply substituting the name of the agent for that of the
    principal. God is not subject to law; God is the source of law;
    and we may say: “If Jehovah be God, worship him; but if Law,
    worship it.”

    Since moral law merely reflects God, it is not a thing _made_. Men
    _discover_ laws, but they do not _make_ them, any more than the
    chemist makes the laws by which the elements combine. Instance the
    solidification of hydrogen at Geneva. Utility does not constitute
    law, although we test law by utility; see Murphy, Scientific Bases
    of Faith, 58-71. The true nature of the moral law is set forth in
    the noble though rhetorical description of Hooker (Eccl. Pol.,
    1:194)—“Of law there can be no less acknowledged than that her
    seat is in the bosom of God; her voice the harmony of the world;
    all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as
    feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power;
    both angels and men, and creatures of what condition soever,
    though each in a different sort and manner, yet all with uniform
    consent admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.” See
    also Martineau, Types, 2:119, and Study, 1:35.

    Curtis, Primitive Semitic Religions, 66, 101—“The Oriental
    believes that God makes right by edict. Saladin demonstrated to
    Henry of Champagne the loyalty of his Assassins, by commanding two
    of them to throw themselves down from a lofty tower to certain and
    violent death.” H. B. Smith, System, 192—“Will implies
    personality, and personality adds to abstract truth and duty the
    element of authority. Law therefore has the force that a person
    has over and above that of an idea.” Human law forbids only those
    offences which constitute a breach of public order or of private
    right. God’s law forbids all that is an offence against the divine
    order, that is, all that is unlike God. The whole law may be
    summed up in the words: “Be like God.” Salter, First Steps in
    Philosophy, 101-126—“The realization of the nature of each being
    is the end to be striven for. Self-realization is an ideal end,
    not of one being, but of each being, with due regard to the value
    of each in the proper scale of worth. The beast can be sacrificed
    for man. All men are sacred as capable of unlimited progress. It
    is our duty to realize the capacities of our nature so far as they
    are consistent with one another and go to make up one whole.” This
    means that man fulfills the law only as he realizes the divine
    idea in his character and life, or, in other words, as he becomes
    a finite image of God’s infinite perfections.

    Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 191, 201, 285, 286—“Morality is rooted in
    the nature of things. There is a universe. We are all parts of an
    infinite organism. Man is inseparably bound to man [and to God].
    All rights and duties arise out of this common life. In the
    solidarity of social life lies the ground of Kant’s law: So will,
    that the maxim of thy conduct may apply to all. The planet cannot
    safely fly away from the sun, and the hand cannot safely separate
    itself from the heart. It is from the fundamental unity of life
    that our duties flow.... The infinite world-organism is the body
    and manifestation of God. And when we recognize the solidarity of
    our vital being with this divine life and embodiment, we begin to
    see into the heart of the mystery, the unquestionable authority
    and supreme sanction of duty. Our moral intuitions are simply the
    unchanging laws of the universe that have emerged to consciousness
    in the human heart.... The inherent principles of the universal
    Reason reflect themselves in the mirror of the moral nature....
    The enlightened conscience is the expression in the human soul of
    the divine Consciousness.... Morality is the victory of the divine
    Life in us.... Solidarity of our life with the universal Life
    gives it unconditional sacredness and transcendental authority....
    The microcosm must bring itself _en rapport_ with the Macrocosm.
    Man must bring his spirit into resemblance to the World-essence,
    and into union with it.”


The law of God, then, is simply an expression of the nature of God in the
form of moral requirement, and a necessary expression of that nature in
view of the existence of moral beings (Ps. 19:7; _cf._ 1). To the
existence of this law all men bear witness. The consciences even of the
heathen testify to it (Rom. 2:14, 15). Those who have the written law
recognize this elemental law as of greater compass and penetration (Rom.
7:14; 8:4). The perfect embodiment and fulfillment of this law is seen
only in Christ (Rom. 10:4; Phil. 3:8, 9).


    _Ps. 19:7_—“_The law of Jehovah is perfect, restoring the soul_”;
    _cf._ _verse 1_—“_The heavens declare the glory of God_”—two
    revelations of God—one in nature, the other in the moral law.
    _Rom. 2:14, 15_—“_for when Gentiles that have not the law do by
    nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are the
    law unto themselves; in that they show the work of the law written
    in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith, and
    their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing
    them_”—here the “_work of the law_”—, not the ten commandments,
    for of these the heathen were ignorant, but rather the work
    corresponding to them, _i. e._, the substance of them. _Rom.
    7:14_—“_For we know that the law is spiritual_”—this, says Meyer,
    is equivalent to saying “its essence is divine, of like nature
    with the Holy Spirit who gave it, a holy self-revelation of God.”
    _Rom. 8:4_—“_that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in
    us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit_”;
    _10:4_—“_For Christ is the end of the law unto righteousness to
    every one that believeth_”; _Phil. 3:8, 9_—“_that I may gain
    Christ, and be found in him, not having a righteousness of mine
    own, even that which is of the law, but that which is through
    faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith_”;
    _Heb. 10:9_—“_Lo, I am come to do thy will._” In Christ “the law
    appears Drawn out in living characters.” Just such as he was and
    is, we feel that we ought to be. Hence the character of Christ
    convicts us of sin, as does no other manifestation of God. See, on
    the passages from Romans, the Commentary of Philippi.

    Fleming, Vocab. Philos., 286—“Moral laws are derived from the
    nature and will of God, and the character and condition of man.”
    God’s nature is reflected in the laws of our nature. Since law is
    inwrought into man’s nature, man is a law unto himself. To conform
    to his own nature, in which conscience is supreme, is to conform
    to the nature of God. The law is only the revelation of the
    constitutive principles of being, the declaration of what must be,
    so long as man is man and God is God. It says in effect: “Be like
    God, or you cannot be truly man.” So moral law is not simply a
    test of obedience, but is also a revelation of eternal reality.
    Man cannot be lost to God, without being lost to himself. “The
    ‘_hands of the living God_’ (_Heb. 10:31_) into which we fall, are
    the laws of nature.” In the spiritual world “the same wheels
    revolve, only there is no iron” (Drummond, Natural Law in the
    Spiritual World, 27). Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 2:82-92—“The
    totality of created being is to be in harmony with God and with
    itself. The idea of this harmony, as active in God under the form
    of will, is God’s law.” A manuscript of the U. S. Constitution was
    so written that when held at a little distance the shading of the
    letters and their position showed the countenance of George
    Washington. So the law of God is only God’s face disclosed to
    human sight.

    R. W. Emerson, Woodnotes, 57—“Conscious Law is King of kings.” Two
    centuries ago John Norton wrote a book entitled The Orthodox
    Evangelist, “designed for the begetting and establishing of the
    faith which is in Jesus,” in which we find the following: “God
    doth not will things because they are just, but things are
    therefore just because God so willeth them. What reasonable man
    but will yield that the being of the moral law hath no necessary
    connection with the being of God? That the actions of men not
    conformable to this law should be sin, that death should be the
    punishment of sin, these are the constitutions of God, proceeding
    from him not by way of necessity of nature, but freely, as effects
    and products of his eternal good pleasure.” This is to make God an
    arbitrary despot. We should not say that God _makes_ law, nor on
    the other hand that God _is subject to_ law, but rather that God
    _is_ law and _the source_ of law.

    Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 161—“God’s law is organic—inwrought into
    the constitution of men and things. The chart however does not
    make the channel.... A law of nature is never the antecedent but
    the consequence of reality. What right has this consequence of
    reality to be personalized and made the ruler and source of
    reality? Law is only the fixed mode in which reality works. Law
    therefore can explain nothing. Only God, from whom reality
    springs, can explain reality.” In other words, law is never an
    agent but always a method—the method of God, or rather of Christ
    who is the only Revealer of God. Christ’s life in the flesh is the
    clearest manifestation of him who is the principle of law in the
    physical and moral universe. Christ is the Reason of God in
    expression. It was he who gave the law on Mount Sinai as well as
    in the Sermon on the Mount. For fuller treatment of the subject,
    see Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 321-344; Talbot, Ethical
    Prolegomena, in Bap. Quar., July, 1877:257-274; Whewell, Elements
    of Morality, 2:35; and especially E. G. Robinson, Principles and
    Practice of Morality, 79-108.


Each of the two last-mentioned characteristics of God’s law is important
in its implications. We treat of these in their order.

First, the law of God as a transcript of the divine nature.—If this be the
nature of the law, then certain common misconceptions of it are excluded.
The law of God is

(_a_) Not arbitrary, or the product of arbitrary will. Since the will from
which the law springs is a revelation of God’s nature, there can be no
rashness or unwisdom in the law itself.


    E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 193—“No law of God seems ever to
    have been arbitrarily enacted, or simply with a view to certain
    ends to be accomplished; it always represented some reality of
    life which it was inexorably necessary that those who were to be
    regulated should carefully observe.” The theory that law
    originates in arbitrary will results in an effeminate type of
    piety, just as the theory that legislation has for its sole end
    the greatest happiness results in all manner of compromises of
    justice. Jones, Robert Browning, 43—“He who cheats his neighbor
    believes in tortuosity, and, as Carlyle says, has the supreme
    Quack for his god.”


(b) Not temporary, or ordained simply to meet an exigency. The law is a
manifestation, not of temporary moods or desires, but of the essential
nature of God.


    The great speech of Sophocles’ Antigone gives us this conception
    of law: “The ordinances of the gods are unwritten, but sure. Not
    one of them is for to-day or for yesterday alone, but they live
    forever.” Moses might break the tables of stone upon which the law
    was inscribed, and Jehoiakim might cut up the scroll and cast it
    into the fire (_Ex. 32:19_; _Jer. 36:23_), but the law remained
    eternal as before in the nature of God and in the constitution of
    man. Prof. Walter Rauschenbusch: “The moral laws are just as
    stable as the law of gravitation. Every fuzzy human chicken that
    is hatched into this world tries to fool with those laws. Some
    grow wiser in the process and some do not. We talk about breaking
    God’s laws. But after those laws have been broken several billion
    times since Adam first tried to play with them, those laws are
    still intact and no seam or fracture is visible in them,—not even
    a scratch on the enamel. But the lawbreakers—that is another
    story. If you want to find their fragments, go to the ruins of
    Egypt, of Babylon, of Jerusalem; study statistics; read faces;
    keep your eyes open; visit Blackwell’s Island; walk through the
    graveyard and read the invisible inscriptions left by the Angel of
    Judgment, for instance: ‘Here lie the fragments of John Smith, who
    contradicted his Maker, played football with the ten commandments,
    and departed this life at the age of thirty-five. His mother and
    wife weep for him. Nobody else does. May he rest in peace!’ ”


(_c_) Not merely negative, or a law of mere prohibition,—since positive
conformity to God is the inmost requisition of law.

The negative form of the commandments in the decalogue merely takes for
granted the evil inclination in men’s hearts and practically opposes its
gratification. In the case of each commandment a whole province of the
moral life is taken into the account, although the act expressly forbidden
is the acme of evil in that one province. So the decalogue makes itself
intelligible: it crosses man’s path just where he most feels inclined to
wander. But back of the negative and specific expression in each case lies
the whole mass of moral requirement: the thin edge of the wedge has the
positive demand of holiness behind it, without obedience to which even the
prohibition cannot in spirit be obeyed. Thus “_the law is spiritual_”
(_Rom. 7:14_), and requires likeness in character and life to the
spiritual God; _John 4:24_—“_God is spirit, and they that worship him must
worship in spirit and truth._”

(_d_) Not partial, or addressed to one part only of man’s being,—since
likeness to God requires purity of substance in man’s soul and body, as
well as purity in all the thoughts and acts that proceed therefrom. As law
proceeds from the nature of God, so it requires conformity to that nature
in the nature of man.


    Whatever God gave to man at the beginning he requires of man with
    interest; _cf._ _Mat. 25:27_—“_thou oughtest therefore to have put
    my money to the bankers, and at my coming I should have received
    back mine own with interest._” Whatever comes short of perfect
    purity in soul or perfect health in body is non-conformity to God
    and contradicts his law, it being understood that only that
    perfection is demanded which answers to the creature’s stage of
    growth and progress, so that of the child there is required only
    the perfection of the child, of the youth only the perfection of
    the youth, of the man only the perfection of the man. See Julius
    Müller, Doctrine of Sin, chapter 1.


(_e_) Not outwardly published,—since all positive enactment is only the
imperfect expression of this underlying and unwritten law of being.


    Much misunderstanding of God’s law results from confounding it
    with published enactment. Paul takes the larger view that the law
    is independent of such expression; see _Rom. 2:14, 15_—“_for when
    Gentiles that have not the law do by nature the things of the law,
    these, not having the law, are the law unto themselves; in that
    they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their
    conscience bearing witness therewith, and their thoughts one with
    another accusing or else excusing them:_” see Expositor’s Greek
    Testament, _in loco_: “ ‘_written on their hearts_,’ when
    contrasted with the law written on the tables of stone, is equal
    to ‘unwritten’; the Apostle refers to what the Greeks called
    ἄγραφος νόμος.”


(_f_) Not inwardly conscious, or limited in its scope by men’s
consciousness of it. Like the laws of our physical being, the moral law
exists whether we recognize it or not.


    Overeating brings its penalty in dyspepsia, whether we are
    conscious of our fault or not. We cannot by ignorance or by vote
    repeal the laws of our physical system. Self-will does not secure
    independence, any more than the stars can by combination abolish
    gravitation. Man cannot get rid of God’s dominion by denying its
    existence, nor by refusing submission to it. _Psalm 2:1-4_—“_Why
    do the nations rage ... against Jehovah ... saying, Let us break
    their bonds asunder.... He that sitteth in the heavens will
    laugh._” Salter, First Steps in Philosophy, 94—“The fact that one
    is not aware of obligation no more affects its reality than
    ignorance of what is at the centre of the earth affects the nature
    of what is really discoverable there. We discover obligation, and
    do not create it by thinking of it, any more than we create the
    sensible world by thinking of it.”


(_g_) Not local, or confined to place,—since no moral creature can escape
from God, from his own being, or from the natural necessity that
unlikeness to God should involve misery and ruin.


    “The Dutch auction” was the public offer of property at a price
    beyond its value, followed by the lowering of the price until some
    one accepted it as a purchaser. There is no such local exception
    to the full validity of God’s demands. The moral law has even more
    necessary and universal sway than the law of gravitation in the
    physical universe. It is inwrought into the very constitution of
    man, and of every other moral being. The man who offended the
    Roman Emperor found the whole empire a prison.


(_h_) Not changeable, or capable of modification. Since law represents the
unchangeable nature of God, it is not a sliding scale of requirements
which adapts itself to the ability of the subjects. God himself cannot
change it without ceasing to be God.


    The law, then, has a deeper foundation than that God merely “said
    so.” God’s word and God’s will are revelations of his inmost
    being; every transgression of the law is a stab at the heart of
    God. Simon, Reconciliation, 141, 142—“God continues to demand
    loyalty even after man has proved disloyal. Sin changes man, and
    man’s change involves a change in God. Man now regards God as a
    ruler and exactor, and God must regard man as a defaulter and a
    rebel.” God’s requirement is not lessened because man is unable to
    meet it. This inability is itself non-conformity to law, and is no
    excuse for sin; see Dr. Bushnell’s sermon on “Duty not measured by
    Ability.” The man with the withered hand would not have been
    justified in refusing to stretch it forth at Jesus’ command (_Mat.
    12:10-13_).

    The obligation to obey this law and to be conformed to God’s
    perfect moral character is based upon man’s original ability and
    the gifts which God bestowed upon him at the beginning. Created in
    the image of God, it is man’s duty to render back to God that
    which God first gave, enlarged and improved by growth and culture
    (_Luke 19:23_—“_wherefore gavest thou not my money into the bank,
    and I at my coming should have required it with interest_”). This
    obligation is not impaired by sin and the weakening of man’s
    powers. To let down the standard would be to misrepresent God.
    Adolphe Monod would not save himself from shame and remorse by
    lowering the claims of the law: “Save first the holy law of my
    God,” he says, “after that you shall save me!”

    Even salvation is not through violation of law. The moral law is
    immutable, because it is a transcript of the nature of the
    immutable God. Shall nature conform to me, or I to nature? If I
    attempt to resist even physical laws, I am crushed. I can use
    nature only by obeying her laws. Lord Bacon: “Natura enim non nisi
    parendo vincitur.” So in the moral realm. We cannot buy off nor
    escape the moral law of God. God will not, and God can not, change
    his law by one hair’s breadth, even to save a universe of sinners.
    Omar Kháyyám, in his Rubáiyát, begs his god to “reconcile the law
    to my desires.” Marie Corelli says well: “As if a gnat should seek
    to build a cathedral, and should ask to have the laws of
    architecture altered to suit its gnat-like capacity.” See
    Martineau, Types, 2:120.


Secondly, the law of God as the ideal of human nature.—A law thus
identical with the eternal and necessary relations of the creature to the
Creator, and demanding of the creature nothing less than perfect holiness,
as the condition of harmony with the infinite holiness of God, is adapted
to man’s finite nature, as needing law; to man’s free nature, as needing
moral law; and to man’s progressive nature, as needing ideal law.


    Man, as finite, needs law, just as railway cars need a track to
    guide them—to leap the track is to find, not freedom, but ruin.
    Railway President: “Our rules are written in blood.” Goethe, Was
    Wir Bringen, 19 Auftritt: “In vain shall spirits that are all
    unbound To the pure heights of perfectness aspire; In limitation
    first the Master shines, And law alone can give us liberty.”—Man,
    as a free being, needs moral law. He is not an automaton, a
    creature of necessity, governed only by physical influences. With
    conscience to command the right, and will to choose or reject it,
    his true dignity and calling are that he should freely realize the
    right.—Man, as a progressive being, needs nothing less than an
    ideal and infinite standard of attainment, a goal which he can
    never overpass, an end which shall ever attract and urge him
    forward. This he finds in the holiness of God.

    The law is a _fence_, not only for ownership, but for care. God
    not only demands, but he protects. Law is the transcript of love
    as well as of holiness. We may reverse the well-known couplet and
    say: “I slept, and dreamed that life was Duty; I woke and found
    that life was Beauty.” “Cui servire regnare est.” Butcher, Aspects
    of Greek Genius, 56—“In Plato’s Crito, the Laws are made to
    present themselves in person to Socrates in prison, not only as
    the guardians of his liberty, but as his lifelong friends, his
    well-wishers, his equals, with whom he had of his own free will
    entered into binding compact.” It does not harm the scholar to
    have before him the ideal of perfect scholarship; nor the teacher
    to have before him the ideal of a perfect school; nor the
    legislator to have before him the ideal of perfect law. Gordon,
    The Christ of To-day, 134—“The moral goal must be a flying goal;
    the standard to which we are to grow must be ever rising; the type
    to which we are to be conformed must have in it inexhaustible
    fulness.”

    John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:119—“It is just the
    best, purest, noblest human souls, who are least satisfied with
    themselves and their own spiritual attainments; and the reason is
    that the human is not a nature essentially different from the
    divine, but a nature which, just because it is in essential
    affinity with God, can be satisfied with nothing less than a
    divine perfection.” J. M. Whiton, The Divine Satisfaction: “Law
    requires being, character, likeness to God. It is automatic,
    self-operating. Penalty is untransferable. It cannot admit of any
    other satisfaction than the reëstablishment of the normal relation
    which it requires. Punishment proclaims that the law has not been
    satisfied. There is no cancelling of the curse except through the
    growing up of the normal relation. Blessing and curse ensue upon
    what we are, not upon what we were. Reparation is within the
    spirit itself. The atonement is educational, not governmental.” We
    reply that the atonement is both governmental and educational, and
    that reparation must first be made to the holiness of God before
    conscience, the mirror of God’s holiness, can reflect that
    reparation and be at peace.


The law of God is therefore characterized by:

(_a_) All-comprehensiveness.—It is over us at all times; it respects our
past, our present, our future. It forbids every conceivable sin; it
requires every conceivable virtue; omissions as well as commissions are
condemned by it.


    _Ps. 119:96_—“_I have seen an end of all perfection ... thy
    commandment is exceeding broad_”; _Rom. 3:23_—“_all have sinned,
    and fall short of the glory of God_”; _James 4:17_—“_To him
    therefore that knoweth to do good, and __ doeth it not, to him it
    is sin._” Gravitation holds the mote as well as the world. God’s
    law detects and denounces the least sin, so that without atonement
    it cannot be pardoned. The law of gravitation may be suspended or
    abrogated, for it has no necessary ground in God’s being; but
    God’s moral law cannot be suspended or abrogated, for that would
    contradict God’s holiness. “About right” is not “all right.” “The
    giant hexagonal pillars of basalt in the Scottish Staffa are
    identical in form with the microscopic crystals of the same
    mineral.” So God is our pattern, and goodness is our likeness to
    him.


(_b_) Spirituality.—It demands not only right acts and words, but also
right dispositions and states. Perfect obedience requires not only the
intense and unremitting reign of love toward God and man, but conformity
of the whole inward and outward nature of man to the holiness of God.


    _Mat. 5:22, 28_—the angry word is murder; the sinful look is
    adultery. _Mark 12:30, 31_—“_thou shalt love the Lord thy God with
    all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and
    with all thy strength.... Thou shalt love thy neighbor as
    thyself_”; _2 Cor. 10:5_—“_bringing every thought into captivity
    to the obedience of Christ_”; _Eph. 5:1_—“_Be ye therefore
    imitators of God, as beloved children_”; _1 Pet. 1:16_—“_Ye shall
    be holy; for I am holy._” As the brightest electric light, seen
    through a smoked glass against the sun, appears like a black spot,
    so the brightest unregenerate character is dark, when compared
    with the holiness of God. Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 235,
    remarks on _Gal. 6:4_—“_let each man prove his own work, and then
    shall he have his glorying in regard of himself alone, and not of
    his neighbor_”—“I have a small candle and I compare it with my
    brother’s taper and come away rejoicing. Why not compare it with
    the sun? Then I shall lose my pride and uncharitableness.” The
    distance to the sun from the top of an ant-hill and from the top
    of Mount Everest is nearly the same. The African princess praised
    for her beauty had no way to verify the compliments paid her but
    by looking in the glassy surface of the pool. But the trader came
    and sold her a mirror. Then she was so shocked at her own ugliness
    that she broke the mirror in pieces. So we look into the mirror of
    God’s law, compare ourselves with the Christ who is reflected
    there, and hate the mirror which reveals us to ourselves (_James
    1:23, 24_).


(_c_) Solidarity.—It exhibits in all its parts the nature of the one
Lawgiver, and it expresses, in its least command, the one requirement of
harmony with him.


    _Mat. 5:48_—“_Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly
    Father is perfect_”; _Mark 12:29, 30_—“_The Lord our God, the Lord
    is one: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God_”; _James 2:10_—“_For
    whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point,
    he is become guilty of all_”; _4:12_—“_One only is the lawgiver
    and judge._” Even little rattlesnakes are snakes. One link broken
    in the chain, and the bucket falls into the well. The least sin
    separates us from God. The least sin renders us guilty of the
    whole law, because it shows us to lack the love which is required
    in all the commandments. Those who send us to the Sermon on the
    Mount for salvation send us to a tribunal that damns us. The
    Sermon on the Mount is but a republication of the law given on
    Sinai, but now in more spiritual and penetrating form. Thunders
    and lightnings proceed from the N. T., as from the O. T., mount.
    The Sermon on the Mount is only the introductory lecture of Jesus’
    theological course, as _John 14-17_ is the closing lecture. In it
    is announced the law, which prepares the way for the gospel. Those
    who would degrade doctrine by exalting precept will find that they
    have left men without the motive or the power to keep the precept.
    Æschylus, Agamemnon: “For there’s no bulwark in man’s wealth to
    him Who, through a surfeit, kicks—into the dim And
    disappearing—Right’s great altar.”


Only to the first man, then, was the law proposed as a method of
salvation. With the first sin, all hope of obtaining the divine favor by
perfect obedience is lost. To sinners the law remains as a means of
discovering and developing sin in its true nature, and of compelling a
recourse to the mercy provided in Jesus Christ.


    _2 Chron. 34:19_—“_And it came to pass, when the king had heard
    the words of the law, that he rent his clothes_”; _Job 42:5,
    6_—“_I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear; But now mine
    eye seeth thee; Wherefore I abhor myself, And repent in dust and
    ashes._” The revelation of God in _Is. 6:3, 5_—“_Holy, holy, holy,
    is Jehovah of hosts_”—causes the prophet to cry like the leper:
    “_Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean
    lips._” _Rom. 3:20_—“_by the works of the law shall no flesh be
    justified in his sight; for through the law cometh the __
    knowledge of sin_”; _5:20_—“_the law came in besides, that the
    trespass might abound_”; _7:7, 8_—“_I had not known sin, except
    through the law: for I had not known coveting, except the law had
    said, Thou shalt not covet: but sin, finding occasion, wrought in
    me through the commandment all manner of coveting: for apart from
    the law sin is dead_”; _Gal. 3:24_—“_So that the law is become our
    tutor,_” or attendant-slave, “_to bring us unto Christ, that we
    might be justified by faith_”—the law trains our wayward boyhood
    and leads it to Christ the Master, as in old times the slave
    accompanied children to school. Stevens, Pauline Theology, 177,
    178—“The law increases sin by increasing the knowledge of sin and
    by increasing the activity of sin. The law does not add to the
    inherent energy of the sinful principle which pervades human
    nature, but it does cause this principle to reveal itself more
    energetically in sinful act.” The law inspires fear, but it leads
    to love. The Rabbins said that, if Israel repented but for one
    day, the Messiah would appear.

    No man ever yet drew a straight line or a perfect curve; yet he
    would be a poor architect who contented himself with anything
    less. Since men never come up to their ideals, he who aims to live
    only an _average_ moral life will inevitably fall _below_ the
    average. The law, then, leads to Christ. He who is the _ideal_ is
    also the _way_ to attain the ideal. He who is himself the Word and
    the Law embodied, is also the Spirit of life that makes obedience
    possible to us (_John 14:6_—“_I am the way, and the truth, and the
    life_”; _Rom. 8:2_—“_For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ
    Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death_”). Mrs.
    Browning, Aurora Leigh: “The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver,
    Unless he had given the Life too with the Law.” Christ _for_ us
    upon the Cross, and Christ _in_ us by his Spirit, is the only
    deliverance from the curse of the law; _Gal 3:13_—“_Christ
    redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for
    us._” We must see the claims of the law satisfied and the law
    itself written on our hearts. We are “_reconciled to God through
    the death of his Son_,” but we are also _“__saved by his life__”__
    (Rom. 5:10_).

    Robert Browning, in The Ring and the Book, represents Caponsacchi
    as comparing himself at his best with the new ideal of “perfect as
    Father in heaven is perfect” suggested by Pompilia’s purity, and
    as breaking out into the cry: “O great, just, good God! Miserable
    me!” In the Interpreter’s House of Pilgrim’s Progress, Law only
    stirred up the dust in the foul room,—the Gospel had to sprinkle
    water on the floor before it could be cleansed. E. G. Robinson:
    “It is necessary to smoke a man out, before you can bring a higher
    motive to bear upon him.” Barnabas said that Christ was the answer
    to the riddle of the law. _Rom. 10:4_—“_Christ is the end of the
    law unto righteousness to every one that believeth._” The railroad
    track opposite Detroit on the St. Clair River runs to the edge of
    the dock and seems intended to plunge the train into the abyss.
    But when the ferry boat comes up, rails are seen upon its deck,
    and the boat is the end of the track, to carry passengers over to
    Detroit. So the law, which by itself would bring only destruction,
    finds its end in Christ who ensures our passage to the celestial
    city.

    Law, then, with its picture of spotless innocence, simply reminds
    man of the heights from which he has fallen. “It is a mirror which
    reveals derangement, but does not create or remove it.” With its
    demand of absolute perfection, up to the measure of man’s original
    endowments and possibilities, it drives us, in despair of
    ourselves, to Christ as our only righteousness and our only Savior
    (_Rom. 8:3, 4_—“_For what the law could not do, in that it was
    weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness
    of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the
    ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after
    the flesh, but after the Spirit_”; _Phil. 3:8, 9_—“_that I may
    gain Christ, and be found in him, not having a righteousness of
    mine own, even that which is of the law, but that which is through
    faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith_”).
    Thus law must prepare the way for grace, and John the Baptist must
    precede Christ.

    When Sarah Bernhardt was solicited to add an eleventh commandment,
    she declined upon the ground there were already ten too many. It
    was an expression of pagan contempt of law. In heathendom, sin and
    insensibility to sin increased together. In Judaism and
    Christianity, on the contrary, there has been a growing sense of
    sin’s guilt and condemnableness. McLaren, in S. S. Times, Sept.
    23, 1893:600—“Among the Jews there was a far profounder sense of
    sin than in any other ancient nation. The law written on men’s
    hearts evoked a lower consciousness of sin, and there are prayers
    on the Assyrian and Babylonian tablets which may almost stand
    beside the 51st Psalm. But, on the whole, the deep sense of sin
    was the product of the revealed law.” See Fairbairn, Revelation of
    Law and Scripture; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 187-242; Hovey, God
    with Us, 187-210; Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:45-50; Murphy,
    Scientific Bases of Faith, 53-71; Martineau, Types, 2:120-125.


2. _Positive Enactment_, or the expression of the will of God in published
ordinances. This is also two-fold:

A. General moral precepts.—These are written summaries of the elemental
law (Mat. 5:48; 22:37-40), or authorized applications of it to special
human conditions (Ex. 20:1-17; Mat. chap. 5-8).


    _Mat. 5:48_—“_Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly
    Father is perfect_”; _22:37-40_—“_Thou shalt love the Lord thy
    God.... Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two
    commandments the whole law hangeth and the prophets_”; _Ex.
    20:1-17_—the Ten Commandments; _Mat., chap. 5-8_—the Sermon on the
    Mount. _Cf._ Augustine, on _Ps. 57:1_.

    Solly, On the Will, 162, gives two illustrations of the fact that
    positive precepts are merely applications of elemental law or the
    law of nature: “ ‘_Thou shalt not steal_,’ is a moral law which
    may be stated thus: _thou shalt not take that for thy own
    property, which is the property of another_. The contradictory of
    this proposition would be: _thou mayest take that for thy own
    property which is the property of another_. But this is a
    contradiction in terms; for it is the very conception of property,
    that the owner stands in a peculiar relation to its subject
    matter; and what is every man’s property is no man’s property, as
    it is _proper_ to no man. Hence the contradictory of the
    commandment contains a simple contradiction directly it is made a
    rule universal; and the commandment itself is established as one
    of the principles for the harmony of individual wills.

    “ ‘_Thou shalt not tell a lie_,’ as a rule of morality, may be
    expressed generally: _thou shall not by thy outward act make
    another to believe thy thought to be other than it is_. The
    contradictory made universal is: _every man may by his outward act
    make another to believe his thought to be other than it is_. Now
    this maxim also contains a contradiction, and is self-destructive.
    It conveys a permission to do that which is rendered impossible by
    the permission itself. Absolute and universal indifference to
    truth, or the entire mutual independence of the thought and
    symbol, makes the symbol cease to be a symbol, and the conveyance
    of thought by its means, an impossibility.”

    Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, 48, 90—“Fundamental law of reason: So
    act, that thy maxims of will might become laws in a system of
    universal moral legislation.” This is Kant’s categorical
    imperative. He expresses it in yet another form: “Act from maxims
    fit to be regarded as universal laws of nature.” For expositions
    of the Decalogue which bring out its spiritual meaning, see Kurtz,
    Religionslehre, 9-72; Dick, Theology, 2:513-554; Dwight, Theology,
    3:163-560; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 3:259-465.


B. Ceremonial or special injunctions.—These are illustrations of the
elemental law, or approximate revelations of it, suited to lower degrees
of capacity and to earlier stages of spiritual training (Ez. 20:25; Mat.
19:8; Mark 10:5). Though temporary, only God can say when they cease to be
binding upon us in their outward form.

All positive enactments, therefore, whether they be moral or ceremonial,
are republications of elemental law. Their forms may change, but the
substance is eternal. Certain modes of expression, like the Mosaic system,
may be abolished, but the essential demands are unchanging (Mat. 5:17, 18;
cf. Eph. 2:15). From the imperfection of human language, no positive
enactments are able to express in themselves the whole content and meaning
of the elemental law. “It is not the purpose of revelation to disclose the
whole of our duties.” Scripture is not a complete code of rules for
practical action, but an enunciation of principles, with occasional
precepts by way of illustration. Hence we must supplement the positive
enactment by the law of being—the moral ideal found in the nature of God.


    _Ez. 20:25_—“_Moreover also I gave them statutes that were not
    good, and ordinances wherein they should not live_”; _Mat.
    19:8_—“_Moses for your hardness of heart suffered you to put away
    your wives_”; _Mark 10:5_—“_For your hardness of heart he wrote
    you this commandment_”; _Mat. 5:17, 18_—“_Think not that I came to
    destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to
    fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass
    away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the
    law, till all things be accomplished_”; _cf._ _Eph. 2:15_—“_having
    abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments
    contained in ordinances_”; _Heb. 8:7_—“_if that first covenant had
    been faultless, then would no place have been sought for a
    second._” Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 90—“After the
    coming of the new covenant, the keeping up of the old was as
    needless a burden as winter garments in the mild air of summer, or
    as the attempt of an adult to wear the clothes of a child.”

    Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:5-35—“Jesus repudiates for himself and
    for his disciples absolute subjection to O. T. Sabbath law (_Mark
    2:27_ _sq._); to O. T. law as to external defilements (_Mark
    7:15_); to O. T. divorce law (_Mark 10:2_ _sq._). He would
    ‘_fulfil_’ law and prophets by complete practical performance of
    the revealed will of God. He would bring out their inner meaning,
    not by literal and slavish obedience to every minute requirement
    of the Mosaic law, but by revealing in himself the perfect life
    and work toward which they tended. He would perfect the O. T.
    conceptions of God—not keep them intact in their literal form, but
    in their essential spirit. Not by quantitative extension, but by
    qualitative renewal, he would fulfil the law and the prophets. He
    would bring the imperfect expression in the O. T. to perfection,
    not by servile letter-worship or allegorizing, but through grasp
    of the divine idea.”

    Scripture is not a series of minute injunctions and prohibitions
    such as the Pharisees and the Jesuits laid down. The Koran showed
    its immeasurable inferiority to the Bible by establishing the
    letter instead of the spirit, by giving permanent, definite, and
    specific rules of conduct, instead of leaving room for the growth
    of the free spirit and for the education of conscience. This is
    not true either of O. T. or of N. T. law. In Miss Fowler’s novel
    The Farringdons, Mrs. Herbert wishes “that the Bible had been
    written on the principle of that dreadful little book called
    ‘Don’t,’ which gives a list of the solecisms you should avoid; she
    would have understood it so much better than the present system.”
    Our Savior’s words about giving to him that asketh, and turning
    the cheek to the smiter (_Mat 5:39-42_) must be interpreted by the
    principle of love that lies at the foundation of the law. Giving
    to every tramp and yielding to every marauder is not pleasing our
    neighbor “_for that which is good unto edifying_” (_Rom. 15:2_).
    Only by confounding the divine law with Scripture prohibition
    could one write as in N. Amer. Rev., Feb. 1890:275—“Sin is the
    transgression of a divine law; but there is no divine law against
    suicide; therefore suicide is not sin.”

    The written law was imperfect because God could, at the time, give
    no higher to an unenlightened people. “But to say that the _scope_
    and _design_ were imperfectly moral, is contradicted by the whole
    course of the history. We must ask what is the moral standard in
    which this course of education issues.” And this we find in the
    life and precepts of Christ. Even the law of repentance and faith
    does not take the place of the old law of being, but applies the
    latter to the special conditions of sin. Under the Levitical law,
    the prohibition of the touching of the dry bone (_Num. 19:16_),
    equally with the purifications and sacrifices, the separations and
    penalties of the Mosaic code, expressed God’s holiness and his
    repelling from him all that savored of sin or death. The laws with
    regard to leprosy were symbolic, as well as sanitary. So church
    polity and the ordinances are not arbitrary requirements, but they
    publish to dull sense-environed consciences, better than abstract
    propositions could have done, the fundamental truths of the
    Christian scheme. Hence they are not to be abrogated “_till he
    come_” (_1 Cor. 11:26_).

    The Puritans, however, in reënacting the Mosaic code, made the
    mistake of confounding the eternal law of God with a partial,
    temporary, and obsolete expression of it. So we are not to rest in
    external precepts respecting woman’s hair and dress and speech,
    but to find the underlying principle of modesty and subordination
    which alone is of universal and eternal validity. Robert Browning,
    The Ring and the Book, 1:255—“God breathes, not speaks, his
    verdicts, felt not heard—Passed on successively to each court, I
    call Man’s conscience, custom, manners, all that make More and
    more effort to promulgate, mark God’s verdict in determinable
    words, Till last come human jurists—solidify Fluid results,—what’s
    fixable lies forged, Statute,—the residue escapes in fume, Yet
    hangs aloft a cloud, as palpable To the finer sense as word the
    legist welds. Justinian’s Pandects only make precise What simply
    sparkled in men’s eyes before, Twitched in their brow or quivered
    on their lip, Waited the speech they called, but would not come.”
    See Mozley, Ruling Ideas in Early Ages, 104; Tulloch, Doctrine of
    Sin, 141-144; Finney, Syst. Theol., 1-40, 135-319; Mansel,
    Metaphysics, 378, 379; H. B. Smith, System of Theology, 191-195.

    Paul’s injunction to women to keep silence in the churches (_1
    Cor. 14:35_; _1 Tim. 2:11,12_) is to be interpreted by the larger
    law of gospel equality and privilege (_Col. 3:11_). Modesty and
    subordination once required a seclusion of the female sex which is
    no longer obligatory. Christianity has emancipated woman and has
    restored her to the dignity which belonged to her at the
    beginning. “In the old dispensation Miriam and Deborah and Huldah
    were recognized as leaders of God’s people, and Anna was a notable
    prophetess in the temple courts at the time of the coming of
    Christ. Elizabeth and Mary spoke songs of praise for all
    generations. A prophecy of _Joel 2:28_ was that the daughters of
    the Lord’s people should prophesy, under the guidance of the
    Spirit, in the new dispensation. Philip the evangelist had ‘_four
    virgin daughters, who prophesied_’ (_Acts 21:9_), and Paul
    cautioned Christian women to have their heads covered when they
    prayed or prophesied in public (_1 Cor. 11:5_), but had no words
    against the work of such women. He brought Priscilla with him to
    Ephesus, where she aided in training Apollos into better preaching
    power (_Acts 18:26_). He welcomed and was grateful for the work of
    those women who labored with him in the gospel at Philippi (_Phil.
    4:3_). And it is certainly an inference from the spirit and
    teachings of Paul that we should rejoice in the efficient service
    and sound words of Christian women to-day in the Sunday School and
    in the missionary field.” The command “_And he that heareth let
    him say, Come_” (_Rev. 22:17_) is addressed to women also. See
    Ellen Batelle Dietrick, Women in the Early Christian Ministry;
    _per contra_, see G. F. Wilkin, Prophesying of Women, 183-193.


III. Relation of the Law to the Grace of God.


In human government, while law is an expression of the will of the
governing power, and so of the nature lying behind the will, it is by no
means an exhaustive expression of that will and nature, since it consists
only of general ordinances, and leaves room for particular acts of command
through the executive, as well as for “the institution of equity, the
faculty of discretionary punishment, and the prerogative of pardon.”


    Amos, Science of Law, 29-46, shows how “the institution of equity,
    the faculty of discretionary punishment, and the prerogative of
    pardon” all involve expressions of will above and beyond what is
    contained in mere statute. Century Dictionary, on Equity: “English
    law had once to do only with property in goods, houses and lands.
    A man who had none of these might have an interest in a salary, a
    patent, a contract, a copyright, a security, but a creditor could
    not at common law levy upon these. When the creditor applied to
    the crown for redress, a chancellor or keeper of the king’s
    conscience was appointed, who determined what and how the debtor
    should pay. Often the debtor was required to put his intangible
    property into the hands of a receiver and could regain possession
    of it only when the claim against it was satisfied. These
    chancellors’ courts were called courts of equity, and redressed
    wrongs which the common law did not provide for. In later times
    law and equity are administered for the most part by the same
    courts. The same court sits at one time as a court of law, and at
    another time as a court of equity.” “Summa lex, summa injuria,” is
    sometimes true.


Applying now to the divine law this illustration drawn from human law, we
remark:

(_a_) The law of God is a _general_ expression of God’s will, applicable
to all moral beings. It therefore does not include the possibility of
special injunctions to individuals, and special acts of wisdom and power
in creation and providence. The very specialty of these latter expressions
of will prevents us from classing them under the category of law.


    Lord Bacon, Confession of Faith: “The soul of man was not produced
    by heaven or earth, but was breathed immediately from God; so the
    ways and dealings of God with spirits are not included in nature,
    that is, in the laws of heaven and earth, but are reserved to the
    law of his secret will and grace.”


(_b_) The law of God, accordingly, is a _partial_, not an exhaustive,
expression of God’s nature. It constitutes, indeed, a manifestation of
that attribute of holiness which is fundamental in God, and which man must
possess in order to be in harmony with God. But it does not fully express
God’s nature in its aspects of personality, sovereignty, helpfulness,
mercy.


    The chief error of all pantheistic theology is the assumption that
    law is an exhaustive expression of God: Strauss, Glaubenslehre,
    1:31—“If nature, as the self-realization of the divine essence, is
    equal to this divine essence, then it is infinite, and there can
    be nothing above and beyond it.” This is a denial of the
    transcendence of God (see notes on Pantheism, pages 100-105). Mere
    law is illustrated by the Buddhist proverb: “As the cartwheel
    follows the tread of the ox, so punishment follows sin.” Denovan:
    “Apart from Christ, even if we have never yet broken the law, it
    is only by steady and perfect obedience for the entire future that
    we can remain justified. If we have sinned, we can be justified
    [without Christ] only by suffering and exhausting the whole
    penalty of the law.”


(_c_) Mere law, therefore, leaves God’s nature in these aspects of
personality, sovereignty, helpfulness, mercy, to be expressed toward
sinners in another way, namely, through the atoning, regenerating,
pardoning, sanctifying work of the gospel of Christ. As creation does not
exclude miracles, so law does not exclude grace (Rom. 8:3—“what the law
could not do ... God” did).


    Murphy, Scientific Bases, 303-327, esp. 315—“To impersonal law, it
    is indifferent whether its subjects obey or not. But God desires,
    not the punishment, but the destruction, of sin.” Campbell,
    Atonement, Introd., 28—“There are two regions of the divine
    self-manifestation, one the reign of law, the other the kingdom of
    God.” C. H. M.: “Law is the transcript of the mind of God as to
    what man ought to be. But God is not merely law, but love. There
    is more in his heart than could be wrapped up in the ‘ten words.’
    Not the law, but only Christ, is the perfect image of God” (_John
    1:17_—“_For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came
    through Jesus Christ_”). So there is more in man’s heart toward
    God than exact fulfilment of requirement. The mother who
    sacrifices herself for her sick child does it, not because she
    must, but because she loves. To say that we are saved by grace, is
    to say that we are saved both without merit on our own part, and
    without necessity on the part of God. Grace is made known in
    proclamation, offer, command; but in all these it is gospel, or
    glad-tidings.


(_d_) Grace is to be regarded, however, not as abrogating law, but as
republishing and enforcing it (Rom. 3:31—“we establish the law”). By
removing obstacles to pardon in the mind of God, and by enabling man to
obey, grace secures the perfect fulfilment of law (Rom. 8:4—“that the
ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us”). Even grace has its law
(Rom. 8:2—“the law of the Spirit of life”); another higher law of grace,
the operation of individualizing mercy, overbears the “law of sin and of
death,”—this last, as in the case of the miracle, not being suspended,
annulled, or violated, but being merged in, while it is transcended by,
the exertion of personal divine will.


    Hooker, Eccl. Polity, 1:155, 185, 194—“Man, having utterly
    disabled his nature unto those [natural] means, hath had other
    revealed by God, and hath received from heaven a law to teach him
    how that which is desired naturally, must now be supernaturally
    attained. Finally, we see that, because those latter exclude not
    the former as unnecessary, therefore the law of grace teaches and
    includes natural duties also, such as are hard to ascertain by the
    law of nature.” The truth is midway between the Pelagian view,
    that there is no obstacle to the forgiveness of sins, and the
    modern rationalistic view, that since law fully expresses God,
    there can be no forgiveness of sins at all. Greg, Creed of
    Christendom, 2:217-228—“God is the only being who cannot forgive
    sins.... Punishment is not the execution of a sentence, but the
    occurrence of an effect.” Robertson, Lect. on Genesis, 100—“Deeds
    are irrevocable,—their consequences are knit up with them
    irrevocably.” So Baden Powell, Law and Gospel, in Noyes’
    Theological Essays, 27. All this is true if God be regarded as
    merely the source of law. But there is such a thing as grace, and
    grace is more than law. There is no forgiveness in nature, but
    grace is above and beyond nature.

    Bradford, Heredity, 233, quotes from Huxley the terrible
    utterance: “Nature always checkmates, without haste and without
    remorse, never overlooking a mistake, or making the slightest
    allowance for ignorance.” Bradford then remarks: “This is
    Calvinism with God left out. Christianity does not deny or
    minimize the law of retribution, but it discloses a Person who is
    able to deliver in spite of it. There is grace, but grace brings
    salvation to those who accept the terms of salvation—terms
    strictly in accord with the laws revealed by science.” God
    revealed himself, we add, not only in law but in life; see _Deut.
    1:6, 7_—“_Ye have dwelt long enough in this mountain_”—the
    mountain of the law; “_turn you and take your journey_”—_i. e._,
    see how God’s law is to be applied to life.


(_e_) Thus the revelation of grace, while it takes up and includes in
itself the revelation of law, adds something different in kind, namely,
the manifestation of the personal love of the Lawgiver. Without grace, law
has only a demanding aspect. Only in connection with grace does it become
“the perfect law, the law of liberty” (James 1:25). In fine, grace is that
larger and completer manifestation of the divine nature, of which law
constitutes the necessary but preparatory stage.


    Law reveals God’s love and mercy, but only in their mandatory
    aspect; it requires in men conformity to the love and mercy of
    God; and as love and mercy in God are conditioned by holiness, so
    law requires that love and mercy should be conditioned by holiness
    in men. Law is therefore chiefly a revelation of holiness: it is
    in grace that we find the chief revelation of love; though even
    love does not save by ignoring holiness, but rather by vicariously
    satisfying its demands. Robert Browning, Saul: “I spoke as I saw.
    I report as man may of God’s work—All’s Love, yet all’s Law.”

    Dorner, Person of Christ, 1:64, 78—“The law was a word (λόγος),
    but it was not a λόγος τέλειος, a plastic word, like the words of
    God that brought forth the world, for it was only imperative, and
    there was no reality nor willing corresponding to the command
    (_dem Sollen fehlte das Seyn, das Wollen_). The Christian λόγος is
    λόγος ἀληθειας—νόμος τέλειος τῆς ἐλευθερίας—an operative and
    effective word, as that of creation.” Chaucer, The Persones Tale:
    “For sothly the lawe of God is the love of God.” S. S. Times,
    Sept. 14, 1901:595—“Until a man ceases to be an outsider to the
    kingdom and knows the liberty of the sons of God, he is apt to
    think of God as the great Exacter, the great Forbidder, who reaps
    where he has not sown and gathers where he has not strewn.”
    Burton, in Bap. Rev., July, 1879:261-273, art.: Law and Divine
    Intervention; Farrar, Science and Theology, 184; Salmon, Reign of
    Law; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 1:31.



Section II.—Nature Of Sin.


I. Definition of Sin.


Sin is lack of conformity to the moral law of God, either in act,
disposition, or state.

In explanation, we remark that (_a_) This definition regards sin as
predicable only of rational and voluntary agents. (_b_) It assumes,
however, that man has a rational nature below consciousness, and a
voluntary nature apart from actual volition. (_c_) It holds that the
divine law requires moral likeness to God in the affections and tendencies
of the nature, as well as in its outward activities. (_d_) It therefore
considers lack of conformity to the divine holiness in disposition or
state as a violation of law, equally with the outward act of
transgression.


    In our discussion of the Will (pages 504-513), we noticed that
    there are permanent states of the will, as well as of the
    intellect and of the sensibilities. It is evident, moreover, that
    these permanent states, unlike man’s deliberate acts, are always
    very imperfectly conscious, and in many cases are not conscious at
    all. Yet it is in these very states that man is most unlike God,
    and so, as law only reflects God (see pages 537-544), most lacking
    in conformity to God’s law.

    One main difference between Old School and New School views of sin
    is that the latter constantly tends to limit sin to mere act,
    while the former finds sin in the states of the soul. We propose
    what we think to be a valid and proper compromise between the two.
    We make sin coëxtensive, not with act, but with activity. The Old
    School and the New School are not so far apart, when we remember
    that the New School “choice” is _elective preference_, exercised
    so soon as the child is born (Park) and reasserting itself in all
    the subordinate choices of life; while the Old School “state” is
    not a dead, passive, mechanical thing, but is a _state of active
    movement_, or of tendency to move, toward evil. As God’s holiness
    is not passive purity but purity willing (pages 268-275), so the
    opposite to this, sin, is not passive impurity but is impurity
    willing.

    The soul may not always be conscious, but it may always be active.
    At his creation man “_became a living soul_” (_Gen. 2:7_), and it
    may be doubted whether the human spirit ever ceases its activity,
    any more than the divine Spirit in whose image it is made. There
    is some reason to believe that even in the deepest sleep the body
    rests rather than the mind. And when we consider how large a
    portion of our activity is automatic and continuous, we see the
    impossibility of limiting the term “sin” to the sphere of
    momentary act, whether conscious or unconscious.

    E. G. Robinson: “Sin is not mere act—something foreign to the
    being. It is a quality of being. There is no such thing as a sin
    apart from a sinner, or an act apart from an actor. God punishes
    sinners, not sins. Sin is a mode of being; as an entity by itself
    it never existed. God punishes sin as a state, not as an act. Man
    is not responsible for the consequences of his crimes, nor for the
    acts themselves, except as they are symptomatic of his personal
    states.” Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 5:162—“The knowledge
    of sin has justly been termed the β and ψ of philosophy.”


Our treatment of Holiness, as belonging to the nature of God (pages
268-275); of Will, as not only the faculty of volitions, but also a
permanent state of the soul (pages 504-513); and of Law as requiring the
conformity of man’s nature to God’s holiness (pages 537-544); has prepared
us for the definition of sin as a state. The chief psychological defect of
New School theology, next to its making holiness to be a mere form of
love, is its ignoring of the unconscious and subconscious elements in
human character. To help our understanding of sin as an underlying and
permanent state of the soul, we subjoin references to recent writers of
note upon psychology and its relations to theology.


    We may preface our quotations by remarking that mind is always
    greater than its conscious operations. The man is more than his
    acts. Only the smallest part of the self is manifested in the
    thoughts, feelings, and volitions. In counting, to put myself to
    sleep, I find, when my attention has been diverted by other
    thoughts, that the counting has gone on all the same. Ladd,
    Philosophy of Mind, 176, speaks of the “dramatic sundering of the
    ego.” There are dream-conversations. Dr. Johnson was once greatly
    vexed at being worsted by his opponent in an argument in a dream.
    M. Maury in a dream corrected the bad English of his real self by
    the good English of his other unreal self. Spurgeon preached a
    sermon in his sleep after vainly trying to excogitate one when
    awake, and his wife gave him the substance of it after he woke.
    Hegel said that “Life is divided into two realms—a night-life of
    genius, and a day-life of consciousness.”

    Du Prel, Philosophy of Mysticism, propounds the thesis: “The ego
    is not wholly embraced in self-consciousness,” and claims that
    there is much of psychical activity within us of which our common
    waking conception of ourselves takes no account. Thus when “dream
    dramatizes”—when we engage in a dream-conversation in which our
    interlocutor’s answer comes to us with a shock of surprise—if our
    own mind is assumed to have furnished that answer, it has done so
    by a process of unconscious activity. Dwinell, in Bib. Sac., July,
    1890:369-389—“The soul is only imperfectly in possession of its
    organs, and is able to report only a small part of its activities
    in consciousness.” Thoughts come to us like foundlings laid at our
    door. We slip in a question to the librarian, Memory, and after
    leaving it there awhile the answer appears on the bulletin board.
    Delbœuf, Le Sommeil et les Rêves, 91—“The dreamer is a momentary
    and involuntary dupe of his own imagination, as the poet is the
    momentary and voluntary dupe, and the insane man is the permanent
    and involuntary dupe.” If we are the organs not only of our own
    past thinking, but, as Herbert Spencer suggests, also the organs
    of the past thinking of the race, his doctrine may give
    additional, though unintended, confirmation to a Scriptural view
    of sin.

    William James, Will to Believe, 316, quotes from F. W. H. Myers,
    in Jour. Psych. Research, who likens our ordinary consciousness to
    the visible part of the solar spectrum; the total consciousness is
    like that spectrum prolonged by the inclusion of the ultra-red and
    the ultra-violet rays—1 to 12 and 96. “Each of us,” he says, “is
    an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows—an
    individuality which can never express itself completely through
    any corporeal manifestation. The self manifests itself through the
    organism; but there is always some part of the self unmanifested,
    and always, as it seems, some power of organic expression in
    abeyance or reserve.” William James himself, in Scribner’s
    Monthly, March, 1890:361-373, sketches the hypnotic investigations
    of Janet and Binet. There is a secondary, subconscious self.
    Hysteria is the lack of synthetising power, and consequent
    disintegration of the field of consciousness into mutually
    exclusive parts. According to Janet, the secondary and the primary
    consciousnesses, added together, can never exceed the normally
    total consciousness of the individual. But Prof. James says:
    “There are trances which obey another type. I know a
    non-hysterical woman, who in her trances knows facts which
    altogether transcend her possible normal consciousness, facts
    about the lives of people whom she never saw or heard of before.”

    Our affections are deeper and stronger than we know. We learn how
    deep and strong they are, when their current is resisted by
    affliction or dammed up by death. We know how powerful evil
    passions are, only when we try to subdue them. Our dreams show us
    our naked selves. On the morality of dreams, the London Spectator
    remarks: “Our conscience and power of self-control act as a sort
    of watchdog over our worse selves during the day, but when the
    watchdog is off duty, the primitive or natural man is at liberty
    to act as he pleases; our ‘soul’ has left us at the mercy of our
    own evil nature, and in our dreams we become what, except for the
    grace of God, we would always be.”

    Both in conscience and in will there is a self-diremption. Kant’s
    categorical imperative is only one self laying down the law to the
    other self. The whole Kantian system of ethics is based on this
    doctrine of double consciousness. Ladd, in his Philosophy of Mind,
    169 _sq._, speaks of “psychical automatism.” Yet this automatism
    is possible only to self-conscious and cognitively remembering
    minds. It is always the “I” that puts itself into “that other.” We
    could not conceive of the other self except under the figure of
    the “I.” All our mental operations are ours, and we are
    responsible for them, because the subconscious and even the
    unconscious self is the product of past self-conscious thoughts
    and volitions. The present settled state of our wills is the
    result of former decisions. The will is a storage battery, charged
    by past acts, full of latent power, ready to manifest its energy
    so soon as the force which confines it is withdrawn. On
    unconscious mental action, see Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 139,
    515-543, and criticism of Carpenter, in Ireland, Blot on the
    Brain, 226-238; Bramwell, Hypnotism, its History, Practice and
    Theory, 358-398; Porter, Human Intellect, 333, 334; _versus_ Sir
    Wm. Hamilton, who adopts the maxim: “Non sentimus, nisi sentiamus
    nos sentire” (Philosophy, ed. Wight, 171). Observe also that sin
    may infect the body, as well as the soul, and may bring it into a
    state of non-conformity to God’s law (see H. B. Smith, Syst.
    Theol., 267).


In adducing our Scriptural and rational proof of the definition of sin as
a state, we desire to obviate the objection that this view leaves the soul
wholly given over to the power of evil. While we maintain that this is
true of man apart from God, we also insist that side by side with the evil
bent of the human will there is always an immanent divine power which
greatly counteracts the force of evil, and if not resisted leads the
individual soul—even when resisted leads the race at large—toward truth
and salvation. This immanent divine power is none other than Christ, the
eternal Word, the Light which lighteth every man; see John 1:4, 9.


    _John 1:4, 9_—“_In him was life, and the life was the light of
    men.... There was the true light, even the light which lighteth
    every man._” See a further statement in A. H. Strong, Cleveland
    Sermon, May, 1904, with regard to the old and the new view as to
    sin:—“Our fathers believed in total depravity, and we agree with
    them that man naturally is devoid of love to God and that every
    faculty is weakened, disordered, and corrupted by the selfish bent
    of his will. They held to original sin. The selfish bent of man’s
    will can be traced back to the apostacy of our first parents; and,
    on account of that departure of the race from God, all men are by
    nature children of wrath. And all this is true, if it is regarded
    as a statement of the facts, apart from their relation to Christ.
    But our fathers did not see, as we do, that man’s relation to
    Christ antedated the Fall and constituted an underlying and
    modifying condition of man’s life. Humanity was naturally in
    Christ, in whom all things were created and in whom they all
    consist. Even man’s sin did not prevent Christ from still working
    in him to counteract the evil and to suggest the good. There was
    an internal, as well as an external, preparation for man’s
    redemption. In this sense, of a divine principle in man striving
    against the selfish and godless will, there was a total
    redemption, over against man’s total depravity; and an original
    grace, that was even more powerful than original sin.

    “We have become conscious that total depravity alone is not a
    sufficient or proper expression of the truth; and the phrase has
    been outgrown. It has been felt that the old view of sin did not
    take account of the generous and noble aspirations, the unselfish
    efforts, the strivings after God, of even unregenerate men. For
    this reason there has been less preaching about sin, and less
    conviction as to its guilt and condemnation. The good impulses of
    men outside the Christian pale have been often credited to human
    nature, when they should have been credited to the indwelling
    Spirit of Christ. I make no doubt that one of our radical
    weaknesses at this present time is our more superficial view of
    sin. Without some sense of sin’s guilt and condemnation, we cannot
    feel our need of redemption. John the Baptist must go before
    Christ; the law must prepare the way for the gospel.

    “My belief is that the new apprehension of Christ’s relation to
    the race will enable us to declare, as never before, the lost
    condition of the sinner; while at the same time we show him that
    Christ is with him and in him to save. This presence in every man
    of a power not his own that works for righteousness is a very
    different doctrine from that ’divinity of man’ which is so often
    preached. The divinity is not the divinity of man, but the
    divinity of Christ. And the power that works for righteousness is
    not the power of man, but the power of Christ. It is a power whose
    warning, inviting, persuading influence renders only more marked
    and dreadful the evil will which hampers and resists it. Depravity
    is all the worse, when we recognize in it the constant antagonist
    of an ever-present, all-holy, and all-loving Redeemer.”


1. Proof.


As it is readily admitted that the outward act of transgression is
properly denominated sin, we here attempt to show only that lack of
conformity to the law of God in disposition or state is also and equally
to be so denominated.

A. From Scripture.

(_a_) The words ordinarily translated “sin,” or used as synonyms for it,
are as applicable to dispositions and states as to acts (חטאה and ἁμαρτία
= a missing, failure, coming short [_sc._ of God’s will]).


    See _Num. 15:28_—“_sinneth unwittingly_”; _Ps. 51:2_—“_cleanse me
    from my sin_”; _5_—“_Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And
    in sin did my mother conceive me_”; _Rom. 7:17_—“_sin which
    dwelleth in me_”; compare _Judges 20:16_, where the literal
    meaning of the word appears: “_sling stones at a hair-breadth, and
    not miss_” (חטא). In a similar manner, משע [LXX ἀσέβεια] =
    separation from, rebellion against [sc. God]; see _Lev. 16:16,
    21_; _cf._ Delitzsch on _Ps. 32:1_. עון [LXX ἀδικία] = bending,
    perversion [sc. of what is right], iniquity; see _Lev. 5:17_;
    _cf._ _John 7:18_. See also the Hebrew רע, רשע, [= ruin,
    confusion], and the Greek ἀποστασία, ἐπιθυμία, ἔχθρα, κακία,
    πονηρία, σάρξ. None of these designations of sin limits it to mere
    act,—most of them more naturally suggest disposition or state.
    Ἁμαρτία implies that man in sin does not reach what he seeks
    therein; sin is a state of delusion and deception (Julius Müller).
    On the words mentioned, see Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms; Cremer,
    Lexicon N. T. Greek; Present Day Tracts, 5: no. 28, pp. 43-47;
    Trench, N. T. Synonyms, part 2:61, 73.


(b) The New Testament descriptions of sin bring more distinctly to view
the states and dispositions than the outward acts of the soul (1 John
3:4—ἡ ἁμαρτία ἐστὶν ἡ ἀνομία, where ἀνομία =, not “transgression of the
law,” but, as both context and etymology show, “lack of conformity to law”
or “lawlessness”—Rev. Vers.).


    See _1 John 5:17_—“_All unrighteousness is sin_”; _Rom.
    14:23_—“_whatsoever is not of faith is sin_”; _James 4:17_—“_To
    him therefore that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it
    is sin._” Where the sin is that of _not doing_, sin cannot be said
    to consist in _act_. It must then at least be a _state_.


(_c_) Moral evil is ascribed not only to the thoughts and affections, but
to the heart from which they spring (we read of the “evil thoughts” and of
the “evil heart”—Mat. 15:19 and Heb. 3:12).


    See also _Mat. 5:22_—anger in the heart is murder; _28_—impure
    desire is adultery. _Luke 6:45_—“_the evil man out of the evil
    treasure_ [of his heart] _bringeth forth that which is evil._”
    _Heb. 3:12_—“_an evil heart of unbelief_”; _cf._ _Is. 1:5_—“_the
    whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint_”; _Jer. 17:9_—“_The
    heart is deceitful above all things, and it is exceedingly
    corrupt: who can know it?_”—here the sin that cannot be known is
    not sin of act, but sin of the heart. “Below the surface stream,
    shallow and light, Of what we _say_ we feel; below the stream, As
    light, of what we _think_ we feel, there flows, With silent
    current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we
    feel _indeed_.”


(_d_) The state or condition of the soul which gives rise to wrong desires
and acts is expressly called sin (Rom. 7:8—“Sin ... wrought in me ... all
manner of coveting”).


    _John 8:34_—“_Every one that committeth sin is the bondservant of
    sin_”; _Rom. 7:11, 13, 14, 17, 20_—“_sin ... beguiled me ...
    working death to me ... I am carnal, sold under sin ... sin which
    dwelleth in me._” These representations of sin as a principle or
    state of the soul are incompatible with the definition of it as a
    mere act. John Byrom, 1691-1763: “Think and be careful what thou
    art within, For there is sin in the desire of sin. Think and be
    thankful in a different case, For there is grace in the desire of
    grace.”

    Alexander, Theories of the Will, 85—“In the person of Paul is
    represented the man who has been already justified by faith and
    who is at peace with God. In the 6th chapter of Romans, the
    question is discussed whether such a man is obliged to keep the
    moral law. But in the 7th chapter the question is not, _must_ man
    keep the moral law? but why is he so _incapable_ of keeping the
    moral law? The struggle is thus, not in the soul of the
    unregenerate man who is dead in sin, but in the soul of the
    regenerate man who has been pardoned and is endeavoring to keep
    the law.... In a state of sin the will is determined toward the
    bad; in a state of grace the will is determined toward
    righteousness; but not wholly so, for the flesh is not at once
    subdued, and there is a war between the good and bad principles of
    action in the soul of him who has been pardoned.”


(_e_) Sin is represented as existing in the soul, prior to the
consciousness of it, and as only discovered and awakened by the law (Rom.
7:9, 10—“when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died”—if sin
“revived,” it must have had previous existence and life, even though it
did not manifest itself in acts of conscious transgression).


    _Rom. 7:8_—“_apart from the law sin is dead_”—here is sin which is
    not yet sin of act. Dead or unconscious sin is still sin. The fire
    in a cave discovers reptiles and stirs them, but they were there
    before; the light and heat do not create them. Let a beam of
    light, says Jean Paul Richter, through your window-shutter into a
    darkened room, and you reveal a thousand motes floating in the air
    whose existence was before unsuspected. So the law of God reveals
    our “_hidden faults_” (_Ps. 19:12_)—infirmities, imperfections,
    evil tendencies and desires—which also cannot all be classed as
    _acts_ of transgression.


(_f_) The allusions to sin as a permanent power or reigning principle, not
only in the individual but in humanity at large, forbid us to define it as
a momentary act, and compel us to regard it as being primarily a settled
depravity of nature, of which individual sins or acts of transgression are
the workings and fruits (Rom. 5:21—“sin reigned in death”; 6:12—“let not
therefore sin reign in your mortal body”).


    In _Rom. 5:21_, the reign of sin is compared to the reign of
    grace. As grace is not an act but a principle, so sin is not an
    act but a principle. As the poisonous exhalations from a well
    indicate that there is corruption and death at the bottom, so the
    ever-recurring thoughts and acts of sin are evidence that there is
    a principle of sin in the heart,—in other words, that sin exists
    as a permanent disposition or state. A momentary act cannot
    “reign” nor “dwell”; a disposition or state can. Maudsley, Sleep,
    its Psychology, makes the damaging confession: “If we were held
    responsible for our dreams, there is no living man who would not
    deserve to be hanged.”


(_g_) The Mosaic sacrifices for sins of ignorance and of omission, and
especially for general sinfulness, are evidence that sin is not to be
limited to mere act, but that it includes something deeper and more
permanent in the heart and the life (Lev. 1:3; 5:11; 12:8; _cf._ Luke
2:24).


    The sin-offering for sins of ignorance (_Lev. 4:14, 20, 31_), the
    trespass-offering for sins of omission (_Lev. 5:5, 6_), and the
    burnt offering to expiate general sinfulness (_Lev. 1:3_; _cf._
    _Luke 2:22-24_), all witness that sin is not confined to mere act.
    _John 1:29_—“_the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sin,_” not the
    sins, “_of the world_”. See Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:233; Schmid,
    Bib. Theol. N. T., 194, 381, 442, 448, 492, 604; Philippi,
    Glaubenslehre, 3:210-217; Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin,
    2:259-306; Edwards, Works. 3:16-18. For the New School definition
    of sin, see Fitch, Nature of Sin, and Park, in Bib. Sac., 7:551.


B. From the common judgment of mankind.

(_a_) Men universally attribute vice as well as virtue not only to
conscious and deliberate acts, but also to dispositions and states. Belief
in something more permanently evil than acts of transgression is indicated
in the common phrases, “hateful temper,” “wicked pride,” “bad character.”


    As the beatitudes (_Mat. 5:1-12_) are pronounced, not upon acts,
    but upon dispositions of the soul, so the curses of the law are
    uttered not so much against single acts of transgression as
    against the evil affections from which they spring. Compare the
    “_works of the flesh_” (_Gal. 5:19_) with the “_fruit of the
    Spirit_” (_5:22_). In both, dispositions and states predominate.


(_b_) Outward acts, indeed, are condemned only when they are regarded as
originating in, and as symptomatic of, evil dispositions. Civil law
proceeds upon this principle in holding crime to consist, not alone in the
external act, but also in the evil motive or intent with which it is
performed.


    The _mens rea_ is essential to the idea of crime. The
    “_idle-word_” (_Mat 12:36_) shall be brought into the judgment,
    not because it is so important in itself, but because it is a
    floating straw that indicates the direction of the whole current
    of the heart and life. Murder differs from homicide, not in any
    outward respect, but simply because of the motive that prompts
    it,—and that motive is always, in the last analysis, an evil
    disposition or state.


(_c_) The stronger an evil disposition, or in other words, the more it
connects itself with, or resolves itself into, a settled state or
condition of the soul, the more blameworthy is it felt to be. This is
shown by the distinction drawn between crimes of passion and crimes of
deliberation.


    Edwards: “Guilt consists in having one’s heart wrong, and in doing
    wrong from the heart.” There is guilt in evil desires, even when
    the will combats them. But there is greater guilt when the will
    consents. The outward act may be in each case the same, but the
    guilt of it is proportioned to the extent to which the evil
    disposition is settled and strong.


(_d_) This condemning sentence remains the same, even although the origin
of the evil disposition or state cannot be traced back to any conscious
act of the individual. Neither the general sense of mankind, nor the civil
law in which this general sense is expressed, goes behind the fact of an
existing evil will. Whether this evil will is the result of personal
transgression or is a hereditary bias derived from generations passed,
this evil will is the man himself, and upon him terminates the blame. We
do not excuse arrogance or sensuality upon the ground that they are family
traits.


    The young murderer in Boston was not excused upon the ground of a
    congenitally cruel disposition. We repent in later years of sins
    of boyhood, which we only now see to be sins; and converted
    cannibals repent, after becoming Christians, of the sins of
    heathendom which they once committed without a thought of their
    wickedness. The peacock cannot escape from his feet by flying, nor
    can we absolve ourselves from blame for an evil state of will by
    tracing its origin to a remote ancestry. We are responsible for
    what we are. How this can be, when we have not personally and
    consciously originated it, is the problem of original sin, which
    we have yet to discuss.


(_e_) When any evil disposition has such strength in itself, or is so
combined with others, as to indicate a settled moral corruption in which
no power to do good remains, this state is regarded with the deepest
disapprobation of all. Sin weakens man’s power of obedience, but the
can-not is a will-not, and is therefore condemnable. The opposite
principle would lead to the conclusion that, the more a man weakened his
powers by transgression, the less guilty he would be, until absolute
depravity became absolute innocence.


    The boy who hates his father cannot change his hatred into love by
    a single act of will; but he is not therefore innocent.
    Spontaneous and uncontrollable profanity is the worst profanity of
    all. It is a sign that the whole will, like a subterranean
    Kentucky river, is moving away from God, and that no recuperative
    power is left in the soul which can reach into the depths to
    reverse its course. See Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:110-114; Shedd,
    Hist. Doct., 2:79-92, 152-157; Richards, Lectures on Theology,
    256-301; Edwards, Works, 2:134; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 243-262;
    Princeton Essays, 2:224-239; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 394.


C. From the experience of the Christian.

Christian experience is a testing of Scripture truth, and therefore is not
an independent source of knowledge. It may, however, corroborate
conclusions drawn from the word of God. Since the judgment of the
Christian is formed under the influence of the Holy Spirit, we may trust
this more implicitly than the general sense of the world. We affirm, then,
that just in proportion to his spiritual enlightenment and self-knowledge,
the Christian

(_a_) Regards his outward deviations from God’s law, and his evil
inclinations and desires, as outgrowths and revelations of a depravity of
nature which lies below his consciousness; and

(_b_) Repents more deeply for this depravity of nature, which constitutes
his inmost character and is inseparable from himself, than for what he
merely feels or does.

In proof of these statements we appeal to the biographies and writings of
those in all ages who have been by general consent regarded as most
advanced in spiritual culture and discernment.


    “Intelligentia prima est, ut te noris peccatorem.” Compare David’s
    experience, _Ps. 51:6_—“_Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward
    parts: And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know
    wisdom_”—with Paul’s experience in _Rom. 7:24_—“_Wretched man that
    I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?_”—with
    Isaiah’s experience (_6:5_), when in the presence of God’s glory
    he uses the words of the leper (_Lev. 13:45_) and calls himself
    “_unclean_,” and with Peter’s experience (_Luke 5:8_) when at the
    manifestation of Christ’s miraculous power he “_fell down at
    Jesus’ __ knees, saying, Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O
    Lord._” So the publican cries: _“__God, be thou merciful to me the
    sinner__”__ (Luke 18:13)_, and Paul calls himself the “_chief_” of
    sinners (_1 Tim. 1:15_). It is evident that in none of these cases
    were there merely single acts of transgression in view; the
    humiliation and self-abhorrence were in view of permanent states
    of depravity. Van Oosterzee: “What we do outwardly is only the
    revelation of our inner nature.” The outcropping and visible rock
    is but small in extent compared with the rock that is underlying
    and invisible. The iceberg has eight-ninths of its mass below the
    surface of the sea, yet icebergs have been seen near Cape Horn
    from 700 to 800 feet high above the water.

    It may be doubted whether any repentance is genuine which is not
    repentance for _sin_ rather than for _sins_; compare _John
    16:8_—the Holy Spirit “_will convict the world in respect of
    sin_/” On the difference between conviction of sins and conviction
    of sin, see Hare, Mission of the Comforter. Dr. A. J. Gordon, just
    before his death, desired to be left alone. He was then overheard
    confessing his sins in such seemingly extravagant terms as to
    excite fear that he was in delirium. Martensen, Dogmatics,
    389—Luther during his early experience “often wrote to Staupitz:
    ‘Oh, my sins, my sins!’ and yet in the confessional he could name
    no sins in particular which he had to confess; so that it was
    clearly a sense of the general depravity of his nature which
    filled his soul with deep sorrow and pain.” Luther’s conscience
    would not accept the comfort that he _wished_ to be without sin,
    and therefore had no real sin. When he thought himself too great a
    sinner to be saved, Staupitz replied: “Would you have the
    semblance of a sinner and the semblance of a Savior?”

    After twenty years of religious experience, Jonathan Edwards wrote
    (Works 1:22, 23; also 3:16-18): “Often since I have lived in this
    town I have had very affecting views of my own sinfulness and
    vileness, very frequently to such a degree as to hold me in a kind
    of loud weeping, sometimes for a considerable time together, so
    that I have been often obliged to shut myself up. I have had a
    vastly greater sense of my own wickedness and the badness of my
    heart than ever I had before my conversion. It has often appeared
    to me that if God should mark iniquity against me, I should appear
    the very worst of all mankind, of all that have been since the
    beginning of the world to this time; and that I should have by far
    the lowest place in hell. When others that have come to talk with
    me about their soul’s concerns have expressed the sense they have
    had of their own wickedness, by saying that it seemed to them they
    were as bad as the devil himself; I thought their expressions
    seemed exceeding faint and feeble to represent my wickedness.”

    Edwards continues: “My wickedness, as I am in myself, has long
    appeared to me perfectly ineffable and swallowing up all thought
    and imagination—like an infinite deluge, or mountains over my
    head. I know not how to express better what my sins appear to me
    to be, than by heaping infinite on infinite and multiplying
    infinite by infinite. Very often for these many years, these
    expressions are in my mind and in my mouth: ‘Infinite upon
    infinite—infinite upon infinite!’ When I look into my heart and
    take a view of my wickedness, it looks like an abyss infinitely
    deeper than hell. And it appears to me that were it not for free
    grace, exalted and raised up to the infinite height of all the
    fulness and glory of the great Jehovah, and the arm of his power
    and grace stretched forth in all the majesty of his power and in
    all the glory of his sovereignty, I should appear sunk down in my
    sins below hell itself, far beyond the sight of everything but the
    eye of sovereign grace that can pierce even down to such a depth.
    And yet it seems to me that my conviction of sin is exceeding
    small and faint; it is enough to amaze me that I have no more
    sense of my sin. I know certainly that I have very little sense of
    my sinfulness. When I have had turns of weeping for my sins, I
    thought I knew at the time that my repentance was nothing to my
    sin.... It is affecting to think how ignorant I was, when a young
    Christian, of the bottomless, infinite depths of wickedness,
    pride, hypocrisy, and deceit left in my heart.”

    Jonathan Edwards was not an ungodly man, but the holiest man of
    his time. He was not an enthusiast, but a man of acute,
    philosophic mind. He was not a man who indulged in exaggerated or
    random statements, for with his power of introspection and
    analysis he combined a faculty and habit of exact expression
    unsurpassed among the sons of men. If the maxim “cuique in arte
    sua credendum est” is of any value, Edwards’s statements in a
    matter of religious experience are to be taken as correct
    interpretations of the facts. H. B. Smith (System. Theol., 275)
    quotes Thomasius as saying: “It is a striking fact in Scripture
    that statements of the depth and power of sin are chiefly from the
    regenerate.” Another has said that “a serpent is never seen at its
    whole length until it is dead.” Thomas à Kempis (ed. Gould and
    Lincoln, 142)—“Do not think that thou hast made any progress
    toward perfection, till thou feelest that thou art less than the
    least of all human beings.” Young’s Night Thoughts: “Heaven’s
    Sovereign saves all beings but himself That hideous sight—a naked
    human heart.”

    Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life: “You may justly
    condemn yourself for being the greatest sinner that you know, 1.
    Because you know more of the folly of your own heart than of other
    people’s, and can charge yourself with various sins which you know
    only of yourself and cannot be sure that others are guilty of
    them. 2. The greatness of our guilt arises from the greatness of
    God’s goodness to us. You know more of these aggravations of your
    sins than you do of the sins of other people. Hence the greatest
    saints have in all ages condemned themselves as the greatest
    sinners.” We may add: 3. That, since each man is a peculiar being,
    each man is guilty of peculiar sins, and in certain particulars
    and aspects may constitute an example of the enormity and
    hatefulness of sin, such as neither earth nor hell can elsewhere
    show.

    Of Cromwell, as a representative of the Puritans, Green says
    (Short History of the English People, 454): “The vivid sense of
    the divine Purity close to such men, made the life of common men
    seem sin.” Dr. Arnold of Rugby (Life and Corresp., App. D.): “In a
    deep sense of moral evil, more perhaps than anything else, abides
    a saving knowledge of God.” Augustine, on his death-bed, had the
    32d Psalm written over against him on the wall. For his
    expressions with regard to sin, see his Confessions, book 10. See
    also Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 284, note.


2. Inferences.


In the light of the preceding discussion, we may properly estimate the
elements of truth and of error in the common definition of sin as “the
voluntary transgression of known law.”

(_a_) Not all sin is voluntary as being a distinct and conscious volition;
for evil disposition and state often precede and occasion evil volition,
and evil disposition and state are themselves sin. All sin, however, is
voluntary as springing either directly from will, or indirectly from those
perverse affections and desires which have themselves originated in will.
“Voluntary” is a term broader then “volitional,” and includes all those
permanent states of intellect and affection which the will has made what
they are. Will, moreover, is not to be regarded as simply the faculty of
volitions, but as primarily the underlying determination of the being to a
supreme end.


    Will, as we have seen, includes preference (θέλημα, _voluntas_,
    _Wille_) as well as volition (βουλή, _arbitrium_, _Willkür_). We
    do not, with Edwards and Hodge, regard the sensibilities as states
    of the will. They are, however, in their character and their
    objects determined by the will, and so they may be called
    voluntary. The permanent state of the will (New School “elective
    preference”) is to be distinguished from the permanent state of
    the sensibilities (dispositions, or desires). But both are
    voluntary because both are due to past decisions of the will, and
    “whatever springs from will we are responsible for” (Shedd,
    Discourses and Essays, 243). Julius Müller, 2:51—“We speak of
    self-consciousness and reason as something which the ego _has_,
    but we identify the will _with_ the ego. No one would say, ‘my
    will has decided this or that,’ although we do say, ‘my reason, my
    conscience teaches me this or that.’ The will is the very man
    himself, as Augustine says: ‘Voluntas est in omnibus; imo omnes
    nihil aliud quam voluntates sunt.’ ”

    For other statements of the relation of disposition to will, see
    Alexander, Moral Science, 151—“In regard to dispositions, we say
    that they are in a sense voluntary. They properly belong to the
    will, taking the word in a large sense. In judging of the morality
    of voluntary acts, the principle from which they proceed is always
    included in our view and comes in for a large part of the blame”;
    see also pages 201, 207, 208. Edwards on the Affections, 3:1-22;
    on the Will, 3:4—“The affections are only certain modes of the
    exercise of the will.” A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 234—“All
    sin is voluntary, in the sense that all sin has its root in the
    perverted dispositions, desires, and affections which constitute
    the depraved state of the will.” But to Alexander, Edwards, and
    Hodge, we reply that the first sin was not voluntary in this
    sense, for there was no such depraved state of the will from which
    it could spring. We are responsible for dispositions, not upon the
    ground that they are a part of the will, but upon the ground that
    they are effects of will, in other words, that past decisions of
    the will have made them what they are. See pages 504-513.


(_b_) Deliberate intention to sin is an aggravation of transgression, but
it is not essential to constitute any given act or feeling a sin. Those
evil inclinations and impulses which rise unbidden and master the soul
before it is well aware of their nature, are themselves violations of the
divine law, and indications of an inward depravity which in the case of
each descendant of Adam is the chief and fontal transgression.


    Joseph Cook: “Only the surface-water of the sea is penetrated with
    light. Beneath is a half-lit region. Still further down is
    absolute darkness. We are greater than we know.” Weismann,
    Heredity, 2:8—“At the depth of 170 meters, or 552 feet, there is
    about as much light as that of a starlight night when there is no
    moon. Light penetrates as far as 400 meters, or 1,300 feet, but
    animal life exists at a depth of 4,000 meters, or 13,000 feet.
    Below 1,300 feet, all animals are blind.” (_Cf._ _Ps. 51:6;
    19:12_—“_the inward parts ... the hidden parts ... hidden
    faults_”—hidden not only from others, but even from ourselves.)
    The light of consciousness plays only on the surface of the waters
    of man’s soul.


(_c_) Knowledge of the sinfulness of an act or feeling is also an
aggravation of transgression, but it is not essential to constitute it a
sin. Moral blindness is the effect of transgression, and, as inseparable
from corrupt affections and desires, is itself condemned by the divine
law.


    It is our duty to do better than we know. Our duty of knowing is
    as real as our duty of doing. Sin is an opiate. Some of the most
    deadly diseases do not reveal themselves in the patient’s
    countenance, nor has the patient any adequate understanding of his
    malady. There is an ignorance which is indolence. Men are often
    unwilling to take the trouble of rectifying their standards of
    judgment. There is also an ignorance which is intention. Instance
    many students’ ignorance of College laws.

    We cannot excuse disobedience by saying: “I forgot.” God’s
    commandment is: “_Remember_”—as in _Ex. 20:8_; _cf._ _2 Pet.
    3:5_—“_For this they wilfully forget._” “Ignorantia legis neminem
    excusat.” _Rom. 2:12_—“_as many as have sinned without the law
    shall also perish without the law_”; _Luke 12:48_—“_he that knew
    not, and did things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten_ [though]
    _with few stripes._” The aim of revelation and of preaching is to
    bring man “_to himself_” (_cf._ _Luke 15:17_)—to show him what he
    has been doing and what he is. Goethe: “We are never deceived: we
    deceive ourselves.” Royce, World and Individual, 2:359—“The sole
    possible free moral action is then a freedom that relates to the
    present fixing of attention upon the ideas of the Ought which are
    already present. To sin is _consciously to choose to forget_,
    through a narrowing of the field of attention, an Ought that one
    already recognizes.”


(_d_) Ability to fulfill the law is not essential to constitute the
non-fulfilment sin. Inability to fulfill the law is a result of
transgression, and, as consisting not in an original deficiency of faculty
but in a settled state of the affections and will, it is itself
condemnable. Since the law presents the holiness of God as the only
standard for the creature, ability to obey can never be the measure of
obligation or the test of sin.


    Not power to the contrary, in the sense of ability to change all
    our permanent states by mere volition, is the basis of obligation
    and responsibility; for surely Satan’s responsibility does not
    depend upon his power at any moment to turn to God and be holy.

    Definitions of sin—Melanchthon: Defectus vel inclinatio vel actio
    pugnans cum lege Dei. Calvin: Illegalitas, seu difformitas a lege.
    Hollaz: Aberratio a lege divina. Hollaz adds: “Voluntariness does
    not enter into the definition of sin, generically considered. Sin
    may be called voluntary, either in respect to its cause, as it
    inheres in the will, or in respect to the act, as it procedes from
    deliberate volition. Here is the antithesis to the Roman Catholics
    and to the Socinians, the latter of whom define sin as a voluntary
    [_i. e._, a volitional] transgression of law”—a view, says Hase
    (Hutterus Redivivus, 11th ed., 162-164), “which is derived from
    the necessary methods of civil tribunals, and which is
    incompatible with the orthodox doctrine of original sin.” On the
    New School definition of sin, see Fairchild, Nature of Sin, in
    Bib. Sac., 25:30-48; Whedon, in Bib. Sac., 19:251, and On the
    Will, 328. _Per contra_, see Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:180-190;
    Lawrence, Old School in N. E. Theol., in Bib. Sac., 20:317-328;
    Julius Müller, Doc. Sin, 1:40-72; Nitzsch, Christ. Doct., 216;
    Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 124-126.


II. The Essential Principle of Sin.


The definition of sin as lack of conformity to the divine law does not
exclude, but rather necessitates, an inquiry into the characterizing
motive or impelling power which explains its existence and constitutes its
guilt. Only three views require extended examination. Of these the first
two constitute the most common excuses for sin, although not propounded
for this purpose by their authors: Sin is due (1) to the human body, or
(2) to finite weakness. The third, which we regard as the Scriptural view,
considers sin as (3) the supreme choice of self, or selfishness.

In the preceding section on the Definition of Sin, we showed that sin is a
_state_, and a state of the _will_. We now ask: What is the nature of this
state? and we expect to show that it is essentially a _selfish_ state of
the will.


1. Sin as Sensuousness.


This view regards sin as the necessary product of man’s sensuous nature—a
result of the soul’s connection with a physical organism. This is the view
of Schleiermacher and of Rothe. More recent writers, with John Fiske,
regard moral evil as man’s inheritance from a brute ancestry.


    For statement of the view here opposed, see Schleiermacher, Der
    Christliche Glaube, 1:361-364—“Sin is a prevention of the
    determining power of the spirit, caused by the independence
    (Selbständigkeit) of the sensuous functions.” The child lives at
    first a life of sense, in which the bodily appetites are supreme.
    The senses are the avenues of all temptation, the physical
    domineers over the spiritual, and the soul never shakes off the
    body. Sin is, therefore, a malarious exhalation from the low
    grounds of human nature, or, to use the words of Schleiermacher,
    “a positive opposition of the flesh to the spirit.” Pfleiderer,
    Prot. Theol. seit Kant, 113,—says that Schleiermacher here repeats
    Spinoza’s “inability of the spirit to control the sensuous
    affections.” Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:230—“In the
    development of man out of naturality, the lower impulses have
    already won a power of self-assertion and resistance, before the
    reason could yet come to its valid position and authority. As this
    propensity of the self-will is grounded in the specific nature of
    man, it may be designated as inborn, hereditary, or _original_
    sinfulness.”

    Rothe’s view of sin may be found in his Dogmatik, 1:300-302;
    notice the connection of Rothe’s view of sin with his doctrine of
    continuous creation (see page 416 of this Compendium).
    Encyclopædia Britannica, 21:2—“Rothe was a thorough going
    evolutionist who regarded the natural man as the consummation of
    the development of physical nature, and regarded spirit as the
    personal attainment, with divine help, of those beings in whom the
    further creative process of moral development is carried on. This
    process of development necessarily takes an abnormal form and
    passes through the phase of sin. This abnormal condition
    necessitates a fresh creative act, that of salvation, which was
    however from the very first a part of the divine plan of
    development. Rothe, notwithstanding his evolutionary doctrine,
    believed in the supernatural birth of Christ.”

    John Fiske, Destiny of Man, 103—“Original sin is neither more nor
    less than the brute inheritance which every man carries with him,
    and the process of evolution is an advance toward true salvation.”
    Thus man is a sphynx in whom the human has not yet escaped from
    the animal. So Bowne, Atonement, 69, declares that sin is “a relic
    of the animal not yet outgrown, a resultant of the mechanism of
    appetite and impulse and reflex action for which the proper
    inhibitions are not yet developed. Only slowly does it grow into a
    consciousness of itself as evil.... It would be hysteria to regard
    the common life of men as rooting in a conscious choice of
    unrighteousness.”


In refutation of this view, it will be sufficient to urge the following
considerations:

(_a_) It involves an assumption of the inherent evil of matter, at least
so far as regards the substance of man’s body. But this is either a form
of dualism, and may be met with the objections already brought against
that system, or it implies that God, in being the author of man’s physical
organism, is also the responsible originator of human sin.


    This has been called the “caged-eagle theory” of man’s existence;
    it holds that the body is a prison only, or, as Plato expressed
    it, “the tomb of the soul,” so that the soul can be pure only by
    escaping from the body. But matter is not eternal. God made it,
    and made it pure. The body was made to be the servant of the
    spirit. We must not throw the blame of sin upon the senses, but
    upon the spirit that used the senses so wickedly. To attribute sin
    to the body is to make God, the author of the body, to be also the
    author of sin,—which is the greatest of blasphemies. Men cannot
    “justly accuse Their Maker, or their making, or their fate”
    (Milton, Paradise Lost, 3:112). Sin is a contradiction within the
    spirit itself, and not simply between the spirit and the flesh.
    Sensuous activities are not themselves sinful—this is essential
    Manichæanism. Robert Burns was wrong when he laid the blame for
    his delinquencies upon “the passions wild and strong.” And Samuel
    Johnson was wrong when he said that “Every man is a rascal so soon
    as he is sick.” The normal soul has power to rise above both
    passion and sickness and to make them serve its moral development.
    On the development of the body, as the organ of sin, see
    Straffen’s Hulsean Lectures on Sin, 33-50. The essential error of
    this view is its identification of the moral with the physical. If
    it were true, then Jesus, who came in human flesh, must needs be a
    sinner.


(_b_) In explaining sin as an inheritance from the brute, this theory
ignores the fact that man, even though derived from a brute ancestry, is
no longer brute, but man, with power to recognize and to realize moral
ideals, and under no necessity to violate the law of his being.


    See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 163-180, on The Fall and the
    Redemption of Man, in the Light of Evolution: “Evolution has been
    thought to be incompatible with any proper doctrine of a fall. It
    has been assumed by many that man’s immoral course and conduct are
    simply survivals of his brute inheritance, inevitable remnants of
    his old animal propensities, yieldings of the weak will to fleshly
    appetites and passions. This is to deny that sin is truly sin, but
    it is also to deny that man is truly man.... Sin must be referred
    to freedom, or it is not sin. To explain it as the natural result
    of weak will overmastered by lower impulses is to make the animal
    nature, and not the will, the cause of transgression. And that is
    to say that man at the beginning is not man, but brute.” See also
    D. W. Simon, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1897:1-20—“The key to the strange
    and dark contrast between man and his animal ancestry is to be
    found in the fact of the Fall. Other species live normally. No
    remnant of the reptile hinders the bird. The bird is a true bird.
    Only man fails to live normally and is a true man only after ages
    of sin and misery.” Marlowe very properly makes his Faustus to be
    tempted by sensual baits only after he has sold himself to Satan
    for power.

    To regard vanity, deceitfulness, malice, and revenge as inherited
    from brute ancestors is to deny man’s original innocence and the
    creatorship of God. B. W. Lockhart: “The animal mind knows not
    God, is not subject to his law, neither indeed can be, just
    because it is animal, and as such is incapable of right or
    wrong.... If man were an animal and nothing more, he could not
    sin. It is by virtue of being something more, that he becomes
    capable of sin. Sin is the yielding of the known higher to the
    known lower. It is the soul’s abdication of its being to the
    brute.... Hence the need of spiritual forces from the spiritual
    world of divine revelation, to heal and build and discipline the
    soul within itself, giving it the victory over the animal passions
    which constitute the body and over the kingdom of blind desire
    which constitutes the world. The final purpose of man is growth of
    the soul into liberty, truth, love, likeness to God. Education is
    the word that covers the movement, and probation is incident to
    education.” We add that reparation for past sin and renewing power
    from above must follow probation, in order to make education
    possible.

    Some recent writers hold to a real fall of man, and yet regard
    that fall as necessary to his moral development. Emma Marie
    Caillard, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893: 879—“Man passed out of a
    state of innocence—unconscious of his own imperfection—into a
    state of consciousness of it. The will became slave instead of
    master. The result would have been the complete stoppage of his
    evolution but for redemption, which restored his will and made the
    continuance of his evolution possible. Incarnation was the method
    of redemption. But even apart from the fall, this incarnation
    would have been necessary to reveal to man the goal of his
    evolution and so to secure his coöperation in it.” Lisle,
    Evolution of Spiritual Man, 39, and in Bib. Sac., July, 1892:
    431-452—“Evolution by catastrophe in the natural world has a
    striking analogue in the spiritual world.... Sin is primarily not
    so much a fall from a higher to a lower, as a failure to rise from
    a lower to a higher; not so much eating of the forbidden tree, as
    failure to partake of the tree of life. The latter represented
    communion and correspondence with God, and had innocent man
    continued to reach out for this, he would not have fallen. Man’s
    refusal to choose the higher preceded and conditioned his fall to
    the lower, and the essence of sin is therefore in this refusal,
    whatever may cause the will to make it.... Man chose the lower of
    his own free will. Then his centripetal force was gone. His
    development was swiftly and endlessly away from God. He reverted
    to his original type of savage animalism; and yet, as a
    self-conscious and free-acting being, he retained a sense of
    responsibility that filled him with fear and suffering.”

    On the development-theory of sin, see W. W. McLane, in New
    Englander, 1891: 180-188; A. B. Bruce, Apologetics, 60-62; Lyman
    Abbott, Evolution of Christianity, 203-208; Le Conte, Evolution,
    330, 365-375; Henry Drummond, Ascent of Man, 1-13, 329, 342; Salem
    Wilder, Life, its Nature, 266-273; Wm. Graham, Creed of Science,
    38-44; Frank H. Foster, Evolution and the Evangelical System;
    Chandler, The Spirit of Man, 45-47.


(_c_) It rests upon an incomplete induction of facts, taking account of
sin solely in its aspect of self-degradation, but ignoring the worst
aspect of it as self-exaltation. Avarice, envy, pride, ambition, malice,
cruelty, revenge, self-righteousness, unbelief, enmity to God, are none of
them fleshly sins, and upon this principle are incapable of explanation.


    Two historical examples may suffice to show the insufficiency of
    the sensuous theory of sin. Goethe was not a markedly sensual man;
    yet the spiritual vivisection which he practised on Friederike
    Brion, his perfidious misrepresentation of his relations with
    Kestner’s wife in the “Sorrows of Werther,” and his flattery of
    Napoleon, when a patriot would have scorned the advances of the
    invader of his country, show Goethe to have been a very
    incarnation of heartlessness and selfishness. The patriot Boerne
    said of him: “Not once has he ever advanced a poor solitary word
    in his country’s cause—he who from the lofty height he has
    attained might speak out what none other but himself would dare
    pronounce.” It has been said that Goethe’s first commandment to
    genius was: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor and thy neighbor’s
    wife.” His biographers count up sixteen women to whom he made love
    and who reciprocated his affection, though it is doubtful whether
    he contented himself with the doctrine of 16 to 1. As Sainte-Beuve
    said of Châteaubriand’s attachments: “They are like the stars in
    the sky,—the longer you look, the more of them you discover.”
    Christiane Vulpius, after being for seventeen years his mistress,
    became at last his wife. But the wife was so slighted that she was
    driven to intemperance, and Goethe’s only son inherited her
    passion and died of drink. Goethe was the great heathen of modern
    Christendom, deriding self-denial, extolling self-confidence,
    attention to the present, the seeking of enjoyment, and the
    submission of one’s self to the decrees of fate. Hutton calls
    Goethe “a Narcissus in love with himself.” Like George Eliot’s
    “Dinah,” in Adam Bede, Goethe’s “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul,”
    in Wilhelm Meister, are the purely artistic delineation of a
    character with which he had no inner sympathy. On Goethe, see
    Hutton, Essays, 2:1-79; Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:490; A. H.
    Strong, Great Poets, 279-331; Principal Shairp, Culture and
    Religion, 16—“Goethe, the high priest of culture, loathes Luther,
    the preacher of righteousness”; S. Law Wilson, Theology of Modern
    Literature, 149-156.

    Napoleon was not a markedly sensual man, but “his self-sufficiency
    surpassed the self-sufficiency of common men as the great Sahara
    desert surpasses an ordinary sand patch.” He wantonly divulged his
    amours to Josephine, with all the details of his ill-conduct, and
    when she revolted from them, he only replied: “I have the right to
    meet all your complaints with an eternal I.” When his wars had
    left almost no able-bodied men in France, he called for the boys,
    saying: “A boy can stop a bullet as well as a man,” and so the
    French nation lost two inches of stature. Before the battle of
    Leipzig, when there was prospect of unexampled slaughter, he
    exclaimed: “What are the lives of a million of men, to carry out
    the will of a man like me?” His most truthful epitaph was: “The
    little butchers of Ghent to Napoleon the Great” [butcher]. Heine
    represents Napoleon as saying to the world: “Thou shalt have no
    other gods before me.” Memoirs of Madame de Rémusat, 1:225—“At a
    fête given by the city of Paris to the Emperor, the repertory of
    inscriptions being exhausted, a brilliant device was resorted to.
    Over the throne which he was to occupy, were placed, in letters of
    gold, the following words from the Holy Scriptures: ‘I am the I
    am.’ And no one seemed to be scandalized.” Iago, in Shakespeare’s
    Othello, is the greatest villain of all literature; but Coleridge,
    Works, 4:180, calls attention to his passionless character. His
    sin is, like that of Goethe and of Napoleon, sin not of the flesh
    but of the intellect and will.


(_d_) It leads to absurd conclusions,—as, for example, that asceticism, by
weakening the power of sense, must weaken the power of sin; that man
becomes less sinful as his senses fail with age; that disembodied spirits
are necessarily holy; that death is the only Redeemer.


    Asceticism only turns the current of sin in other directions.
    Spiritual pride and tyranny take the place of fleshly desires. The
    miser clutches his gold more closely as he nears death. Satan has
    no physical organism, yet he is the prince of evil. Not our own
    death, but Christ’s death, saves us. But when Rousseau’s Émile
    comes to die, he calmly declares: “I am delivered from the
    trammels of the body, and am myself without contradiction.” At the
    age of seventy-five Goethe wrote to Eckermann: “I have ever been
    esteemed one of fortune’s favorites, nor can I complain of the
    course my life has taken. Yet truly there has been nothing but
    care and toil, and I may say that I have never had four weeks of
    genuine pleasure.” Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:743—“When the
    authoritative demand of Jesus Christ, to confess sin and beg
    remission through atoning blood, is made to David Hume, or David
    Strauss, or John Stuart Mill, none of whom were sensualists, it
    wakens intense mental hostility.”


(_e_) It interprets Scripture erroneously. In passages like Rom. 7:18—οὐκ
οἰκεῖ ἐν ἐμοί, τοῦτ᾽ ἐστιν ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου, ἀγαθόν—σάρξ, or flesh,
signifies, not man’s body, but man’s whole being when destitute of the
Spirit of God. The Scriptures distinctly recognize the seat of sin as
being in the soul itself, not in its physical organism. God does not tempt
man, nor has he made man’s nature to tempt him (James 1:13, 14).


    In the use of the term “_flesh_,” Scripture puts a stigma upon
    sin, and intimates that human nature without God is as corruptible
    and perishable as the body would be without the soul to inhabit
    it. The “carnal mind,” or _“__mind of the flesh__”__ (Rom. 8:7)_,
    accordingly means, not the sensual mind, but the mind which is not
    under the control of the Holy Spirit, its true life. See Meyer, on
    _1 Cor. 1:26_—σάρξ—“the purely human element in man, as opposed to
    the divine principle”; Pope, Theology, 2:65—σάρξ—“the whole being
    of man, body, soul, and spirit, separated from God and subjected
    to the creature”; Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 19—σάρξ—“human
    nature as living in and for itself, sundered from God and opposed
    to him.” The earliest and best statement of this view of the term
    σάρξ is that of Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:295-333,
    especially 321. See also Dickson, St. Paul’s Use of the Terms
    Flesh and Spirit, 270-271—σάρξ—“human nature without the
    πνεῦμα.... man standing by himself, or left to himself, over
    against God.... the natural man, conceived as not having yet
    received grace, or as not yet wholly under its influence.”

    _James 1:14, 15_—“_desire, when it hath conceived, beareth
    sin_”—innocent desire—for it comes in before the sin—innocent
    constitutional propensity, not yet of the nature of depravity, is
    only the _occasion_ of sin. The love of freedom is a part of our
    nature; sin arises only when the will determines to indulge this
    impulse without regard to the restraints of the divine law.
    Luther, Preface to Ep. to Romans: “Thou must not understand
    ‘flesh’ as though that only were ‘flesh’ which is connected with
    unchastity. St. Paul uses ‘flesh’ of the whole man, body and soul,
    reason and all his faculties included, because all that is in him
    longs and strives after the ‘flesh’.” Melanchthon: “Note that
    ‘flesh’ signifies the entire nature of man, sense and reason,
    without the Holy Spirit.” Gould, Bib. Theol. N. T., 76—“The σάρξ
    of Paul corresponds to the κόσμος of John. Paul sees the divine
    economy; John the divine nature. That Paul did not hold sin to
    consist in the possession of a body appears from his doctrine of a
    bodily resurrection (_1 Cor. 15:38-49_). This resurrection of the
    body is an integral part of immortality.” On σάρξ, see Thayer, N.
    T. Lexicon, 571; Kaftan, Dogmatik, 319.


(_f_) Instead of explaining sin, this theory virtually denies its
existence,—for if sin arises from the original constitution of our being,
reason may recognize it as misfortune, but conscience cannot attribute to
it guilt.


    Sin which in its ultimate origin is a necessary thing is no longer
    sin. On the whole theory of the sensuous origin of sin, see
    Neander, Planting and Training, 386, 428; Ernesti, Ursprung der
    Sünde, 1:29-274; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:132-147; Tulloch,
    Doctrine of Sin, 144—“That which is an inherent and necessary
    power in the creation cannot be a contradiction of its highest
    law.” This theory confounds sin with the mere consciousness of
    sin. On Schleiermacher, see Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin,
    1:341-349. On the sense-theory of sin in general, see John Caird,
    Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:26-52; N. R. Wood, The Witness of
    Sin, 79-87.


2. Sin as Finiteness.


This view explains sin as a necessary result of the limitations of man’s
finite being. As an incident of imperfect development, the fruit of
ignorance and impotence, sin is not absolutely but only relatively evil—an
element in human education and a means of progress. This is the view of
Leibnitz and of Spinoza. Modern writers, as Schurman and Royce, have
maintained that moral evil is the necessary background and condition of
moral good.


    The theory of Leibnitz may be found in his Théodicée, part 1,
    sections 20 and 31; that of Spinoza in his Ethics, part 4,
    proposition 20. Upon this view sin is the blundering of
    inexperience, the thoughtlessness that takes evil for good, the
    ignorance that puts its fingers into the fire, the stumbling
    without which one cannot learn to walk. It is a fruit which is
    sour and bitter simply because it is immature. It is a means of
    discipline and training for something better,—it is holiness in
    the germ, good in the making—“Erhebung des Menschen zur freien
    Vernunft.” The Fall was a fall up, and not down.

    John Fiske, in addition to his sense-theory of sin already
    mentioned, seems to hold this theory also. In his Mystery of Evil,
    he says: “Its impress upon the human soul is the indispensable
    background against which shall be set hereafter the eternal joys
    of heaven”; in other words, sin is necessary to holiness, as
    darkness is the indispensable contrast and background to light;
    without black, we should never be able to know white. Schurman,
    Belief in God, 251 _sq._—“The possibility of sin is the
    correlative of the free initiative God has vacated on man’s
    behalf.... The essence of sin is the enthronement of self.... Yet,
    without such self-absorption, there could be no sense of union
    with God. For consciousness is possible only through opposition.
    To know A, we must know it through not-A. Alienation from God is
    the necessary condition of communion with God. And this is the
    meaning of the Scripture that ‘where sin abounded, grace shall
    much more abound.’... Modern culture protests against the Puritan
    enthronement of goodness above truth.... For the decalogue it
    would substitute the wider new commandment of Goethe: ‘Live
    resolutely in the Whole, in the Good, in the Beautiful.’ The
    highest religion can be content with nothing short of the
    synthesis demanded by Goethe.... God is the universal life in
    which individual activities are included as movements of a single
    organism.”

    Royce, World and Individual, 2:364-384—“Evil is a discord
    necessary to perfect harmony. In itself it is evil, but in
    relation to the whole it has value by showing us its own
    finiteness and imperfection. It is a sorrow to God as much as to
    us; indeed, all our sorrow is his sorrow. The evil serves the good
    only by being overcome, thwarted, overruled. Every evil deed must
    somewhere and at some time be atoned for, by some other than the
    agent, if not by the agent himself.... All finite life is a
    struggle with evil. Yet from the final point of view the Whole is
    good. The temporal order contains at no moment anything that can
    satisfy. Yet the eternal order is perfect. We have all sinned and
    come short of the glory of God. Yet in just our life, viewed in
    its entirety, the glory of God is completely manifest. These hard
    sayings are the deepest expressions of the essence of true
    religion. They are also the most inevitable outcome of
    philosophy.... Were there no longing in time, there would be no
    peace in eternity. The prayer that God’s will may be done on earth
    as it is in heaven is identical with what philosophy regards as
    simple fact.”


We object to this theory that

(_a_) It rests upon a pantheistic basis, as the sense-theory rests upon
dualism. The moral is confounded with the physical; might is identified
with right. Since sin is a necessary incident of finiteness, and creatures
can never be infinite, it follows that sin must be everlasting, not only
in the universe, but in each individual soul.


    Goethe, Carlyle, and Emerson are representatives of this view in
    literature. Goethe spoke of the “idleness of wishing to jump off
    from one’s own shadow.” He was a disciple of Spinoza, who believed
    in one substance with contradictory attributes of thought and
    extension. Goethe took the pantheistic view of God with the
    personal view of man. He ignored the fact of sin. Hutton calls him
    “the wisest man the world has seen who was without humility and
    faith, and who lacked the wisdom of a child.” Speaking of Goethe’s
    Faust, Hutton says: “The great drama is radically false in its
    fundamental philosophy. Its primary notion is that even a spirit
    of pure evil is an exceedingly useful being, because he stirs into
    activity those whom he leads into sin, and so prevents them from
    rusting away in pure indolence. There are other and better means
    of stimulating the positive affections of men than by tempting
    them to sin.” On Goethe, see Hutton, Essays, 2:1-79; Shedd, Dogm.
    Theol., 1:490; A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology,
    279-331.

    Carlyle was a Scotch Presbyterian _minus_ Christianity. At the age
    of twenty-five, he rejected miraculous and historical religion,
    and thenceforth had no God but natural Law. His worship of
    objective truth became a worship of subjective sincerity, and his
    worship of personal will became a worship of impersonal force. He
    preached truth, service, sacrifice, but all in a mandatory and
    pessimistic way. He saw in England and Wales “twenty-nine
    millions—mostly fools.” He had no love, no remedy, no hope. In our
    civil war, he was upon the side of the slaveholder. He claimed
    that his philosophy made right to be might, but in practice he
    made might to be right. Confounding all moral distinctions, as he
    did in his later writings, he was fit to wear the title which he
    invented for another: “President of the
    Heaven-and-Hell-Amalgamation Society.” Froude calls him “a
    Calvinist without the theology”—a believer in predestination
    without grace. On Carlyle, see S. Law Wilson, Theology of Modern
    Literature, 131-178.

    Emerson also is the worshiper of successful force. His pantheism
    is most manifest in his poems “Cupido” and “Brahma,” and in his
    Essays on “Spirit” and on “The Over-soul.” Cupido: “The solid,
    solid universe Is pervious to Love; With bandaged eyes he never
    errs, Around, below, above. His blinding light He flingeth white
    On God’s and Satan’s brood, And reconciles by mystic wiles The
    evil and the good.” Brahma: “If the red slayer thinks he slays, Or
    if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways
    I keep, and pass, and turn again. Far or forgot to me is near;
    Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear;
    And one to me are shame or fame. They reckon ill who leave me out;
    When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt,
    And I the hymn the Brahmin sings. The strong gods pine for my
    abode, And pine in vain the sacred Seven; But thou, meek lover of
    the good, Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.”

    Emerson taught that man’s imperfection is not sin, and that the
    cure for it lies in education. “He lets God evaporate into
    abstract Ideality. Not a Deity in the concrete, nor a superhuman
    Person, but rather the immanent divinity in things, the
    essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of
    the transcendental cult.” His view of Jesus is found in his
    Essays, 2:263—“Jesus would absorb the race; but Tom Paine, or the
    coarsest blasphemer, helps humanity by resisting this exuberance
    of power.” In his Divinity School Address, he banished the person
    of Jesus from genuine religion. He thought “one could not be a man
    if he must subordinate his nature to Christ’s nature.” He failed
    to see that Jesus not only absorbs but transforms, and that we
    grow only by the impact of nobler souls than our own. Emerson’s
    essay style is devoid of clear and precise theological statement,
    and in this vagueness lies its harmfulness. Fisher, Nature and
    Method of Revelation, xii—“Emerson’s pantheism is not hardened
    into a consistent creed, for to the end he clung to the belief in
    personal immortality, and he pronounced the acceptance of this
    belief ‘the test of mental sanity.’ ” On Emerson, see S. L.
    Wilson, Theology of Modern Literature, 97-123.

    We may call this theory the “green-apple theory” of sin. Sin is a
    green apple, which needs only time and sunshine and growth to
    bring it to ripeness and beauty and usefulness. But we answer that
    sin is not a green apple, but an apple with a worm at its heart.
    The evil of it can never be cured by growth. The fall can never be
    anything else than downward. Upon this theory, sin is an
    inseparable factor in the nature of finite things. The highest
    archangel cannot be without it. Man in moral character is “the
    asymptote of God,”—forever learning, but never able to come to the
    knowledge of the truth. The throne of iniquity is set up forever
    in the universe. If this theory were true, Jesus, in virtue of his
    partaking of our finite humanity, must needs be a sinner. His
    perfect development, without sin, shows that sin was not a
    necessity of finite progress. Matthews, in Christianity and
    Evolution, 137—“It was not necessary for the prodigal to go into
    the far country and become a swineherd, in order to find out the
    father’s love.” E. H. Johnson, Syst. Theol., 141—“It is not the
    privilege of the Infinite alone to be good.” Dorner, System,
    1:119, speaks of the moral career which this theory describes, as
    “a _progressus in infinitum_, where the constant approach to the
    goal has as its reverse side an eternal separation from the goal.”
    In his “Transformation,” Hawthorne hints, though rather
    hesitatingly, that without sin the higher humanity of man could
    not be taken up at all, and that sin may be essential to the first
    conscious awakening of moral freedom and to the possibility of
    progress; see Hutton, Essays, 2:381.


(_b_) So far as this theory regards moral evil as a necessary
presupposition and condition of moral good, it commits the serious error
of confounding the possible with the actual. What is necessary to goodness
is not the actuality of evil, but only the possibility of evil.


    Since we cannot know white except in contrast to black, it is
    claimed that without knowing actual evil we could never know
    actual good. George A. Gordon, New Epoch for Faith, 49, 50, has
    well shown that in that case the elimination of evil would imply
    the elimination of good. Sin would need to have place in God’s
    being in order that he might be holy, and thus he would be
    divinity and devil in one person. Jesus too must needs be evil as
    well as good. Not only would it be true, as intimated above, that
    Christ, since his humanity is finite, must be a sinner, but also
    that we ourselves, who must always be finite, must always be
    sinners. We grant that holiness, in either God or man, must
    involve the abstract possibility of its opposite. But we maintain
    that, as this possibility in God is only abstract and never
    realized, so in man it should be only abstract and never realized.
    Man has power to reject this possible evil. His sin is a turning
    of the merely possible evil, by the decision of his will, into
    actual evil. Robert Browning is not free from the error above
    mentioned; see S. Law Wilson, Theology of Modern Literature,
    207-210; A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 433-444.

    This theory of sin dates back to Hegel. To him there is no real
    sin and cannot be. Imperfection there is and must always be,
    because the relative can never become the absolute. Redemption is
    only an evolutionary process, indefinitely prolonged, and evil
    must remain an eternal condition. All finite thought is an element
    in the infinite thought, and all finite will an element in the
    infinite will. As good cannot exist without evil as its
    antithesis, infinite righteousness should have for its counterpart
    an infinite wickedness. Hegel’s guiding principle was that “What
    is rational is real, and what is real is rational.” Seth,
    Hegelianism and Personality, remarks that this principle ignores
    “the riddle of the painful earth.” The disciples of Hegel thought
    that nothing remained for history to accomplish, now that the
    World-spirit had come to know himself in Hegel’s philosophy.

    Biedermann’s Dogmatik is based upon the Hegelian philosophy. At
    page 649 we read: “Evil is the finiteness of the world-being which
    clings to all individual existences by virtue of their belonging
    to the immanent world-order. Evil is therefore a necessary element
    in the divinely willed being of the world.” Bradley follows Hegel
    in making sin to be no reality, but only a relative appearance.
    There is no free will, and no antagonism between the will of God
    and the will of man. Darkness is an evil, a destroying agent. But
    it is not a positive force, as light is. It cannot be attacked and
    overcome as an entity. Bring light, and darkness disappears. So
    evil is not a positive force, as good is. Bring good, and evil
    disappears. Herbert Spencer’s Evolutionary Ethics fits in with
    such a system, for he says: “A perfect man in an imperfect race is
    impossible.” On Hegel’s view of sin, a view which denies holiness
    even to Christ, see J. Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:390-407; Dorner, Hist.
    Doct. Person of Christ, B. 3:131-162; Stearns, Evidence of Christ.
    Experience, 92-96; John Caird, Fund. Ideas, 2:1-25; Forrest,
    Authority of Christ, 13-16.


(_c_) It is inconsistent with known facts,—as for example, the following:
Not all sins are negative sins of ignorance and infirmity; there are acts
of positive malignity, conscious transgressions, wilful and presumptuous
choices of evil. Increased knowledge of the nature of sin does not of
itself give strength to overcome it; but, on the contrary, repeated acts
of conscious transgression harden the heart in evil. Men of greatest
mental powers are not of necessity the greatest saints, nor are the
greatest sinners men of least strength of will and understanding.


    Not the weak but the strong are the greatest sinners. We do not
    pity Nero and Cæsar Borgia for their weakness; we abhor them for
    their crimes. Judas was an able man, a practical administrator;
    and Satan is a being of great natural endowments. Sin is not
    simply a weakness,—it is also a power. A pantheistic philosophy
    should worship Satan most of all; for he is the truest type of
    godless intellect and selfish strength.

    _John 12:6_—Judas, “_having the bag, made away with what was put
    therein_.” Judas was set by Christ to do the work he was best
    fitted for, and that was best fitted to interest and save him.
    Some men may be put into the ministry, because that is the only
    work that will prevent their destruction. Pastors should find for
    their members work suited to the aptitudes of each. Judas was
    tempted, or tried, as all men are, according to his native
    propensity. While his motive in objecting to Mary’s generosity was
    really avarice, his pretext was charity, or regard for the poor.
    Each one of the apostles had his own peculiar gift, and was chosen
    because of it. The sin of Judas was not a sin of weakness, or
    ignorance, or infirmity. It was a sin of disappointed ambition, of
    malice, of hatred for Christ’s self-sacrificing purity.

    E. H. Johnson: “Sins are not men’s limitations, but the active
    expressions of a perverse nature.” M. F. H. Round, Sec. of Nat.
    Prison Association, on examining the record of a thousand
    criminals, found that one quarter of them had an exceptionally
    fine basis of physical life and strength, while the other three
    quarters fell only a little below the average of ordinary
    humanity; see The Forum, Sept. 1893. The theory that sin is only
    holiness in the making reminds us of the view that the most
    objectionable refuse can by ingenious processes be converted into
    butter or at least into oleomargarine. It is not true that “tout
    comprendre est tout pardonner.” Such doctrine obliterates all
    moral distinctions. Gilbert, Bab Ballads, “My Dream”: “I dreamt
    that somehow I had come To dwell in Topsy-Turvydom, Where vice is
    virtue, virtue vice; Where nice is nasty, nasty nice; Where right
    is wrong, and wrong is right; Where white is black and black is
    white.”


(_d_) like the sense-theory of sin, it contradicts both conscience and
Scripture by denying human responsibility and by transferring the blame of
sin from the creature to the Creator. This is to explain sin, again, by
denying its existence.


    Œdipus said that his evil deeds had been suffered, not done.
    Agamemnon, in the Iliad, says the blame belongs, not to himself,
    but to Jupiter and to fate. So sin blames everything and everybody
    but self. _Gen. 3:12_—“_The woman whom thou gavest to be with me,
    she gave me of the tree, and I did eat._” But self-vindicating is
    God-accusing. Made imperfect at the start, man cannot help his
    sin. By the very fact of his creation he is cut loose from God.
    That cannot be sin which is a necessary outgrowth of human nature,
    which is not our act but our fate. To all this, the one answer is
    found in Conscience. Conscience testifies that sin is not “das
    Gewordene,” but “das Gemachte,” and that it was his own act when
    man by transgression fell. The Scriptures refer man’s sin, not to
    the limitations of his being, but to the free will of man himself.
    On the theory here combated, see Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:271-295;
    Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:123-131; N. R. Wood, The Witness of
    Sin, 20-42.


3. Sin as Selfishness.


We hold the essential principle of sin to be selfishness. By selfishness
we mean not simply the exaggerated self-love which constitutes the
antithesis of benevolence, but that choice of self as the supreme end
which constitutes the antithesis of supreme love to God. That selfishness
is the essence of sin may be shown as follows:

A. Love to God is the essence of all virtue. The opposite to this, the
choice of self as the supreme end, must therefore be the essence of sin.

We are to remember, however, that the love to God in which virtue consists
is love for that which is most characteristic and fundamental in God,
namely, his holiness. It is not to be confounded with supreme regard for
God’s interests or for the good of being in general. Not mere benevolence,
but love for God as holy, is the principle and source of holiness in man.
Since the love of God required by the law is of this sort, it not only
does not imply that love, in the sense of benevolence, is the essence of
holiness in God,—it implies rather that holiness, or self-loving and
self-affirming purity, is fundamental in the divine nature. From this
self-loving and self-affirming purity, love properly so-called, or the
self-communicating attribute, is to be carefully distinguished (see vol.
1, pages 271-275).


    Bossuet, describing heathendom, says: “Every thing was God but God
    himself.” Sin goes further than this, and says: “I am myself all
    things,”—not simply as Louis XVI: “I am the state,” but: “I am the
    world, the universe, God.” Heinrich Heine: “I am no child. I do
    not want a heavenly Father any more.” A French critic of Fichte’s
    philosophy said that it was a flight toward the infinite which
    began with the ego, and never got beyond it. Kidd, Social
    Evolution, 75—“In Calderon’s tragic story, the unknown figure,
    which throughout life is everywhere in conflict with the
    individual whom it haunts, lifts the mask at last to disclose to
    the opponent his own features.” Caird, Evolution of Religion,
    1:78—“Every self, once awakened, is naturally a despot, and
    ‘bears, like the Turk, no brother near the throne.’ ” Every one
    has, as Hobbes said, “an infinite desire for gain or glory,” and
    can be satisfied with nothing but a whole universe for himself.
    Selfishness—“homo homini lupus.” James Martineau: “We ask Comte to
    lift the veil from the holy of holies and show us the all-perfect
    object of worship,—he produces a looking-glass and shows us
    ourselves.” Comte’s religion is a “synthetic idealization of our
    existence”—a worship, not of God, but of humanity; and “the
    festival of humanity” among Positivists—Walt Whitman’s “I
    celebrate myself.” On Comte, see Martineau, Types, 1:499. The most
    thorough discussion of the essential principle of sin is that of
    Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:147-182. He defines sin as “a turning
    away from the love of God to self-seeking.”

    N. W. Taylor holds that self-love is the primary cause of all
    moral action; that selfishness is a different thing, and consists
    not in making our own happiness our ultimate end, which we must do
    if we are moral beings, but in love of the world, and in
    preferring the world to God as our portion or chief good (see N.
    W. Taylor, Moral Govt., 1:24-26; 2:20-24, and Rev. Theol.,
    134-162; Tyler, Letters on the New Haven Theology, 72). We claim,
    on the contrary, that to make our own happiness our ultimate aim
    is itself sin, and the essence of sin. As God makes his holiness
    the central thing, so we are to live for that, loving self only in
    God and for God’s sake. This love for God as holy is the essence
    of virtue. The opposite to this, or supreme love for self, is sin.
    As Richard Lovelace writes: “I could not love thee, dear, so much,
    Loved I not honor more,” so Christian friends can say: “Our loves
    in higher love endure.” The sinner raises some lower object of
    instinct or desire to supremacy, regardless of God and his law,
    and this he does for no other reason than to gratify self. On the
    distinction between mere benevolence and the love required by
    God’s law, see Hovey, God With Us, 187-200; Hopkins, Works, 1:235;
    F. W. Robertson, Sermon I. Emerson: “Your goodness must have some
    edge to it, else it is none.” See Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics,
    327-370, on duties toward self as a moral end.

    Love to God is the essence of all virtue. We are to love God with
    all the heart. But what God? Surely, not the false God, the God
    who is indifferent to moral distinctions and who treats the wicked
    as he treats the righteous. The love which the law requires is
    love for the true God, the God of holiness. Such love aims at the
    reproduction of God’s holiness in ourselves and in others. We are
    to love ourselves only for God’s sake and for the sake of
    realizing the divine idea in us. We are to love others only for
    God’s sake and for the sake of realizing the divine idea in them.
    In our moral progress we, first, love self for our own sake;
    secondly, God for our own sake; thirdly, God for his own sake;
    fourthly, ourselves for God’s sake. The first is our state by
    nature; the second requires prevenient grace; the third,
    regenerating grace; and the fourth, sanctifying grace. Only the
    last is reasonable self-love. Balfour, Foundations of Belief,
    27—“Reasonable self-love is a virtue wholly incompatible with what
    is commonly called selfishness. Society suffers, not from having
    too much of it, but from having too little.” Altruism is not the
    whole of duty. Self-realization is equally important. But to care
    only for self, like Goethe, is to miss the true self-realization,
    which love to God ensures.

    Love desires only _the best_ for its object, and the best is
    _God_. The golden rule bids us give, not what others desire, but
    what they need. _Rom. 15:2_—“_Let each one of us please his
    neighbor for that which is good, unto edifying._” Deutsche Liebe:
    “Nicht Liebe die fragt: Willst du mein sein? Sondern Liebe die
    sagt: Ich muss dein sein.” Sin consists in taking for one’s self
    alone and apart from God that in one’s self and in others to which
    one has a right only in God and for God’s sake. Mrs. Humphrey
    Ward, David Grieve, 403—“How dare a man pluck from the Lord’s
    hand, for his wild and reckless use, a soul and body for which he
    died? How dare he, the Lord’s bondsman, steal his joy, carrying it
    off by himself into the wilderness, like an animal his prey,
    instead of asking it at the hands and under the blessing of the
    Master? How dare he, a member of the Lord’s body, forget the
    whole, in his greed for the one—eternity in his thirst for the
    present?” Wordsworth, Prelude, 546—“Delight how pitiable, Unless
    this love by a still higher love Be hallowed, love that breathes
    not without awe; Love that adores, but on the knees of prayer. By
    heaven inspired.... This spiritual love acts not nor can exist
    Without imagination, which in truth Is but another name for
    absolute power, And clearest insight, amplitude of mind, And
    reason in her most exalted mood.”

    Aristotle says that the wicked have no right to love themselves,
    but that the good may. So, from a Christian point of view, we may
    say: No unregenerate man can properly respect himself.
    Self-respect belongs only to the man who lives in God and who has
    God’s image restored to him thereby. True self-love is not love
    for the _happiness_ of the self, but for the _worth_ of the self
    in God’s sight, and this self-love is the condition of all genuine
    and worthy love for others. But true self-love is in turn
    conditioned by love to God as holy, and it seeks primarily, not
    the happiness, but the holiness, of others. Asquith, Christian
    Conception of Holiness, 98, 145, 154, 207—“Benevolence or love is
    not the same with altruism. Altruism is instinctive, and has not
    its origin in the moral reason. It has utility, and it may even
    furnish material for reflection on the part of the moral reason.
    But so far as it is not deliberate, not indulged for the sake of
    the end, but only for the gratification of the instinct of the
    moment, it is not moral.... Holiness is dedication to God, the
    Good, not as an external Ruler, but as an internal controller and
    transformer of character.... God is a being whose every thought is
    love, of whose thoughts not one is for himself, save so far as
    himself is not himself, that is, so far as there is a distinction
    of persons in the Godhead. Creation is one great unselfish
    thought—the bringing into being of creatures who can know the
    happiness that God knows.... To the spiritual man holiness and
    love are one. Salvation is deliverance from selfishness.” Kaftan,
    Dogmatik, 319, 320, regards the essence of sin as consisting, not
    in selfishness, but in turning away from God and so from the love
    which would cause man to grow in knowledge and likeness to God.
    But this seems to be nothing else than choosing self instead of
    God as our object and end.


B. All the different forms of sin can be shown to have their root in
selfishness, while selfishness itself, considered as the choice of self as
a supreme end, cannot be resolved into any simpler elements.

(_a_) Selfishness may reveal itself in the elevation to supreme dominion
of any one of man’s natural appetites, desires, or affections. Sensuality
is selfishness in the form of inordinate appetite. Selfish desire takes
the forms respectively of avarice, ambition, vanity, pride, according as
it is set upon property, power, esteem, independence. Selfish affection is
falsehood or malice, according as it hopes to make others its voluntary
servants, or regards them as standing in its way; it is unbelief or enmity
to God, according as it simply turns away from the truth and love of God,
or conceives of God’s holiness as positively resisting and punishing it.


    Augustine and Aquinas held the essence of sin to be pride; Luther
    and Calvin regarded its essence to be unbelief. Kreibig
    (Versöhnungslehre) regards it as “world-love”; still others
    consider it as enmity to God. In opposing the view that sensuality
    is the essence of sin, Julius Müller says: “Wherever we find
    sensuality, there we find selfishness, but we do not find that,
    where there is selfishness, there is always sensuality.
    Selfishness may embody itself in fleshly lust or inordinate desire
    for the creature, but this last cannot bring forth spiritual sins
    which have no element of sensuality in them.”

    Covetousness or avarice makes, not sensual gratification itself,
    but the things that may minister thereto, the object of pursuit,
    and in this last chase often loses sight of its original aim.
    Ambition is selfish love of power; vanity is selfish love of
    esteem. Pride is but the self-complacency, self-sufficiency, and
    self-isolation of a selfish spirit that desires nothing so much as
    unrestrained independence. Falsehood originates in selfishness,
    first as self-deception, and then, since man by sin isolates
    himself and yet in a thousand ways needs the fellowship of his
    brethren, as deception of others. Malice, the perversion of
    natural resentment (together with hatred and revenge), is the
    reaction of selfishness against those who stand, or are imagined
    to stand, in its way. Unbelief and enmity to God are effects of
    sin, rather than its essence; selfishness leads us first to doubt,
    and then to hate, the Lawgiver and Judge. Tacitus: “Humani generis
    proprium est odisse quem læseris.” In sin, self-affirmation and
    self-surrender are not coördinate elements, as Dorner holds, but
    the former conditions the latter.

    As love to God is love to God’s holiness, so love to man is love
    for holiness in man and desire to impart it. In other words, true
    love for man is the longing to make man like God. Over against
    this normal desire which should fill the heart and inspire the
    life, there stands a hierarchy of lower desires which may be
    utilized and sanctified by the higher love, but which may assert
    their independence and may thus be the occasions of sin. Physical
    gratification, money, esteem, power, knowledge, family, virtue,
    are proper objects of regard, so long as these are sought for
    God’s sake and within the limitations of his will. Sin consists in
    turning our backs on God and in seeking any one of these objects
    for its own sake; or, which is the same thing, for our own sake.
    Appetite gratified without regard to God’s law is lust; the love
    of money becomes avarice; the desire for esteem becomes vanity;
    the longing for power becomes ambition; the love for knowledge
    becomes a selfish thirst for intellectual satisfaction; parental
    affection degenerates into indulgence and nepotism; the seeking of
    virtue becomes self-righteousness and self-sufficiency. Kaftan,
    Dogmatik, 323—“Jesus grants that even the heathen and sinners love
    those who love them. But family love becomes family pride;
    patriotism comes to stand for country right or wrong; happiness in
    one’s calling leads to class distinctions.”

    Dante, in his Divine Comedy, divides the Inferno into three great
    sections: those in which are punished, respectively, incontinence,
    bestiality, and malice. Incontinence—sin of the heart, the
    emotions, the affections. Lower down is found bestiality—sin of
    the head, the thoughts, the mind, as infidelity and heresy. Lowest
    of all is malice—sin of the will, deliberate rebellion, fraud and
    treachery. So we are taught that the heart carries the intellect
    with it, and that the sin of unbelief gradually deepens into the
    intensity of malice. See A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their
    Theology, 133—“Dante teaches us that sin is the self-perversion of
    the will. If there is any thought fundamental to his system, it is
    the thought of freedom. Man is not a waif swept irresistibly
    downward on the current; he is a being endowed with power to
    resist, and therefore guilty if he yields. Sin is not misfortune,
    or disease, or natural necessity; it is wilfulness, and crime, and
    self-destruction. The Divine Comedy is, beyond all other poems,
    the poem of conscience; and this could not be, if it did not
    recognize man as a free agent, the responsible cause of his own
    evil acts and his own evil state.” See also Harris, in Jour. Spec.
    Philos., 21:350-451; Dinsmore, Atonement in Literature and Life,
    69-86.

    In Greek tragedy, says Prof. Wm. Arnold Stevens, the one sin which
    the gods hated and would not pardon was ὕβρις—obstinate
    self-assertion of mind or will, absence of reverence and
    humility—of which we have an illustration in Ajax. George
    MacDonald: “A man may be possessed of himself, as of a devil.”
    Shakespeare depicts this insolence of infatuation in Shylock,
    Macbeth, and Richard III. Troilus and Cressida, 4:4—“Something may
    be done that we will not; And sometimes we are devils to
    ourselves, When we will tempt the frailty of our powers, Presuming
    on their changeful potency.” Yet Robert G. Ingersoll said that
    Shakespeare holds crime to be the mistake of ignorance! N. P.
    Willis, Parrhasius: “How like a mounting devil in the heart Rules
    unrestrained ambition!”


(_b_) Even in the nobler forms of unregenerate life, the principle of
selfishness is to be regarded as manifesting itself in the preference of
lower ends to that of God’s proposing. Others are loved with idolatrous
affection because these others are regarded as a part of self. That the
selfish element is present even here, is evident upon considering that
such affection does not seek the highest interest of its object, that it
often ceases when unreturned, and that it sacrifices to its own
gratification the claims of God and his law.


    Even in the mother’s idolatry of her child, the explorer’s
    devotion to science, the sailor’s risk of his life to save
    another’s, the gratification sought may be that of a lower
    instinct or desire, and any substitution of a lower for the
    highest object is non-conformity to law, and therefore sin. H. B.
    Smith, System Theology, 277—“Some lower affection is supreme.” And
    the underlying motive which leads to this substitution is
    self-gratification. There is no such thing as disinterested sin,
    for “_every one that loveth is begotten of God_” (_1 John 4:7_).
    Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ: Much of the heroism of
    battle is simply “resolution in the actors to have their way,
    contempt for ease, animal courage which we share with the bulldog
    and the weasel, intense assertion of individual will and force,
    avowal of the rough-handed man that he has that in him which
    enables him to defy pain and danger and death.”

    Mozley on Blanco White, in Essays, 2:143: Truth may be sought in
    order to absorb truth in self, not for the sake of absorbing self
    in truth. So Blanco White, in spite of the pain of separating from
    old views and friends, lived for the selfish pleasure of new
    discovery, till all his early faith vanished, and even immortality
    seemed a dream. He falsely thought that the pain he suffered in
    giving up old beliefs was evidence of self-sacrifice with which
    God must be pleased, whereas it was the inevitable pain which
    attends the victory of selfishness. Robert Browning, Paracelsus,
    81—“I still must hoard, and heap, and class all truths With one
    ulterior purpose: I must know! Would God translate me to his
    throne, believe That I should only listen to his words To further
    my own ends.” F. W. Robertson on Genesis, 57—“He who sacrifices
    his sense of right, his conscience, for another, sacrifices the
    God within him; he is not sacrificing self.... He who prefers his
    dearest friend or his beloved child to the call of duty, will soon
    show that he prefers himself to his dearest friend, and would not
    sacrifice himself for his child.” _Ib._, 91—“In those who love
    little, love [for finite beings] is a primary affection,—a
    secondary, in those who love much.... The only true affection is
    that which is subordinate to a higher.” True love is love for the
    soul and its highest, its eternal, interests; love that seeks to
    make it holy; love for the sake of God and for the accomplishment
    of God’s idea in his creation.

    Although we cannot, with Augustine, call the virtues of the
    heathen “splendid vices”—for they were relatively good and
    useful,—they still, except in possible instances where God’s
    Spirit wrought upon the heart, were illustrations of a morality
    divorced from love to God, were lacking in the most essential
    element demanded by the law, were therefore infected with sin.
    Since the law judges all action by the heart from which it
    springs, no action of the unregenerate can be other than sin. The
    ebony-tree is white in its outer circles of woody fibre; at heart
    it is black as ink. There is no unselfishness in the unregenerate
    heart, apart from the divine enlightenment and energizing.
    Self-sacrifice for the sake of self is selfishness after all.
    Professional burglars and bank-robbers are often carefully
    abstemious in their personal habits, and they deny themselves the
    use of liquor and tobacco while in the active practice of their
    trade. Herron, The Larger Christ, 47—“It is as truly immoral to
    seek truth out of mere love of knowing it, as it is to seek money
    out of love to gain. Truth sought for truth’s sake is an
    intellectual vice; it is spiritual covetousness. It is an
    idolatry, setting up the worship of abstractions and generalities
    in place of the living God.”


(_c_) It must be remembered, however, that side by side with the selfish
will, and striving against it, is the power of Christ, the immanent God,
imparting aspirations and impulses foreign to unregenerate humanity, and
preparing the way for the soul’s surrender to truth and righteousness.


    _Rom. 8:7_—“_the mind of the flesh is enmity against God_”; _Acts
    17:27, 28_—“_he is not far from each one of us: for in him we
    live, and move, and have our being_”; _Rom. 2:4_—“_the goodness of
    God leadeth thee to repentance_”; _John 1:9_—“_the light which
    lighteth every man._” Many generous traits and acts of
    self-sacrifice in the unregenerate must be ascribed to the
    prevenient grace of God and to the enlightening influence of the
    Spirit of Christ. A mother, during the Russian famine, gave to her
    children all the little supply of food that came to her in the
    distribution, and died that they might live. In her decision to
    sacrifice herself for her offspring she may have found her
    probation and may have surrendered herself to God. The impulse to
    make the sacrifice may have been due to the Holy Spirit, and her
    yielding may have been essentially an act of saving faith. In
    _Mark 10:21, 22_—“_And Jesus looking upon him loved him ... he
    went away sorrowful_”—our Lord apparently loved the young man, not
    only for his gifts, his efforts, and his possibilities, but also
    for the manifest working in him of the divine Spirit, even while
    in his natural character he was without God and without love,
    self-ignorant, self-righteous, and self-seeking.

    Paul, in like manner, before his conversion, loved and desired
    righteousness, provided only that this righteousness might be the
    product and achievement of his own will and might reflect honor on
    himself; in short, provided only that self might still be
    uppermost. To be dependent for righteousness upon another was
    abhorrent to him. And yet this very impulse toward righteousness
    may have been due to the divine Spirit within him. On Paul’s
    experience before conversion, see E. D. Burton, Bib. World, Jan.
    1893. Peter objected to the washing of his feet by Jesus (_John
    13:8_), not because it humbled the Master too much in the eyes of
    the disciple, but because it humbled the disciple too much in his
    own eyes. Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:218—“Sin is the
    violation of the God-willed moral order of the world by the
    self-will of the individual.” Tophel on the Holy Spirit, 17—“You
    would deeply wound him [the average sinner] if you told him that
    his heart, full of sin, is an object of horror to the holiness of
    God.” The impulse to repentance, as well as the impulse to
    righteousness, is the product, not of man’s own nature, but of the
    Christ within him who is moving him to seek salvation.

    Elizabeth Barrett wrote to Robert Browning after she had accepted
    his proposal of marriage: “Henceforth I am yours for everything
    but to do you harm.” George Harris, Moral Evolution, 138—“Love
    seeks the true good of the person loved. It will not minister in
    an unworthy way to afford a temporary pleasure. It will not
    approve or tolerate that which is wrong. It will not encourage the
    coarse, base passions of the one loved. It condemns impurity,
    falsehood, selfishness. A parent does not really love his child if
    he tolerates the self-indulgence, and does not correct or punish
    the faults, of the child.” Hutton: “You might as well say that it
    is a fit subject for art to paint the morbid exstasy of cannibals
    over their horrid feasts, as to paint lust without love. If you
    are to delineate man at all, you must delineate him with his human
    nature, and therefore you can never omit from any worthy picture
    that conscience which is its crown.”

    Tennyson, in In Memoriam, speaks of “Fantastic beauty such as
    lurks In some wild poet when he works Without a conscience or an
    aim.” Such work may be due to mere human nature. But the lofty
    work of true creative genius, and the still loftier acts of men
    still unregenerate but conscientious and self-sacrificing, must be
    explained by the working in them of the immanent Christ, the life
    and light of men. James Martineau, Study, 1:20—“Conscience may act
    as human, before it is discovered to be divine.” See J. D. Stoops,
    in Jour. Philos., Psych., and Sci. Meth., 2:512—“If there is a
    divine life over and above the separate streams of individual
    lives, the welling up of this larger life in the experience of the
    individual is precisely the point of contact between the
    individual person and God.” Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity,
    2:122—“It is this divine element in man, this relationship to God,
    which gives to sin its darkest and direst complexion. For such a
    life is the turning of a light brighter than the sun into
    darkness, the squandering or bartering away of a boundless wealth,
    the suicidal abasement, to the things that perish, of a nature
    destined by its very constitution and structure for participation
    in the very being and blessedness of God.”

    On the various forms of sin as manifestations of selfishness, see
    Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:147-182; Jonathan Edwards, Works,
    2:268, 269; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:5, 6; Baird, Elohim
    Revealed, 243-262; Stewart, Active and Moral Powers, 11-91;
    Hopkins, Moral Science, 86-156. On the Roman Catholic “Seven
    Deadly Sins” (Pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, Lust),
    see Wetzer und Welte, Kirchenlexikon, and Orby Shipley, Theory
    about Sin, preface, xvi-xviii.


C. This view accords best with Scripture.

(_a_) The law requires love to God as its all-embracing requirement. (_b_)
The holiness of Christ consisted in this, that he sought not his own will
or glory, but made God his supreme end. (_c_) The Christian is one who has
ceased to live for self. (_d_) The tempter’s promise is a promise of
selfish independence. (_e_) The prodigal separates himself from his
father, and seeks his own interest and pleasure. (_f_) The “man of sin”
illustrates the nature of sin, in “opposing and exalting himself against
all that is called God.”


    (_a_) _Mat. 22:37-39_—the command of love to God and man; _Rom.
    13:8-10_—“_love therefore is the fulfilment of the law_”; _Gal.
    5:14_—“_the whole law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: Thou
    shalt love thy neighbor as thyself_”; _James 2:8_—“_the royal
    law._” (_b_) _John 5:30_—“_my judgment is righteous; because I
    seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me_”;
    _7:18_—“_He that speaketh from himself seeketh his own glory: but
    he that seeketh the glory of him that sent him, the same is true,
    and no unrighteousness is in him_”; _Rom. 15:3_—“_Christ also
    pleased not himself._” (_c_) _Rom. 14:7_—“_none of us liveth to
    himself, and none dieth to himself_”; _2 Cor. 5:15_—“_he died for
    all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves,
    but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again_”; _Gal.
    2:20_—“_I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I
    that live, but Christ liveth in me._” Contrast _2 Tim.
    3:2_—“_lovers of self._” (_d_) _Gen. 3:5_—“_ye shall be as God,
    knowing good and evil._” (_e_) _Luke 15:12, 13_—“_give me the
    portion of thy substance ... gathered all together and took his
    journey into a far country._” (_f_) _2 Thess. 2:3, 4_—“_the man of
    sin ... the son of perdition, he that opposeth and exalteth
    himself against all that is called God or that is worshipped; so
    that he sitteth in the temple of God, setting himself forth as
    God._”

    Contrast “_the man of sin_” who “_exalteth himself_” (_2 Thess.
    2:3, 4_) with the Son of God who “_emptied himself_” (_Phil.
    2:7_). On “_the man of sin_”, see Wm. Arnold Stevens, in Bap.
    Quar. Rev., July, 1889:328-360. Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 24—“We
    are conscious of sin, because we know that our true self is God,
    from whom we are severed. No ethics is possible unless we
    recognize an ideal for all human effort in the presence of the
    eternal Self which any account of conduct presupposes.” John
    Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:53-73—“Here, as in all
    organic life, the individual member or organ has no independent or
    exclusive life, and the attempt to attain to it is fatal to
    itself.” Milton describes man as “affecting Godhead, and so losing
    all.” Of the sinner, we may say with Shakespeare, Coriolanus,
    5:4—“He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne
    in.... There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male
    tiger.” No one of us, then, can sign too early “the declaration of
    dependence.” Both Old School and New School theologians agree that
    sin is selfishness; see Bellamy, Hopkins, Emmons, the younger
    Edwards, Finney, Taylor. See also A. H. Strong, Christ in
    Creation, 287-292.


Sin, therefore, is not merely a negative thing, or an absence of love to
God. It is a fundamental and positive choice or preference of self instead
of God, as the object of affection and the supreme end of being. Instead
of making God the centre of his life, surrendering himself unconditionally
to God and possessing himself only in subordination to God’s will, the
sinner makes self the centre of his life, sets himself directly against
God, and constitutes his own interest the supreme motive and his own will
the supreme rule.

We may follow Dr. E. G. Robinson in saying that, while sin as a state is
unlikeness to God, as a principle is opposition to God, and as an act is
transgression of God’s law, the essence of it always and everywhere is
selfishness. It is therefore not something external, or the result of
compulsion from without; it is a depravity of the affections and a
perversion of the will, which constitutes man’s inmost character.


    See Harris, in Bib. Sac., 18:148—“Sin is essentially egoism or
    selfism, putting self in God’s place. It has four principal
    characteristics or manifestations: (1) self-sufficiency, instead
    of faith; (2) self-will, instead of submission; (3) self-seeking,
    instead of benevolence; (4) self-righteousness, instead of
    humility and reverence.” All sin is either explicit or implicit
    “_enmity against God_” (_Rom. 8:7_). All true confessions are like
    David’s (_Ps. 51:4_)—“_Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And
    done that which is evil in thy sight._” Of all sinners it might be
    said that they “_Fight neither with small nor great, save only
    with the king of Israel_” (_1 K. 22:31_).

    Not every sinner is conscious of this enmity. Sin is a principle
    in course of development. It is not yet “_full-grown_” (_James
    1:15_—“_the sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth forth death_”).
    Even now, as James Martineau has said: “If it could be known that
    God was dead, the news would cause but little excitement in the
    streets of London and Paris.” But this indifference easily grows,
    in the presence of threatening and penalty, into violent hatred to
    God and positive defiance of his law. If the sin which is now
    hidden in the sinner’s heart were but permitted to develop itself
    according to its own nature, it would hurl the Almighty from his
    throne, and would set up its own kingdom upon the ruins of the
    moral universe. Sin is world-destroying, as well as
    God-destroying, for it is inconsistent with the conditions which
    make being as a whole possible; see Royce, World and Individual,
    2:366; Dwight, Works, sermon 80.



Section III.—Universality Of Sin.


We have shown that sin is a state, a state of the will, a selfish state of
the will. We now proceed to show that this selfish state of the will is
universal. We divide our proof into two parts. In the first, we regard sin
in its aspect as conscious violation of law; in the second, in its aspect
as a bias of the nature to evil, prior to or underlying consciousness.


I. Every human being who has arrived at moral consciousness has committed
acts, or cherished dispositions, contrary to the divine law.


1. _Proof from Scripture._

The universality of transgression is:

(_a_) Set forth in direct statements of Scripture.


    _1 K. 8:46_—“_there is no man that sinneth not_”; _Ps.
    143:2_—“_enter not into judgment with thy servant; For in thy
    sight no man living is righteous_”; _Prov. 20:9_—“_Who can say, I
    have made my heart clean, I am pure from my sin?_”; _Eccl.
    7:20_—“_Surely there is not a righteous man upon earth, that doeth
    good, and sinneth not_”; _Luke 11:13_—“_If ye, then, being evil_”;
    _Rom. 3:10, 12_—“_There is none righteous, no, not one.... There
    is none that doeth good, no, not so much as one_”; _19, 20_—“_that
    every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may be brought under
    the judgment of God: because by the works of the law shall no
    flesh be justified in his sight; for through the law cometh the
    knowledge of sin_”; _23_—“_for all have sinned, and fall short of
    the glory of God_”; _Gal. 3:22_—“_the scripture shut up all things
    under sin_”; _James 3:2_—“_For in many things we all stumble_”; _1
    John 1:8_—“_If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves,
    and the truth is not in us._” Compare _Mat. 6:12_—“_forgive us our
    debts_”—given as a prayer for all men; _14_—“_if ye forgive men
    their trespasses_”—the condition of our own forgiveness.


(_b_) Implied in declarations of the universal need of atonement,
regeneration, and repentance.


    Universal need of atonement: _Mark 16:16_—“_He that believeth and
    is baptised shall be saved_” (Mark 16:9-20, though probably not
    written by Mark, is nevertheless of canonical authority); _John
    3:16_—“_God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten
    Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish_”;
    _6:50_—“_This is the bread which cometh down out of heaven, that a
    man may eat thereof, and not die_”; _12:47_—“_I came not to judge
    the world, but to save the world_”; _Acts 4:12_—“_in none other is
    there salvation: for neither is there any other name under heaven,
    that is given among men, wherein we must be saved._” Universal
    need of regeneration: _John 3:3, 5_—“_Except one be born anew, he
    cannot see the kingdom of God.... Except one be born of water and
    the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God._” Universal
    need of repentance: _Acts 17:30_—“_commandeth men that they should
    all everywhere repent._” Yet Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy, in her
    “Unity of Good,” speaks of “the illusion which calls sin real and
    man a sinner needing a Savior.”


(_c_) Shown from the condemnation resting upon all who do not accept
Christ.


    _John 3:18_—“_he that believeth not hath been judged already,
    because he hath not believed on the name of the only begotten Son
    of God_”; _36_—“_he that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life,
    but the wrath of God abideth on him_”; Compare _1 John 5:19_—“_the
    whole world lieth in_ [_i. e._, in union with] _the evil one_”;
    see Annotated Paragraph Bible, _in loco_. Kaftan, Dogmatik,
    318—“Law requires love to God. This implies love to our neighbor,
    not only abstaining from all injury to him, but righteousness in
    all our relations, forgiving instead of requiting, help to enemies
    as well as friends in all salutary ways, self-discipline,
    avoidance of all sensuous immoderation, subjection of all sensuous
    activity as means for spiritual ends in the kingdom of God, and
    all this, not as a matter of outward conduct merely, but from the
    heart and as the satisfaction of one’s own will and desire. This
    is the will of God respecting us, which Jesus has revealed and of
    which he is the example in his life. Instead of this, man
    universally seeks to promote his own life, pleasure, and honor.”


(_d_) Consistent with those passages which at first sight seem to ascribe
to certain men a goodness which renders them acceptable to God, where a
closer examination will show that in each case the goodness supposed is a
merely imperfect and fancied goodness, a goodness of mere aspiration and
impulse due to preliminary workings of God’s Spirit, or a goodness
resulting from the trust of a conscious sinner in God’s method of
salvation.


    In _Mat 9:12_—“_They that are whole have no need of a physician,
    but they that are sick_”—Jesus means those who in their own esteem
    are whole; _cf._ _13_—“_I came not to call the righteous, but
    sinners_”—“if any were truly righteous, they would not need my
    salvation; if they think themselves so, they will not care to seek
    it” (An. Par. Bib.). In _Luke 10:30-37_—the parable of the good
    Samaritan—Jesus intimates, not that the good Samaritan was not a
    sinner, but that there were saved sinners outside of the bounds of
    Israel. In _Acts 10:35_—“_in every nation he that feareth him, and
    worketh righteousness, is acceptable to him_”—Peter declares, not
    that Cornelius was not a sinner, but that God had accepted him
    through Christ; Cornelius was already justified, but he needed to
    know (1) _that_ he was saved, and (2) _how_ he was saved; and
    Peter was sent to tell him of the fact, and of the method, of his
    salvation in Christ. In _Rom. 2:14_—“_for when Gentiles that have
    not the law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having
    the law, are a law unto themselves_”—it is only said that in
    certain respects the obedience of these Gentiles shows that they
    have an unwritten law in their hearts; it is not said that they
    perfectly obey the law and therefore have no sin—for Paul says
    immediately after (_Rom. 3:9_)—“_we before laid to the charge both
    of Jews and Greeks, that they are all under sin._”

    So with regard to the words “_perfect_” and “_upright_,” as
    applied to godly men. We shall see, when we come to consider the
    doctrine of Sanctification, that the word “_perfect_,” as applied
    to spiritual conditions already attained, signifies only a
    relative perfection, equivalent to sincere piety or maturity of
    Christian judgment, in other words, the perfection of a sinner who
    has long trusted in Christ, and in whom Christ has overcome his
    chief defects of character. See _1 Cor. 2:6_—“_we speak wisdom
    among the perfect_” (Am. Rev.: “_among them that are
    full-grown_”); _Phil. 3:15_—“_let us therefore, as many as are
    perfect, be thus minded_”—_i. e._, to press toward the goal—a goal
    expressly said by the apostles to be not yet attained (_v.
    12-14_).

    “Est deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo.” God is the “spark
    that fires our clay.” S. S. Times, Sept. 21, 1901:609—“Humanity is
    better and worse than men have painted it. There has been a kind
    of theological pessimism in denouncing human sinfulness, which has
    been blind to the abounding love and patience and courage and
    fidelity to duty among men.” A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation,
    287-290—“There is a natural life of Christ, and that life pulses
    and throbs in all men everywhere. All men are created in Christ,
    before they are recreated in him. The whole race lives, moves, and
    has its being in him, for he is the soul of its soul and the life
    of its life.” To Christ then, and not to unaided human nature, we
    attribute the noble impulses of unregenerate men. These impulses
    are drawings of his Spirit, moving men to repentance. But they are
    influences of his grace which, if resisted, leave the soul in more
    than its original darkness.


2. _Proof from history, observation, and the common judgment of mankind._

(_a_) History witnesses to the universality of sin, in its accounts of the
universal prevalence of priesthood and sacrifice.


    See references in Luthardt, Fund. Truths, 161-172, 335-339.
    Baptist Review, 1882:343—“Plutarch speaks of the tear-stained
    eyes, the pallid and woe-begone countenances which he sees at the
    public altars, men rolling themselves in the mire and confessing
    their sins. Among the common people the dull feeling of guilt was
    too real to be shaken off or laughed away.”


(_b_) Every man knows himself to have come short of moral perfection, and,
in proportion to his experience of the world, recognizes the fact that
every other man has come short of it also.


    Chinese proverb: “There are but two good men; one is dead, and the
    other is not yet born.” Idaho proverb: “The only good Indian is a
    dead Indian.” But the proverb applies to the white man also. Dr.
    Jacob Chamberlain, the missionary, said: “I never but once in
    India heard a man deny that he was a sinner. But once a Brahmin
    interrupted me and said: ‘I deny your premisses. I am not a
    sinner. I do not need to do better.’ For a moment I was abashed.
    Then I said: ‘But what do your neighbors say?’ Thereupon one cried
    out: ‘He cheated me in trading horses’; another: ‘He defrauded a
    widow of her inheritance.’ The Brahmin went out of the house, and
    I never saw him again.” A great nephew of Richard Brinsley
    Sheridan, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, when a child, wrote in a few
    lines an “Essay on the Life of Man,” which ran as follows: “A
    man’s life naturally divides itself into three distinct parts: the
    first when he is contriving and planning all kinds of villainy and
    rascality,—that is the period of youth and innocence. In the
    second, he is found putting in practice all the villainy and
    rascality he has contrived,—that is the flower of mankind and
    prime of life. The third and last period is that when he is making
    his soul and preparing for another world,—that is the period of
    dotage.”


(_c_) The common judgment of mankind declares that there is an element of
selfishness in every human heart, and that every man is prone to some form
of sin. This common judgment is expressed in the maxims: “No man is
perfect”; “Every man has his weak side”, or “his price”; and every great
name in literature has attested its truth.


    Seneca, De Ira, 3:26—“We are all wicked. What one blames in
    another he will find in his own bosom. We live among the wicked,
    ourselves being wicked”; Ep., 22—“No one has strength of himself
    to emerge [from this wickedness]; some one must needs hold forth a
    hand; some one must draw us out.” Ovid, Met., 7:19—“I see the
    things that are better and I approve them, yet I follow the
    worse.... We strive even after that which is forbidden, and we
    desire the things that are denied.” Cicero: “Nature has given us
    faint sparks of knowledge; we extinguish them by our
    immoralities.”

    Shakespeare, Othello, 3:3—“Where’s that palace whereinto foul
    things Sometimes Intrude not? Who has a breast so pure, But some
    uncleanly apprehensions keep leets [meetings in court] and
    law-days, and in sessions sit With meditations lawful?” Henry VI.,
    II:3:3—“Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all.” Hamlet, 2:2,
    compares God’s influence to the sun which “breeds maggots in a
    dead dog, Kissing carrion,”—that is, God is no more responsible
    for the corruption in man’s heart and the evil that comes from it,
    than the sun is responsible for the maggots which its heat breeds
    in a dead dog; 3:1—“We are arrant knaves all.” Timon of Athens,
    1:2—“Who lives that’s not depraved or depraves?”

    Goethe: “I see no fault committed which I too might not have
    committed.” Dr. Johnson: “Every man knows that of himself which he
    dare not tell to his dearest friend.” Thackeray showed himself a
    master in fiction by having no heroes; the paragons of virtue
    belonged to a cruder age of romance. So George Eliot represents
    life correctly by setting before us no perfect characters; all act
    from mixed motives. Carlyle, hero-worshiper as he was inclined to
    be, is said to have become disgusted with each of his heroes
    before he finished his biography. Emerson said that to understand
    any crime, he had only to look into his own heart. Robert Burns:
    “God knows I’m no thing I would be, Nor am I even the thing I
    could be.” Huxley: “The best men of the best epochs are simply
    those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.”
    And he speaks of “the infinite wickedness” which has attended the
    course of human history. Matthew Arnold: “What mortal, when he
    saw, Life’s voyage done, his heavenly Friend, Could ever yet dare
    tell him fearlessly:—I have kept uninfringed my nature’s law: The
    inly written chart thou gavest me, to guide me, I have kept by to
    the end?” Walter Besant, Children of Gibeon: “The men of ability
    do not desire a system in which they shall not be able to do good
    to themselves first.” “Ready to offer praise and prayer on Sunday,
    if on Monday they may go into the market place to skin their
    fellows and sell their hides.” Yet Confucius declares that “man is
    born good.” He confounds conscience with will—the _sense_ of right
    with the _love_ of right. Dean Swift’s worthy sought many years
    for a method of extracting sunbeams from cucumbers. Human nature
    of itself is as little able to bear the fruits of God.

    Every man will grant (1) that he is not perfect in moral
    character; (2) that love to God has not been the constant motive
    of his actions, _i. e._, that he has been to some degree selfish;
    (3) that he has committed at least one known violation of
    conscience. Shedd, Sermons to the Natural Man, 86, 87—“Those
    theorists who reject revealed religion, and remand man to the
    first principles of ethics and morality as the only religion that
    he needs, send him to a tribunal that damns him”; for it is simple
    fact that “no human creature, in any country or grade of
    civilization, has ever glorified God to the extent of his
    knowledge of God.”


3. _Proof from Christian experience._

(_a_) In proportion to his spiritual progress does the Christian recognize
evil dispositions within him, which but for divine grace might germinate
and bring forth the most various forms of outward transgression.


    See Goodwin’s experience, in Baird, Elohim Revealed, 409; Goodwin,
    member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, speaking of his
    conversion, says: “An abundant discovery was made to me of my
    inward lusts and concupiscence, and I was amazed to see with what
    greediness I had sought the gratification of every sin.” Töllner’s
    experience, in Martensen’s Dogmatics: Töllner, though inclined to
    Pelagianism, says: “I look into my own heart and I see with
    penitent sorrow that I must in God’s sight accuse myself of all
    the offences I have named,”—and he had named only deliberate
    transgressions;—“he who does not allow that he is similarly
    guilty, let him look deep into his own heart.” John Newton sees
    the murderer led to execution, and says: “There, but for the grace
    of God, goes John Newton.” Count de Maistre: “I do not know what
    the heart of a villain may be—I only know that of a virtuous man,
    and that is frightful.” Tholuck, on the fiftieth anniversary of
    his professorship at Halle, said to his students: “In review of
    God’s manifold blessings, the thing I seem most to thank him for
    is the conviction of sin.”

    Roper Ascham: “By experience we find out a short way, by a long
    wandering.” _Luke 15:25-32_ is sometimes referred to as indicating
    that there are some of God’s children who never wander from the
    Father’s house. But there were two prodigals in that family. The
    elder was a servant in spirit as well as the younger. J. J.
    Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 41, 42—“In the wish of
    the elder son that he might sometimes feast with his own friends
    apart from his father, was contained the germ of that desire to
    escape the wholesome restraints of home which, in its full
    development, had brought his brother first to riotous living, and
    afterwards to the service of the stranger and the herding of
    swine. This root of sin is in us all, but in him it was not so
    full-grown as to bring death. Yet he says: ‘_Lo, these many years
    do I serve thee_’ (δουλεύω—as a bondservant), ‘_and I never
    transgressed a commandment of thine._’ Are the father’s
    commandments grievous? Is service true and sincere, without love
    from the heart? The elder brother was calculating toward his
    father and unsympathetic toward his brother.” Sir J. R. Seelye,
    Ecce Homo: “No virtue can be safe, unless it is enthusiastic.”
    Wordsworth: “Heaven rejects the love Of nicely calculated less or
    more.”


(_b_) Since those most enlightened by the Holy Spirit recognize themselves
as guilty of unnumbered violations of the divine law, the absence of any
consciousness of sin on the part of unregenerate men must be regarded as
proof that they are blinded by persistent transgression.


    It is a remarkable fact that, while those who are enlightened by
    the Holy Spirit and who are actually overcoming their sins see
    more and more of the evil of their hearts and lives, those who are
    the slaves of sin see less and less of that evil, and often deny
    that they are sinners at all. Rousseau, in his Confessions,
    confesses sin in a spirit which itself needs to be confessed. He
    glosses over his vices, and magnifies his virtues. “No man,” he
    says, “can come to the throne of God and say: ‘I am a better man
    than Rousseau.’... Let the trumpet of the last judgment sound when
    it will: I will present myself before the Sovereign Judge with
    this book in my hand, and I will say aloud: ‘Here is what I did,
    what I thought, and what I was.’ ” “Ah,” said he, just before he
    expired, “how happy a thing it is to die, when one has no reason
    for remorse or self-reproach!” And then, addressing himself to the
    Almighty, he said: “Eternal Being, the soul that I am going to
    give thee back is as pure at this moment as it was when it
    proceeded from thee; render it a partaker of thy felicity!” Yet,
    in his boyhood, Rousseau was a petty thief. In his writings, he
    advocated adultery and suicide. He lived for more than twenty
    years in practical licentiousness. His children, most of whom, if
    not all, were illegitimate, he sent off to the foundling hospital
    as soon as they were born, thus casting them upon the charity of
    strangers, yet he inflamed the mothers of France with his eloquent
    appeals to them to nurse their own babies. He was mean,
    vacillating, treacherous, hypocritical, and blasphemous. And in
    his Confessions, he rehearses the exciting scenes of his life in
    the spirit of the bold adventurer. See N. M. Williams, in Bap.
    Review, art.: Rousseau, from which the substance of the above is
    taken.

    Edwin Forrest, when accused of being converted in a religious
    revival, wrote an indignant denial to the public press, saying
    that he had nothing to regret; his sins were those of omission
    rather than commission; he had always acted upon the principle of
    loving his friends and hating his enemies; and trusting in the
    justice as well as the mercy of God, he hoped, when he left this
    earthly sphere, to “wrap the drapery of his couch about him, and
    lie down to pleasant dreams.” And yet no man of his time was more
    arrogant, self-sufficient, licentious, revengeful. John Y. McCane,
    when sentenced to Sing Sing prison for six years for violating the
    election laws by the most highhanded bribery and ballot-stuffing,
    declared that he had never done anything wrong in his life. He was
    a Sunday School Superintendent, moreover. A lady who lived to the
    age of 92, protested that, if she had her whole life to live over
    again, she would not alter a single thing. Lord Nelson, after he
    had received his death wound at Trafalgar, said: “I have never
    been a great sinner.” Yet at that very time he was living in open
    adultery. Tennyson, Sea Dreams: “With all his conscience and one
    eye askew, So false, he partly took himself for true.” Contrast
    the utterance of the apostle Paul: _1 Tim. 1:15_—“_Christ Jesus
    came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief_.” It has
    been well said that “the greatest of sins is to be conscious of
    none.” Rowland Hill: “The devil makes little of sin, that he may
    retain the sinner.”

    The following reasons may be suggested for men’s unconsciousness
    of their sins: 1. We never know the force of any evil passion or
    principle within us, until we begin to resist it. 2. God’s
    providential restraints upon sin have hitherto prevented its full
    development. 3. God’s judgments against sin have not yet been made
    manifest. 4. Sin itself has a blinding influence upon the mind. 5.
    Only he who has been saved from the penalty of sin is willing to
    look into the abyss from which he has been rescued.—That a man is
    unconscious of any sin is therefore only proof that he is a great
    and hardened transgressor. This is also the most hopeless feature
    of his case, since for one who never realizes his sin there is no
    salvation. In the light of this truth, we see the amazing grace of
    God, not only in the gift of Christ to die for sinners, but in the
    gift of the Holy Spirit to convince men of their sins and to lead
    them to accept the Savior. _Ps. 90:8_—“_Thou hast set ... Our
    secret sins in the light of thy countenance_” = man’s inner
    sinfulness is hidden from himself, until it is contrasted with the
    holiness of God. Light = a luminary or sun, which shines down into
    the depths of the heart and brings out its hidden evil into
    painful relief. See Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:248-259;
    Edwards, Works, 2:326; John Caird, Reasons for Men’s
    Unconsciousness of their Sins, in Sermons, 33.


II. Every member of the human race, without exception, possesses a
corrupted nature, which is a source of actual sin, and is itself sin.


1. _Proof from Scripture._

A. The sinful acts and dispositions of men are referred to, and explained
by, a corrupt nature.


    By “nature” we mean that which is _born_ in a man, that which he
    has by birth. That there is an inborn corrupt state, from which
    sinful acts and dispositions flow, is evident from _Luke
    6:43-45_—“_there is no good tree that bringeth forth corrupt
    fruit.... the evil man out of the evil treasure_ [of his heart]
    _bringeth forth that which is evil_”; _Mat. 12:34_—“_Ye offspring
    of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things?_” _Ps.
    58:3_—“_The wicked are estranged from the womb: They go astray as
    soon as they are born, speaking lies._”


This corrupt nature (_a_) belongs to man from the first moment of his
being; (_b_) underlies man’s consciousness; (_c_) cannot be changed by
man’s own power; (_d_) first constitutes him a sinner before God; (_e_) is
the common heritage of the race.


    (_a_) _Ps. 51:5_—“_Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And in
    sin did my mother conceive me_”—here David is confessing, not his
    mother’s sin, but his own sin; and he declares that this sin goes
    back to the very moment of his conception. Tholuck, quoted by H.
    B. Smith, System, 281—“David confesses that sin begins with the
    life of man; that not only his works, but the man himself, is
    guilty before God.” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:94—“David mentions the
    fact that he was born sinful, as an aggravation of his particular
    act of adultery, and not as an excuse for it.” (_b_) _Ps.
    19:12_—“_Who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden
    faults_”; _51:6, 7_—“_Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward
    parts; And in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom.
    Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: Wash me, and I shall
    be whiter than snow._” (_c_) _Jer. 13:23_—“_Can the Ethiopian
    change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do
    good, that are accustomed to do evil_”; _Rom. 7:24_—“_Wretched man
    that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?_”
    (_d_) _Ps. 51:6_—“_Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward
    parts_”; _Jer. 17:9_—“_The heart is deceitful above all things and
    it is exceedingly corrupt: who can know it? I, Jehovah, search the
    mind, I try the heart,_”—only God can fully know the native and
    incurable depravity of the human heart; see Annotated Paragraph
    Bible, _in loco_, (_e_) _Job 14:4_—“_Who can bring a clean thing
    out of an unclean? not one_”; _John 3:6_—“_That which is born of
    the flesh is flesh,_” _i. e._, human nature sundered from God.
    Pope, Theology, 2:53—“Christ, who knew what was in man, says: ‘_If
    ye then, being evil_’ (_Mat. 7:11_), and ‘_That which is born of
    the flesh is flesh_’ (_John 3:6_), that is—putting the two
    together—‘men are evil, because they are born evil.’ ”

    Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story of The Minister’s Black Veil portrays
    the isolation of every man’s deepest life, and the awe which any
    visible assertion of that isolation inspires. C. P. Cranch: “We
    are spirits clad in veils; Man by man was never seen; All our deep
    communing fails To remove the shadowy screen.” In the heart of
    every one of us is that fearful “black drop,” which the Koran says
    the angel showed to Mohammed. Sin is like the taint of scrofula in
    the blood, which shows itself in tumors, in consumption, in
    cancer, in manifold forms, but is everywhere the same organic
    evil. Byron spoke truly of “This ineradicable taint of sin, this
    boundless Upas, this all-blasting tree.”

    E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theol., 161, 162—“The objection that
    conscience brings no charge of guilt against inborn depravity,
    however true it may be of the nature in its passive state, is
    seen, when the nature is roused to activity, to be unfounded. This
    faculty, on the contrary, lends support to the doctrine it is
    supposed to overthrow. When the conscience holds intelligent
    inquisition upon single acts, it soon discovers that these are
    mere accessories to crime, while the principal is hidden away
    beyond the reach of consciousness. In following up its
    inquisition, it in due time extorts the exclamation of David: _Ps.
    51:5_—‘_Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And in sin did my
    mother conceive me._’ Conscience traces guilt to its seat in the
    inherited nature.”


B. All men are declared to be by nature children of wrath (Eph. 2:3). Here
“nature” signifies something inborn and original, as distinguished from
that which is subsequently acquired. The text implies that: (_a_) Sin is a
nature, in the sense of a congenital depravity of the will. (_b_) This
nature is guilty and condemnable,—since God’s wrath rests only upon that
which deserves it. (_c_) All men participate in this nature and in this
consequent guilt and condemnation.


    _Eph. 2:3_—“_were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest._”
    Shedd: “Nature here is not substance created by God, but
    corruption of that substance, which corruption is created by man.”
    “Nature” (from _nascor_) may denote anything inborn, and the term
    may just as properly designate inborn evil tendencies and state,
    as inborn faculties or substance. “_By nature_” therefore = “by
    birth”; compare _Gal. 2:15_—“_Jews by nature._” E. G. Robinson:
    “Nature = not οὐσία, or essence, but only qualification of
    essence, as something born in us. There is just as much difference
    in babes, from the beginning of their existence, as there is in
    adults. If sin is defined as ‘voluntary transgression of known
    law,’ the definition of course disposes of original sin.” But if
    sin is a selfish state of the will, such a state is demonstrably
    inborn. Aristotle speaks of some men as born to be savages (φύσει
    βάρβαροι), and of others as destined by nature to be slaves (φύσει
    δοῦλοι). Here evidently is a congenital aptitude and disposition.
    Similarly we can interpret Paul’s words as declaring nothing less
    than that men are possessed at birth of an aptitude and
    disposition which is the object of God’s just displeasure.

    The opposite view can be found in Stevens, Pauline Theology,
    152-157. Principal Fairbairn also says that inherited sinfulness
    “is _not_ transgression, and is _without_ guilt.” Ritschl, Just.
    and Recon., 344—“The predicate ‘children of wrath’ refers to the
    former actual transgression of those who now as Christians have
    the right to apply to themselves that divine purpose of grace
    which is the antithesis of wrath.” Meyer interprets the verse; “We
    _become_ children of wrath by following a natural propensity.” He
    claims the doctrine of the apostle to be, that man incurs the
    divine wrath by his _actual_ sin, when he submits his will to the
    inborn sin principle. So N. W. Taylor, Concio ad Clerum, quoted in
    H. B. Smith, System, 281—“We were by nature such that we became
    through our own act children of wrath.” “But,” says Smith, “if the
    apostle had meant this, he could have said so; there is a proper
    Greek word for ‘became’; the word which is used can only be
    rendered ‘were.’ ” So _1 Cor. 7:14_—“_else were your children
    unclean_”—implies that, apart from the operations of grace, all
    men are defiled in virtue of their very birth from a corrupt
    stock. Cloth is first died in the wool, and then dyed again after
    the weaving. Man is a “double-dyed villain.” He is corrupted by
    nature and afterwards by practice. The colored physician in New
    Orleans advertised that his method was “first to remove the
    disease, and then to eradicate the system.” The New School method
    of treating this text is of a similar sort. Beginning with a
    definition of sin which excludes from that category all inborn
    states of the will, it proceeds to vacate of their meaning the
    positive statements of Scripture.

    For the proper interpretation of _Eph. 2:3_, see Julius Müller,
    Doct. of Sin, 2:278, and Commentaries of Harless and Olshausen.
    See also Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:212 _sq._; Thomasius, Christi
    Person und Werk, 1:289; and an excellent note in the Expositor’s
    Greek N.T., _in loco_. _Per contra_, see Reuss, Christ. Theol. in
    Apost. Age, 2:29, 79-84; Weiss, Bib. Theol. N.T., 239.


C. Death, the penalty of sin, is visited even upon those who have never
exercised a personal and conscious choice (Rom. 5:12-14). This text
implies that (_a_) Sin exists in the case of infants prior to moral
consciousness, and therefore in the nature, as distinguished from the
personal activity. (_b_) Since infants die, this visitation of the penalty
of sin upon them marks the ill-desert of that nature which contains in
itself, though undeveloped, the germs of actual transgression. (_c_) It is
therefore certain that a sinful, guilty, and condemnable nature belongs to
all mankind.


    _Rom. 5:12-14_—“_Therefore, as through one man sin entered into
    the world, and death through sin; and so death passed unto all
    men, for that all sinned:—for until the law sin was in the world;
    but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death
    reigned from Adam until Moses, even over them that had not sinned
    after the likeness of Adam’s transgression_”—that is, over those
    who, like infants, had never personally and consciously sinned.
    See a more full treatment of these last words in connection with
    an exegesis of the whole passage—_Rom. 5:12-19_—under Imputation
    of Sin, pages 625-627.

    N. W. Taylor maintained that infants, prior to moral agency, are
    not subjects of the moral government of God, any more than are
    animals. In this he disagreed with Edwards, Bellamy, Hopkins,
    Dwight, Smalley, Griffin. See Tyler, Letters on N. E. Theol., 8,
    132-142—“To say that animals die, and therefore death can be no
    proof of sin in infants, is to take infidel ground. The infidel
    has just as good a right to say: Because animals die without being
    sinners, therefore adults may. If death may reign to such an
    alarming extent over the human race and yet be no proof of sin,
    then you adopt the principle that death may reign to any extent
    over the universe, yet never can be made a proof of sin in any
    case.” We reserve our full proof that physical death is the
    penalty of sin to the section on Penalty as one of the
    Consequences of Sin.


2. _Proof from Reason._

Three facts demand explanation: (_a_) The universal existence of sinful
dispositions in every mind, and of sinful acts in every life. (_b_) The
preponderating tendencies to evil, which necessitate the constant
education of good impulses, while the bad grow of themselves. (_c_) The
yielding of the will to temptation, and the actual violation of the divine
law, in the case of every human being so soon as he reaches moral
consciousness.


    The fundamental selfishness of man is seen in childhood, when
    human nature acts itself out spontaneously. It is difficult to
    develop courtesy in children. There can be no true courtesy
    without regard for man as man and willingness to accord to each
    man his place and right as a son of God equal with ourselves. But
    children wish to please themselves without regard to others. The
    mother asks the child: “Why don’t you do right instead of doing
    wrong?” and the child answers: “Because it makes me so tired,” or
    “Because I do wrong without trying.” Nothing runs itself, unless
    it is going down hill. “No other animal does things habitually
    that will injure and destroy it, and does them from the love of
    it. But man does this, and he is born to do it, he does it from
    birth. As the seedlings of the peach-tree are all peaches, not
    apples, and those of thorns are all thorns, not grapes, so all the
    descendants of man are born with evil in their natures. That sin
    continually comes back to us, like a dog or cat that has been
    driven away, proves that our hearts are its home.”

    Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s novel, Robert Elsmere, represents the
    milk-and-water school of philanthropists. “Give man a chance,”
    they say; “give him good example and favorable environment and he
    will turn out well. He is more sinned against than sinning. It is
    the outward presence of evil that drives men to evil courses.” But
    God’s indictment is found in _Rom. 8:7_—“_the mind of the flesh is
    enmity against God._” G. P. Fisher: “Of the ideas of natural
    religion, Plato, Plutarch and Cicero found in the fact that they
    are in man’s _reason_, but not obeyed and realized in man’s
    _will_, the most convincing evidence that humanity is at schism
    with itself, and therefore depraved, fallen, and unable to deliver
    itself. The reason why many moralists fail and grow bitter and
    hateful is that they do not take account of this state of sin.”


Reason seeks an underlying principle which will reduce these multitudinous
phenomena to unity. As we are compelled to refer common physical and
intellectual phenomena to a common physical and intellectual nature, so we
are compelled to refer these common moral phenomena to a common moral
nature, and to find in it the cause of this universal, spontaneous, and
all-controlling opposition to God and his law. The only possible solution
of the problem is this, that the common nature of mankind is corrupt, or,
in other words, that the human will, prior to the single volitions of the
individual, is turned away from God and supremely set upon
self-gratification. This unconscious and fundamental direction of the
will, as the source of actual sin, must itself be sin; and of this sin all
mankind are partakers.


    The greatest thinkers of the world have certified to the
    correctness of this conclusion. See Aristotle’s doctrine of “the
    slope,” described in Chase’s Introduction to Aristotle’s Ethics,
    XXXV and 32—“In regard to moral virtue, man stands on a slope. His
    appetites and passions gravitate downward; his reason attracts him
    upward. Conflict occurs. A step upward, and reason gains what
    passion has lost; but the reverse is the case if he steps
    downward. The tendency in the former case is to the entire
    subjection of passion; in the latter case, to the entire
    suppression of reason. The slope will terminate upwards in a level
    summit where men’s steps will be secure, or downwards in an
    irretrievable plunge over the precipice. Continual self-control
    leads to absolute self-mastery; continual failure, to the utter
    absence of self-control. But _all we can see is the slope_. No man
    is ever at the ἠρεμία of the summit, nor can we say that a man has
    irretrievably fallen into the abyss. How it is that men constantly
    act against their own convictions of what is right, and their
    previous determinations to follow right, is a mystery Which
    Aristotle discusses, but leaves unexplained.

    “Compare the passage in the Ethics, 1:11—‘Clearly there is in them
    [men], besides the Reason, some other Inborn principle (πεφυκός)
    which fights with and strains against the Reason.... There is in
    the soul also somewhat besides the Reason which is opposed to this
    and goes against it.’—Compare this passage with Paul, in _Rom.
    7:23_—‘_I see a different law in my members, warring against the
    law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of
    sin which is in my members._’ But as Aristotle does not explain
    the cause, so he suggests no cure. Revelation alone can account
    for the disease, or point out the remedy.”

    Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 1:102—“Aristotle makes the significant
    and almost surprising observation, that the character which has
    become evil by guilt can just as little be thrown off again at
    mere volition, as the person who has made himself sick by his own
    fault can become well again at mere volition; once become evil or
    sick, it stands no longer within his discretion to cease to be so;
    a stone, when once cast, cannot be caught back from its flight;
    and so is it with the character that has become evil.” He does not
    tell “how a reformation in character is possible,—moreover, he
    does not concede to evil any other than an individual
    effect,—knows nothing of any natural solidarity of evil in
    self-propagating, morally degenerated races” (Nic. Eth., 3:6, 7;
    5:12; 7:2, 3; 10:10). The good nature, he says, “is evidently not
    within our power, but is by some kind of divine causality
    conferred upon the truly happy.”

    Plato speaks of “that blind, many-headed wild beast of all that is
    evil within thee.” He repudiates the idea that men are naturally
    good, and says that, if this were true, all that would be needed
    to make them holy would be to shut them up, from their earliest
    years, so that they might not be corrupted by others. Republic, 4
    (Jowett’s translation, 11:276)—“There is a rising up of part of
    the soul against the whole of the soul.” Meno, 89—“The cause of
    corruption is from our parents, so that we never relinquish their
    evil way, or escape the blemish of their evil habit.” Horace, Ep.,
    1:10—“Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.” Latin
    proverb: “Nemo repente fuit turpissimus.” Pascal: “We are born
    unrighteous; for each one tends to himself, and the bent toward
    self is the beginning of all disorder.” Kant, in his Metaphysical
    Principles of Human Morals, speaks of “the indwelling of an evil
    principle side by side with the good one, or the radical evil of
    human nature,” and of “the contest between the good and the evil
    principles for the control of man.” “Hegel, pantheist as he was,
    declared that original sin is the nature of every man,—every man
    begins with it” (H. B. Smith).

    Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 4:3—“All is oblique: There’s nothing
    level in our cursed natures, But direct villainy.” All’s Well,
    4:3—“As we are in ourselves, how weak we are! Merely our own
    traitors.” Measure for Measure, 1:2—“Our natures do pursue, Like
    rats that ravin down their proper bane, A thirsty evil, and when
    we drink, we die.” Hamlet, 3:1—“Virtue cannot so inoculate our old
    stock, but we shall relish of it.” Love’s Labor Lost, 1:1—“Every
    man with his affects is born, Not by might mastered, but by
    special grace.” Winter’s Tale, 1:2—“We should have answered Heaven
    boldly, Not guilty; the imposition cleared Hereditary ours”—that
    is, provided our hereditary connection with Adam had not made us
    guilty. On the theology of Shakespeare, see A. H. Strong, Great
    Poets, 196-211—“If any think it irrational to believe in man’s
    depravity, guilt, and need of supernatural redemption, they must
    also be prepared to say that Shakespeare did not understand human
    nature.”

    S. T. Coleridge, Omniana, at the end: “It is a fundamental article
    of Christianity that I am a fallen creature ... that an evil
    ground existed in my will, previously to any act or assignable
    moment of time in my consciousness; I am born a child of wrath.
    This fearful mystery I pretend not to understand. I cannot even
    conceive the possibility of it; but I know that it is so, ... and
    what is real must be possible.” A sceptic who gave his children no
    religious training, with the view of letting them each in mature
    years choose a faith for himself, reproved Coleridge for letting
    his garden run to weeds; but Coleridge replied, that he did not
    think it right to prejudice the soil in favor of roses and
    strawberries. Van Oosterzee: Rain and sunshine make weeds grow
    more quickly, but could not draw them out of the soil if the seeds
    did not lie there already; so evil education and example draw out
    sin, but do not implant it. Tennyson, Two Voices: “He finds a
    baseness in his blood, At such strange war with what is good, He
    cannot do the thing he would.” Robert Browning, Gold Hair: a
    Legend of Pornic: “The faith that launched point-blank her dart At
    the head of a lie—taught Original Sin, The corruption of Man’s
    Heart.” Taine, Ancien Régime: “Savage, brigand and madman each of
    us harbors, in repose or manacled, but always living, in the
    recesses of his own heart.” Alexander Maclaren: “A great mass of
    knotted weeds growing in a stagnant pool is dragged toward you as
    you drag one filament.” Draw out one sin, and it brings with it
    the whole matted nature of sin.

    Chief Justice Thompson, of Pennsylvania: “If those who preach had
    been lawyers previous to entering the ministry, they would know
    and say far more about the depravity of the human heart than they
    do. The old doctrine of total depravity is the only thing that can
    explain the falsehoods, the dishonesties, the licentiousness, and
    the murders which are so rife in the world. Education, refinement,
    and even a high order of talent, cannot overcome the inclination
    to evil which exists in the heart, and has taken possession of the
    very fibres of our nature.” See Edwards, Original Sin, in Works,
    2:309-510; Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:259-307; Hodge, Syst.
    Theol., 2:231-238; Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 226-236.



Section IV.—Origin Of Sin In The Personal Act Of Adam.


With regard to the origin of this sinful nature which is common to the
race, and which is the occasion of all actual transgressions, reason
affords no light. The Scriptures, however, refer the origin of this nature
to that free act of our first parents by which they turned away from God,
corrupted themselves, and brought themselves under the penalties of the
law.


    Chandler, Spirit of Man, 76—“It is vain to attempt to sever the
    moral life of Christianity from the historical fact in which it is
    rooted. We may cordially assent to the assertion that the whole
    value of historical events is in their ideal significance. But in
    many cases, part of that which the idea signifies is the fact that
    it has been exhibited in history. The value and interest of the
    conquest of Greece over Persia lie in the significant idea of
    freedom and intelligence triumphing over despotic force; but
    surely a part, and a very important part, of the idea, is the fact
    that this triumph was won in a historical past, and the
    encouragement for the present which rests upon that fact. So too,
    the value of Christ’s resurrection lies in its immense moral
    significance as a principle of life; but an essential part of that
    very significance is the fact that the principle was actually
    realized by One in whom mankind was summed up and expressed, and
    by whom, therefore, the power of realizing it is conferred on all
    who receive him.”

    As it is important for us to know that redemption is not only
    ideal but actual, so it is important for us to know that sin is
    not an inevitable accompaniment of human nature, but that it had a
    historical beginning. Yet no _a priori_ theory should prejudice
    our examination of the facts. We would preface our consideration
    of the Scriptural account, therefore, by stating that our view of
    inspiration would permit us to regard that account as inspired,
    even if it were mythical or allegorical. As God can use all
    methods of literary composition, so he can use all methods of
    instructing mankind that are consistent with essential truth.
    George Adam Smith observes that the myths and legends of primitive
    folk-lore are the intellectual equivalents of later philosophies
    and theories of the universe, and that “at no time has revelation
    refused to employ such human conceptions for the investiture and
    conveyance of the higher spiritual truths.” Sylvester Burnham:
    “Fiction and myth have not yet lost their value for the moral and
    religious teacher. What a knowledge of his own nature has shown
    man to be good for his own use, God surely may also have found to
    be good for his use. Nor would it of necessity affect the value of
    the Bible if the writer, in using for his purpose myth or fiction,
    supposed that he was using history. Only when the value of the
    truth of the teaching depends upon the historicity of the alleged
    fact, does it become impossible to use myth or fiction for the
    purpose of teaching.” See vol. 1, page 241 of this work, with
    quotations from Denney, Studies in Theology, 218, and Gore, in Lux
    Mundi, 356. Euripides: “Thou God of all! infuse light into the
    souls of men, whereby they may be enabled to know what is the root
    from which all their evils spring, and by what means they may
    avoid them!”


I. The Scriptural Account of the Temptation and Fall in Genesis 3:1-7.


1. Its general, character not mythical or allegorical, but historical.


We adopt this view for the following reasons:—(_a_) There is no intimation
in the account itself that it is not historical. (_b_) As a part of a
historical book, the presumption is that it is itself historical. (_c_)
The later Scripture writers refer to it as a veritable history even in its
details. (_d_) Particular features of the narrative, such as the placing
of our first parents in a garden and the speaking of the tempter through a
serpent-form, are incidents suitable to man’s condition of innocent but
untried childhood. (_e_) This view that the narrative is historical does
not forbid our assuming that the trees of life and of knowledge were
symbols of spiritual truths, while at the same time they were outward
realities.


    See _John 8:44_—“_Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts
    of your father it is your will to do. He was a murderer from the
    beginning, and standeth not in the truth, because there is no
    truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for
    he is a liar and the father thereof_”; _2 Cor. 11:3_—“_the serpent
    beguiled Eve in his craftiness_”; _Rev. 20:2_—“_the dragon, the
    old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan._” H. B. Smith, System,
    261—“If Christ’s temptation and victory over Satan were historical
    events, there seems to be no ground for supposing that the first
    temptation was not a historical event.” We believe in the unity
    and sufficiency of Scripture. We moreover regard the testimony of
    Christ and the apostles as conclusive with regard to the
    historicity of the account in Genesis. We assume a divine
    superintendence in the choice of material by its author, and the
    fulfilment to the apostles of Christ’s promise that they should be
    guided into the truth. Paul’s doctrine of sin is so manifestly
    based upon the historical character of the Genesis story, that the
    denial of the one must naturally lead to the denial of the other.
    John Milton writes, in his Areopagitica: “It was from out of the
    rind of one apple tasted that the knowledge of good and evil, as
    two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And
    perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into, that is to say, of
    knowing good by evil.” He should have learned to know evil as God
    knows it—as a thing possible, hateful, and forever rejected. He
    actually learned to know evil as Satan knows it—by making it
    actual and matter of bitter experience.

    Infantile and innocent man found his fit place and work in a
    garden. The language of appearances is doubtless used. Satan might
    enter into a brute-form, and might appear to speak through it. In
    all languages, the stories of brutes speaking show that such a
    temptation is congruous with the condition of early man. Asiatic
    myths agree in representing the serpent as the emblem of the
    spirit of evil. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was the
    symbol of God’s right of eminent domain, and indicated that all
    belonged to him. It is not necessary to suppose that it was known
    by this name before the Fall. By means of it man came to know
    good, by the loss of it; to know evil, by bitter experience; C. H.
    M.: “To know good, without the power to do it; to know evil,
    without the power to avoid it.” Bible Com., 1:40—The tree of life
    was symbol of the fact that “life is to be sought, not from
    within, from himself, in his own powers or faculties; but from
    that which is without him, even from him who hath life in
    himself.”

    As the water of baptism and the bread of the Lord’s supper, though
    themselves common things, are symbolic of the greatest truths, so
    the tree of knowledge and the tree of life were sacramental.
    McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 99-141—“The two trees
    represented good and evil. The prohibition of the latter was a
    declaration that man of himself could not distinguish between good
    and evil, and must trust divine guidance. Satan urged man to
    discern between good and evil by his own wisdom, and so become
    independent of God. Sin is the attempt of the creature to exercise
    God’s attribute of discerning and choosing between good and evil
    by his own wisdom. It is therefore self-conceit, self-trust,
    self-assertion, the preference of his own wisdom and will to the
    wisdom and will of God.” McIlvaine refers to Lord Bacon, Works,
    1:82, 162. See also Pope, Theology, 2:10, 11; Boston Lectures for
    1871:80, 81.

    Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 142, on the tree of the
    knowledge of good and evil—“When for the first time man stood face
    to face with definite conscious temptation to do that which he
    knew to be wrong, he held in his hand the fruit of that tree, and
    his destiny as a moral being hung trembling in the balance. And
    when for the first time he succumbed to temptation and faint
    dawnings of remorse visited his heart, at that moment he was
    banished from the Eden of innocence, in which his nature had
    hitherto dwelt, and he was driven forth from the presence of the
    Lord.” With the first sin, was started another and a downward
    course of development. For the mythical or allegorical explanation
    of the narrative, see also Hase, Hutterus Redivivus, 164, 165, and
    Nitzsch, Christian Doctrine, 218.


2. The course of the temptation, and the resulting fall.


The stages of the temptation appear to have been as follows:

(_a_) An appeal on the part of Satan to innocent appetites, together with
an implied suggestion that God was arbitrarily withholding the means of
their gratification (Gen. 3:1). The first sin was in Eve’s isolating
herself and choosing to seek her own pleasure without regard to God’s
will. This initial selfishness it was, which led her to listen to the
tempter instead of rebuking him or flying from him, and to exaggerate the
divine command in her response (Gen. 3:3).


    _Gen. 3:1_—“_Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of any tree of
    the garden?_” Satan emphasizes the _limitation_, but is silent
    with regard to the generous _permission_—“_Of every tree of the
    garden_ [but one] _thou mayest freely eat_” (_2:16_). C. H. M.,
    _in loco_: “To admit the question ‘_hath God said?_’ is already
    positive infidelity. To add to God’s word is as bad as to take
    from it. ‘_Hath God said?_’ is quickly followed by ‘_Ye shall not
    surely die._’ Questioning whether God has spoken, results in open
    contradiction of what God has said. Eve suffered God’s word to be
    contradicted by a creature, only because she had abjured its
    authority over her conscience and heart.” The command was simply:
    “_thou shalt not eat of it_” (_Gen. 2:17_). In her rising dislike
    to the authority she had renounced, she exaggerates the command
    into: “_Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it_” (_Gen.
    3:3_). Here is already self-isolation, instead of love. Matheson,
    Messages of the Old Religions, 318—“Ere ever the human soul
    disobeyed, it had learned to distrust.... Before it violated the
    existing law, it had come to think of the Lawgiver as one who was
    jealous of his creatures.” Dr. C. H. Parkhurst: “The first
    question ever asked in human history was asked by the devil, and
    the interrogation point still has in it the trail of the serpent.”


(_b_) A denial of the veracity of God, on the part of the tempter, with a
charge against the Almighty of jealousy and fraud in keeping his creatures
in a position of ignorance and dependence (Gen. 3:4, 5). This was
followed, on the part of the woman, by positive unbelief, and by a
conscious and presumptuous cherishing of desire for the forbidden fruit,
as a means of independence and knowledge. Thus unbelief, pride, and lust
all sprang from the self-isolating, self-seeking spirit, and fastened upon
the means of gratifying it (Gen. 3:6).


    _Gen. 3:4, 5_—“_And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not
    surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then
    your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God, knowing good
    and evil_”; _3:6_—“_And when the woman saw that the tree was good
    for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree
    was to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof,
    and did eat; and she gave also unto her husband with her, and he
    did eat_”—so “taking the word of a Professor of Lying, that he
    does not lie” (John Henry Newman). Hooker, Eccl. Polity, book
    I—“To live by one man’s will became the cause of all men’s
    misery.” Godet on _John 1:4_—“In the words ‘_life_’ and ‘_light_’
    it is natural to see an allusion to the tree of life and to that
    of knowledge. After having eaten of the former, man would have
    been called to feed on the second. John initiates us into the real
    essence of these primordial and mysterious facts and gives us in
    this verse, as it were, the philosophy of Paradise.” Obedience is
    the way to knowledge, and the sin of Paradise was the seeking of
    light without life; _cf._ _John 7:17_—“_If any man willeth to do
    his will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it is of God, or
    whether I speak from myself._”


(_c_) The tempter needed no longer to urge his suit. Having poisoned the
fountain, the stream would naturally be evil. Since the heart and its
desires had become corrupt, the inward disposition manifested itself in
act (Gen. 3:6—“did eat; and she gave also unto her husband with her” = who
had been with her, and had shared her choice and longing). Thus man fell
inwardly, before the outward act of eating the forbidden fruit,—fell in
that one fundamental determination whereby he made supreme choice of self
instead of God. This sin of the inmost nature gave rise to sins of the
desires, and sins of the desires led to the outward act of transgression
(James 1:15).


    _James 1:15_—“_Then the lust, when it hath conceived, beareth
    sin._” Baird, Elohim Revealed, 888—“The law of God had already
    been violated; man was fallen before the fruit had been plucked,
    or the rebellion had been thus signalized. The law required not
    only outward obedience but fealty of the heart, and this was
    withdrawn before any outward token indicated the change.” Would he
    part company with God, or with his wife? When the Indian asked the
    missionary where his ancestors were, and was told that they were
    in hell, he replied that he would go with his ancestors. He
    preferred hell with his tribe to heaven with God. Sapphira, in
    like manner, had opportunity given her to part company with her
    husband, but she preferred him to God; _Acts 5:7-11_.

    Philippi, Glaubenslehre: “So man became like God, a setter of law
    to himself. Man’s self-elevation to godhood was his fall. God’s
    self-humiliation to manhood was man’s restoration and
    elevation.... _Gen. 3:22_—‘_The man has become as one of us_’ in
    his condition of self-centered activity,—thereby losing all real
    likeness to God, which consists in having the same aim with God
    himself. _De te fabula narratur_; it is the condition, not of one
    alone, but of all the race.” Sin once brought into being is
    self-propagating; its seed is in itself: the centuries of misery
    and crime that have followed have only shown what endless
    possibilities of evil were wrapped up in that single sin. Keble:
    “’Twas but a little drop of sin We saw this morning enter in, And
    lo, at eventide a world is drowned!” Farrar, Fall of Man: “The
    guilty wish of one woman has swollen into the irremediable
    corruption of a world.” See Oehler, O.T. Theology, 1:231; Müller,
    Doct. Sin, 2:381-385; Edwards, on Original Sin, part 4, chap. 2;
    Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:168-180.


II. Difficulties connected with the Fall considered as the personal Act of
Adam.


1. How could a holy being fall?


Here we must acknowledge that we cannot understand how the first unholy
emotion could have found lodgment in a mind that was set supremely upon
God, nor how temptation could have overcome a soul in which there were no
unholy propensities to which it could appeal. The mere power of choice
does not explain the fact of an unholy choice. The fact of natural desire
for sensuous and intellectual gratification does not explain how this
desire came to be inordinate. Nor does it throw light upon the matter, to
resolve this fall into a deception of our first parents by Satan. Their
yielding to such deception presupposes distrust of God and alienation from
him. Satan’s fall, moreover, since it must have been uncaused by
temptation from without, is more difficult to explain than Adam’s fall.


    We may distinguish six incorrect explanations of the origin of
    sin: 1. Emmons: Sin is due to God’s efficiency—God wrought the sin
    in man’s heart. This is the “exercise system,” and is essentially
    pantheistic. 2. Edwards: Sin is due to God’s providence—God caused
    the sin indirectly by presenting motives. This explanation has all
    the difficulties of determinism. 3. Augustine: Sin is the result
    of God’s withdrawal from man’s soul. But inevitable sin is not
    sin, and the blame of it rests on God who withdrew the grace
    needed for obedience, 4. Pfleiderer: The fall results from man’s
    already existing sinfulness. The fault then belongs, not to man,
    but to God who made man sinful. 5. Hadley: Sin is due to man’s
    moral insanity. But such concreated ethical defect would render
    sin impossible. Insanity is the effect of sin, but not its cause.
    6. Newman: Sin is due to man’s weakness. It is a negative, not a
    positive, thing, an incident of finiteness. But conscience and
    Scripture testify that it is positive as well as negative,
    opposition to God as well as non-conformity to God.

    Emmons was really a pantheist: “Since God,” he says, “works in all
    men both to will and to do of his good pleasure, it is as easy to
    account for the first offence of Adam as for any other sin....
    There is no difficulty respecting the fall of Adam from his
    original state of perfection and purity into a state of sin and
    guilt, which is in any way peculiar.... It is as consistent with
    the moral rectitude of the Deity to produce sinful as holy
    exercises in the minds of men. He puts forth a positive influence
    to make moral agents act, in every instance of their conduct, as
    he pleases.... There is but one satisfactory answer to the
    question _Whence came evil?_ and that is: It came from the great
    first Cause of all things”; see Nathaniel Emmons, Works, 2:683.

    Jonathan Edwards also denied power to the contrary even in Adam’s
    first sin. God did not immediately cause that sin. But God was
    active in the region of motives though his action was not seen.
    Freedom of the Will, 161—“It was fitting that the transaction
    should so take place that it might not appear to be from God as
    the apparent fountain.” Yet “God may actually in his providence so
    dispose and permit things that the event may be certainly and
    infallibly connected with such disposal and permission”; see
    Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 304. Encyc. Britannica, 7:690—“According
    to Edwards, Adam had two principles,—natural and supernatural.
    When Adam sinned, the supernatural or divine principle was
    withdrawn from him, and thus his nature became corrupt without God
    infusing any evil thing into it. His posterity came into being
    entirely under the government of natural and inferior principles.
    But this solves the difficulty of making God the author of sin
    only at the expense of denying to sin any real existence, and also
    destroys Edwards’s essential distinction between natural and moral
    ability.” Edwards on Trinity, Fisher’s edition, 44—“The sun does
    not cause darkness and cold, when these follow infallibly upon the
    withdrawal of his beams. God’s disposing the result is not a
    positive exertion on his part.” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:50—“God did
    not withdraw the common supporting grace of his Spirit from Adam
    until after transgression.” To us Adam’s act was irrational, but
    not impossible; to a determinist like Edwards, who held that men
    simply act out their characters, Adam’s act should have been not
    only irrational, but impossible. Edwards nowhere shows how,
    according to his principles, a holy being could possibly fall.

    Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 123—“The account of the fall is the first
    appearance of an already existing sinfulness, and a typical
    example of the way in which every individual becomes sinful.
    Original sin is simply the universality and originality of sin.
    There is no such thing as indeterminism. The will can lift itself
    from natural unfreedom, the unfreedom of the natural impulses, to
    real spiritual freedom, only by distinguishing itself from the law
    which sets before it its true end of being. The opposition of
    nature to the law reveals an original nature power which precedes
    all free self-determination. Sin is the evil bent of lawless
    self-willed selfishness.” Pfleiderer appears to make this
    sinfulness concreated, and guiltless, because proceeding from God.
    Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 288—“The wide discrepancy between
    precept and practice gives rise to the theological conception of
    _sin_, which, in low types of religion, is as often a violation of
    some trivial prescription as it is of an ethical principle. The
    presence of sin, contrasted with a state of innocence, occasions
    the idea of a fall, or lapse from a sinless condition. This is not
    incompatible with man’s derivation from an animal ancestry, which
    prior to the rise of self-consciousness may be regarded as having
    been in a state of moral _innocence_, the sense and reality of sin
    being impossible to the animal.... The existence of sin, both as
    an inherent disposition, and as a perverted form of action, may be
    explained as a survival of animal propensity in human life.... Sin
    is the disturbance of higher life by the intrusion of lower.”

    Professor James Hadley: “Every man is more or less insane.” We
    prefer to say: Every man, so far as he is apart from God, is
    morally insane. But we must not make sin the result of insanity.
    Insanity is the result of sin. Insanity, moreover, is a physical
    disease,—sin is a perversion of the will. John Henry Newman, Idea
    of a University, 60—“Evil has no substance of its own, but is only
    the defect, excess, perversion or corruption of that which has
    substance.” Augustine seems at times to favor this view. He
    maintains that evil has no origin, inasmuch as it is negative, not
    positive; that it is merely defect or failure. He illustrates it
    by the damaged state of a discordant harp; see Moule, Outlines of
    Theology, 171. So too A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 190, tells us
    that Adam’s will was like a violin in tune, which through mere
    inattention and neglect got out of tune at last. But here, too, we
    must say with E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 124—“Sin explained
    is sin defended.” All these explanations fail to explain, and
    throw the blame of sin upon God, as directly or indirectly its
    cause.


But sin is an existing fact. God cannot be its author, either by creating
man’s nature so that sin was a necessary incident of its development, or
by withdrawing a supernatural grace which was necessary to keep man holy.
Reason, therefore, has no other recourse than to accept the Scripture
doctrine that sin originated in man’s free act of revolt from God—the act
of a will which, though inclined toward God, was not yet confirmed in
virtue and was still capable of a contrary choice. The original possession
of such power to the contrary seems to be the necessary condition of
probation and moral development. Yet the exercise of this power in a
sinful direction can never be explained upon grounds of reason, since sin
is essentially unreason. It is an act of wicked arbitrariness, the only
motive of which is the desire to depart from God and to render self
supreme.


    Sin is a “_mystery of lawlessness_” (_2 Thess. 2:7_), at the
    beginning, as well as at the end. Neander, Planting and Training,
    388—“Whoever explains sin nullifies it.” Man’s power at the
    beginning to choose evil does not prove that, now that he has
    fallen, he has equal power of himself permanently to choose good.
    Because man has power to cast himself from the top of a precipice
    to the bottom, it does not follow that he has equal power to
    transport himself from the bottom to the top.

    Man fell by wilful resistance to the inworking God. Christ is in
    all men as he was in Adam, and all good impulses are due to him.
    Since the Holy Spirit is the Christ within, all men are the
    subjects of his striving. He does not withdraw from them except
    upon, and in consequence of, their withdrawing from him. John
    Milton makes the Almighty say of Adam’s sin: “Whose fault? Whose
    but his own? Ingrate, he had of me All he could have; I made him
    just and right, Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
    Such I created all the Etherial Powers, And Spirits, both them who
    stood and them who failed; Freely they stood who stood, and fell
    who failed.” The word “cussedness” has become an apt word here.
    The Standard Dictionary defines it as “1. Cursedness, meanness,
    perverseness; 2. resolute courage, endurance: ‘Jim Bludsoe’s voice
    was heard, And they all had trust in his cussedness And knowed he
    would keep his word.’ ” (John Hay, Jim Bludsoe, stanza 6). Not the
    last, but the first, of these definitions best describes the first
    sin. The most thorough and satisfactory treatment of the fall of
    man in connection with the doctrine of evolution is found in
    Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 73-240.

    Hodge, Essays and Reviews, 30—“There is a broad difference between
    the commencement of holiness and the commencement of sin, and more
    is necessary for the former than for the latter. An act of
    obedience, if it is performed under the mere impulse of self-love,
    is virtually no act of obedience. It is not performed with any
    intention to obey, for that is holy, and cannot, according to the
    theory, precede the act. But an act of disobedience, performed
    from the desire of happiness, is rebellion. The cases are surely
    different. If, to please myself, I do what God commands, it is not
    holiness; but if, to please myself, I do what he forbids, it is
    sin. Besides, no creature is immutable. Though created holy, the
    taste for holy enjoyments may be overcome by a temptation
    sufficiently insidious and powerful, and a selfish motive or
    feeling excited in the mind. Neither is a sinful character
    immutable. By the power of the Holy Spirit, the truth may be
    clearly presented and so effectually applied as to produce that
    change which is called regeneration; that is, to call into
    existence a taste for holiness, so that it is chosen for its own
    sake, and not as a means of happiness.”

    H. B. Smith, System, 262—“The state of the case, as far as we can
    enter into Adam’s experience, is this: Before the command, there
    was the state of love without the thought of the opposite: a
    knowledge of good only, a yet unconscious goodness: there was also
    the knowledge that the eating of the fruit was against the divine
    command. The temptation aroused pride; the yielding to that was
    the sin. The change was there. The change was not in the choice as
    an executive act, nor in the result of that act—the eating; but in
    the choice of supreme love to the world and self, rather than
    supreme devotion to God. It was an immanent preference of the
    world,—not a love of the world following the choice, but a love of
    the world which is the choice itself.”

    263—“We cannot account for Adam’s fall, psychologically. In saying
    this we mean: It is inexplicable by anything outside itself. We
    must receive the fact as ultimate, and rest there. Of course we do
    not mean that it was not in accordance with the laws of moral
    agency—that it was a violation of those laws: but only that we do
    not see the mode, that we cannot construct it for ourselves in a
    rational way. It differs from all other similar cases of ultimate
    preference _which we know_; _viz._, the sinner’s immanent
    preference of the world, where we know there is an antecedent
    ground in the bias to sin, and the Christian’s regeneration, or
    immanent preference of God, where we know there is an influence
    from without, the working of the Holy Spirit.” 264—“We must leave
    the whole question with the immanent preference standing forth as
    the ultimate fact in the case, which is not to be constructed
    philosophically, as far as the processes of Adam’s soul are
    concerned: we must regard that immanent preference as both a
    choice and an affection, not an affection the result of a choice,
    not a choice which is the consequence of an affection, but both
    together.”

    In one particular, however, we must differ with H. B. Smith: Since
    the power of voluntary internal movement is the power of the will,
    we must regard the change from good to evil as primarily a choice,
    and only secondarily a state of affection caused thereby. Only by
    postulating a free and conscious act of transgression on the part
    of Adam, an act which bears to evil affection the relation not of
    effect but of cause, do we reach, at the beginning of human
    development, a proper basis for the responsibility and guilt of
    Adam and the race. See Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:148-167.


2. How could God justly permit Satanic temptation?


We see in this permission not justice but benevolence.

(_a_) Since Satan fell without external temptation, it is probable that
man’s trial would have been substantially the same, even though there had
been no Satan to tempt him.


    Angels had no animal nature to obscure the vision; they could not
    be influenced through sense; yet they were tempted and they fell.
    As Satan and Adam sinned under the best possible circumstances, we
    may conclude that the human race would have sinned with equal
    certainty. The only question at the time of their creation,
    therefore, was how to modify the conditions so as best to pave the
    way for repentance and pardon. These conditions are: 1. a material
    body—which means confinement, limitation, need of self-restraint;
    2. infancy—which means development, deliberation, with no memory
    of the first sin; 3. the parental relation—repressing the
    wilfulness of the child, and teaching submission to authority.


(_b_) In this case, however, man’s fall would perhaps have been without
what now constitutes its single mitigating circumstance. Self-originated
sin would have made man himself a Satan.


    _Mat. 13:28_—“_An enemy hath done this._” “God permitted Satan to
    divide the guilt with man, so that man might be saved from
    despair.” See Trench, Studies in the Gospels, 16-29. Mason, Faith
    of the Gospel, 103—“Why was not the tree made outwardly repulsive?
    Because only the abuse of that which was positively good and
    desirable could have attractiveness for Adam or could constitute a
    real temptation.”


(_c_) As, in the conflict with temptation, it is an advantage to objectify
evil under the image of corruptible flesh, so it is an advantage to meet
it as embodied in a personal and seducing spirit.


    Man’s body, corruptible and perishable as it is, furnishes him
    with an illustration and reminder of the condition of soul to
    which sin has reduced him. The flesh, with its burdens and pains,
    is thus, under God, a help to the distinct recognition and
    overcoming of sin. So it was an advantage to man to have
    temptation confined to a single external voice. We may say of the
    influence of the tempter, as Birks, in his Difficulties of Belief,
    101, says of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil:
    “Temptation did not depend upon the tree. Temptation was certain
    in any event. The tree was a type into which God contracted the
    possibilities of evil, so as to strip them of delusive vastness,
    and connect them with definite and palpable warning,—to show man
    that it was only one of the many possible activities of his spirit
    which was forbidden, that God had right to all and could forbid
    all.” The originality of sin was the most fascinating element in
    it. It afforded boundless range for the imagination. Luther did
    well to throw his inkstand at the devil. It was an advantage to
    localize him. The concentration of the human powers upon a
    definite offer of evil helps our understanding of the evil and
    increases our disposition to resist it.


(_d_) Such temptation has in itself no tendency to lead the soul astray.
If the soul be holy, temptation may only confirm it in virtue. Only the
evil will, self-determined against God, can turn temptation into an
occasion of ruin.


    As the sun’s heat has no tendency to wither the plant rooted in
    deep and moist soil, but only causes it to send down its roots the
    deeper and to fasten itself the more strongly, so temptation has
    in itself no tendency to pervert the soul. It was only the seeds
    that “_fell upon the rocky places, where they had not much earth_”
    (_Mat. 13:5, 6_), that “_were scorched_” when “_the sun was
    risen_”; and our Lord attributes their failure, not to the sun,
    but to their lack of root and of soil: “_because they had no
    root_,” “_because they had no deepness of earth._” The same
    temptation which occasions the ruin of the false disciple
    stimulates to sturdy growth the virtue of the true Christian.
    Contrast with the temptation of Adam the temptation of Christ.
    Adam had everything to plead for God, the garden and its delights,
    while Christ had everything to plead against him, the wilderness
    and its privations. But Adam had confidence in Satan, while Christ
    had confidence in God; and the result was in the former case
    defeat, in the latter victory. See Baird, Elohim Revealed,
    385-396.

    C. H. Spurgeon: “All the sea outside a ship can do it no damage
    till the water enters and fills the hold. Hence, it is clear, our
    greatest danger is within. All the devils in hell and tempters on
    earth could do us no injury, if there were no corruption in our
    own natures. The sparks will fly harmlessly, if there is no
    tinder. Alas, our heart is our greatest enemy; this is the little
    home-born thief. Lord, save me from that evil man, myself!”

    Lyman Abbott: “The scorn of goody-goody is justified; for
    goody-goody is innocence, not virtue; and the boy who never does
    anything wrong because he never does anything at all is of no use
    in the world.... Sin is not a help in development; it is a
    hindrance. But temptation is a help; it is an indispensable
    means.” E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 123—“Temptation in the
    bad sense and a fall from innocence were no more necessary to the
    perfection of the first man, than a marring of any one’s character
    is now necessary to its completeness.” John Milton, Areopagitica:
    “Many there be that complain of divine providence for suffering
    Adam to transgress. Foolish tongues! When God gave him reason, he
    gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had
    been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the
    motions” (puppet shows). Robert Browning, Ring and the Book, 204
    (Pope, 1183)—“Temptation sharp? Thank God a second time! Why comes
    temptation but for man to meet And master and make crouch beneath
    his foot, And so be pedestaled in triumph? Pray ‘Lead us into no
    such temptations. Lord’? Yea, but, O thou whose servants are the
    bold, Lead such temptations by the head and hair, Reluctant
    dragons, up to who dares fight, That so he may do battle and have
    praise!”


3. How could a penalty so great be justly connected with disobedience to
so slight a command?


To this question we may reply:

(_a_) So slight a command presented the best test of the spirit of
obedience.


    Cicero: “Parva res est, at magna culpa.” The child’s persistent
    disobedience in one single respect to the mother’s command shows
    that in all his other acts of seeming obedience he does nothing
    for his mother’s sake, but all for his own,—shows, in other words,
    that he does not possess the spirit of obedience in a single act.
    S. S. Times: “Trifles are trifles only to triflers. Awake to the
    significance of the insignificant! for you are in a world that
    belongs not alone to the God of the Infinite, but also to the God
    of the infinitesimal.”


(_b_) The external command was not arbitrary or insignificant in its
substance. It was a concrete presentation to the human will of God’s claim
to eminent domain or absolute ownership.


    John Hall, Lectures on the Religious rise of Property, 10—“It
    sometimes happens that owners of land, meaning to give the use of
    it to others, without alienating it, impose a nominal rent—a
    quit-rent, the passing of which acknowledges the recipient as
    owner and the occupier as tenant. This is understood in all lands.
    In many an old English deed, ‘three barley-corns,’ ‘a fat capon,’
    or ‘a shilling,’ is the consideration which permanently recognizes
    the rights of lordship. God taught men by the forbidden tree that
    he was owner, that man was occupier. He selected the matter of
    property to be the test of man’s obedience, the outward and
    sensible sign of a right state of heart toward God; and when man
    put forth his hand and did eat, he denied God’s ownership and
    asserted his own. Nothing remained but to eject him.”


(_c_) The sanction attached to the command shows that man was not left
ignorant of its meaning or importance.


    _Gen. 2:17_—“_in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt
    surely die._” _Cf._ _Gen. 3:3_—“_the tree which is in the midst of
    the garden_”; and see Dodge, Christian Theology, 206, 207—“The
    tree was central, as the commandment was central. The choice was
    between the tree of life and the tree of death,—between self and
    God. Taking the one was rejecting the other.”


(_d_) The act of disobedience was therefore the revelation of a will
thoroughly corrupted and alienated from God—a will given over to
ingratitude, unbelief, ambition, and rebellion.


    The motive to disobedience was not appetite, but the ambition to
    be as God. The outward act of eating the forbidden fruit was only
    the thin edge of the wedge, behind which lay the whole mass—the
    fundamental determination to isolate self and to seek personal
    pleasure regardless of God and his law. So the man under
    conviction for sin commonly clings to some single passion or plan,
    only half-conscious of the fact that opposition to God in one
    thing is opposition in all.


III. Consequences of the Fall, so far as respects Adam.


1. Death.


This death was twofold. It was partly:

A. Physical death, or the separation of the soul from the body.—The seeds
of death, naturally implanted in man’s constitution, began to develop
themselves the moment that access to the tree of life was denied him. Man
from that moment was a dying creature.


    In a true sense death began at once. To it belonged the pains
    which both man and woman should suffer in their appointed
    callings. The fact that man’s earthly existence did not at once
    end, was due to God’s counsel of redemption. “_The law of the
    Spirit of life_” (_Rom. 8:2_) began to work even then, and grace
    began to counteract the effects of the Fall. Christ has now
    “_abolished death_” (_2 Tim. 1:10_) by taking its terrors away,
    and by turning it into the portal of heaven. He will destroy it
    utterly (_1 Cor. 15:26_) when by resurrection from the dead, the
    bodies of the saints shall be made immortal. Dr. William A.
    Hammond, following a French scientist, declares that there is no
    reason in a normal physical system why man should not live
    forever.

    That death is not a physical necessity is evident if we once
    remember that life is, not fuel, but fire. Weismann, Heredity, 8,
    24, 72, 159—“The organism must not be looked upon as a heap of
    combustible material, which is completely reduced to ashes in a
    certain time, the length of which is determined by its size and by
    the rate at which it burns; but it should be compared to a fire,
    to which fresh fuel can be continually added, and which, whether
    it burns quickly or slowly, can be kept burning as long as
    necessity demands.... Death is not a primary necessity, but it has
    been acquired secondarily, as an adaptation.... Unicellular
    organisms, increasing by means of fission, in a certain sense
    possess immortality. No Amœba has ever lost an ancestor by
    death.... Each individual now living is far older than mankind,
    and is almost as old as life itself.... Death is not an essential
    attribute of living matter.”

    If we regard man as primarily spirit, the possibility of life
    without death is plain. God lives on eternally, and the future
    physical organism of the righteous will have in it no seed of
    death. Man might have been created without being mortal. That he
    is mortal is due to anticipated sin. Regard body as simply the
    constant energizing of God, and we see that there is no inherent
    necessity of death. Denney, Studies in Theology, 98—“Man, it is
    said, must die because he is a natural being, and what belongs to
    nature belongs to him. But we assert, on the contrary, that he was
    created a supernatural being, with a primacy over nature, so
    related to God as to be immortal. Death is an intrusion, and it is
    finally to be abolished.” Chandler, The Spirit of Man, 45-47—“The
    first stage in the fall was the disintegration of spirit into body
    and mind; and the second was the enslavement of mind to body.”

    Some recent writers, however, deny that death is a consequence of
    the Fall, except in the sense that man’s fear of death results
    from his sin. Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, 19-22,
    indeed, asserts the value and propriety of death as an element of
    the normal universe. He would oppose to the doctrine of Weismann
    the conclusions of Maupas, the French biologist, who has followed
    infusoria through 600 generations. Fission, says Maupas,
    reproduces for many generations, but the unicellular germ
    ultimately weakens and dies out. The asexual reproduction must be
    supplemented by a higher conjugation, the meeting and partial
    blending of the contents of two cells. This is only occasional,
    but it is necessary to the permanence of the species. Isolation is
    ultimate death. Newman Smyth adds that death and sex appear
    together. When sex enters to enrich and diversify life, all that
    will not take advantage of it dies out. Survival of the fittest is
    accompanied by death of that which will not improve. Death is a
    secondary thing—a consequence of life. A living form acquired the
    power of giving up its life for another. It died in order that its
    offspring might survive in a higher form. Death helps life on and
    up. It does not put a stop to life. It became an advantage to life
    as a whole that certain primitive forms should be left by the way
    to perish. We owe our human birth to death in nature. The earth
    before us has died that we might live. We are the living children
    of a world that has died for us. Death is a means of life, of
    increasing specialization of function. Some cells are born to give
    up their life sacrificially for the organism to which they belong.

    While we regard Newman Smyth’s view as an ingenious and valuable
    explanation of the incidental results of death, we do not regard
    it as an explanation of death’s origin. God has overruled death
    for good, and we can assent to much of Dr. Smyth’s exposition. But
    that this good could be gained only by death seems to us wholly
    unproved and unprovable. Biology shows us that other methods of
    reproduction are possible, and that death is an incident and not a
    primary requisite to development. We regard Dr. Smyth’s theory as
    incompatible with the Scripture representations of death as the
    consequence of sin, as the sign of God’s displeasure, as a means
    of discipline for the fallen, as destined to complete abolition
    when sin itself has been done away. We reserve, however, the full
    proof that physical death is part of the penalty of sin until we
    discuss the Consequences of Sin to Adam’s Posterity.


But this death was also, and chiefly,

B. Spiritual death, or the separation of the soul from God.—In this are
included: (_a_) Negatively, the loss of man’s moral likeness to God, or
that underlying tendency of his whole nature toward God which constituted
his original righteousness. (_b_) Positively, the depraving of all those
powers which, in their united action with reference to moral and religious
truth, we call man’s moral and religious nature; or, in other words, the
blinding of his intellect, the corruption of his affections, and the
enslavement of his will.


    Seeking to be a god, man became a slave; seeking independence, he
    ceased to be master of himself. Once his intellect was pure,—he
    was supremely conscious of God, and saw all things also in God’s
    light. Now he was supremely conscious of self, and saw all things
    as they affected self. This self-consciousness—how unlike the
    objective life of the first apostles, of Christ and of every
    loving soul! Once man’s affections were pure,—he loved God
    supremely, and other things in subordination to God’s will. Now he
    loved self supremely, and was ruled by inordinate affections
    toward the creatures which could minister to his selfish
    gratification. Now man could do nothing pleasing to God, because
    he lacked the love which is necessary to all true obedience.

    G. F. Wilkin, Control in Evolution, shows that the will may
    initiate a counter-evolution which shall reverse the normal course
    of man’s development. First comes an act, then a habit, of
    surrender to animalism; then subversion of faith in the true and
    the good; then active championship of evil; then transmission of
    evil disposition and tendencies to posterity. This subversion of
    the rational will by an evil choice took place very early, indeed
    in the first man. All human history has been a conflict between
    these two antagonistic evolutions, the upward and the downward.
    Biological rather than moral phenomena predominate. No human being
    escapes transgressing the law of his evolutionary nature. There is
    a moral deadness and torpor resulting. The rational will must be
    restored before man can go right again. Man must commit himself to
    a true life; then to the restoration of other men to that same
    life; then there must be coöperation of society; this work must
    extend to the limits of the human species. But this will be
    practicable and rational only as it is shown that the unfolding
    plan of the universe has destined the righteous to a future
    incomparably more desirable than that of the wicked; in other
    words, immortality is necessary to evolution.

    “If immortality be necessary to evolution, then immortality
    becomes scientific. Jesus has the authority and omnipresence of
    the power behind evolution. He imposes upon his followers the same
    normal evolutionary mission that sent him into the world. He
    organizes them into churches. He teaches a moral evolution of
    society through the united voluntary efforts of his followers.
    They are ‘_the good seed ... the sons of the kingdom_’ (_Mat.
    13:38_). Theism makes a definite attempt to counteract the evil of
    the counter-evolution, and the attempt justifies itself by its
    results. Christianity is scientific (1) in that it satisfies the
    conditions of _knowledge_: the persisting and comprehensive
    harmony of phenomena, and the interpretation of all the facts; (2)
    in its _aim_, the moral regeneration of the world; (3) in its
    _methods_, adapting itself to man as an ethical being, capable of
    endless progress; (4) in its conception of normal _society_, as of
    sinners uniting together to help one another to depend on God and
    conquer self, so recognizing the ethical bond as the most
    essential. This doctrine harmonizes science and religion,
    revealing the new species of control which marks the highest stage
    of evolution; shows that the religion of the N. T. is essentially
    scientific and its truths capable of practical verification; that
    Christianity is not any particular church, but the teachings of
    the Bible; that Christianity is the true system of ethics, and
    should be taught in public institutions; that cosmic evolution
    comes at last to depend on the wisdom and will of man, the
    immanent God working in finite and redeemed humanity.”


In fine, man no longer made God the end of his life, but chose self
instead. While he retained the power of self-determination in subordinate
things, he lost that freedom which consisted in the power of choosing God
as his ultimate aim, and became fettered by a fundamental inclination of
his will toward evil. The intuitions of the reason were abnormally
obscured, since these intuitions, so far as they are concerned with moral
and religious truth, are conditioned upon a right state of the affections;
and—as a necessary result of this obscuring of reason—conscience, which,
as the normal judiciary of the soul, decides upon the basis of the law
given to it by reason, became perverse in its deliverances. Yet this
inability to judge or act aright, since it was a moral inability springing
ultimately from will, was itself hateful and condemnable.


    See Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:61-73; Shedd, Sermons to the
    Natural Man, 202-230, esp. 205—“Whatsoever springs from will we
    are responsible for. Man’s inability to love God supremely results
    from his intense self-will and self-love, and therefore his
    impotence is a part and element of his sin, and not an excuse for
    it.” And yet the question “_Adam, where art thou?_” (_Gen. 3:9_),
    says C. J. Baldwin, “was, (1) a question, not as to Adam’s
    physical locality, but as to his moral condition; (2) a question,
    not of justice threatening, but of love inviting to repentance and
    return; (3) a question, not to Adam as an individual only, but to
    the whole humanity of which he was the representative.”

    Dale, Ephesians, 40—“Christ is the eternal Son of God; and it was
    the first, the primeval purpose of the divine grace that his life
    and sonship should be shared by all mankind; that through Christ
    all men should rise to a loftier rank than that which belonged to
    them by their creation; should be ‘_partakers of the divine
    nature_’ (_2 Pet. 1:4_), and share the divine righteousness and
    joy. Or rather, the race was actually created in Christ; and it
    was created that the whole race might in Christ inherit the life
    and glory of God. The divine purpose has been thwarted and
    obstructed and partially defeated by human sin. But it is being
    fulfilled in all who are ‘_in Christ_’ (_Eph. 1:3_).”


2. Positive and formal exclusion from God’s presence.


This included:

(_a_) The cessation of man’s former familiar intercourse with God, and the
setting up of outward barriers between man and his Maker (cherubim and
sacrifice).


    “In die Welt hinausgestossen, Steht der Mensch verlassen da.”
    Though God punished Adam and Eve, he did not curse them as he did
    the serpent. Their exclusion from the tree of life was a matter of
    benevolence as well as of justice, for it prevented the
    immortality of sin.


(_b_) Banishment from the garden, where God had specially manifested his
presence.—Eden was perhaps a spot reserved, as Adam’s body had been, to
show what a _sinless_ world would be. This positive exclusion from God’s
presence, with the sorrow and pain which it involved, may have been
intended to illustrate to man the nature of that eternal death from which
he now needed to seek deliverance.


    At the gates of Eden, there seems to have been a manifestation of
    God’s presence, in the cherubim, which constituted the place a
    sanctuary. Both Cain and Abel brought offerings “_unto the Lord_”
    (_Gen. 4:3, 4_), and when Cain fled, he is said to have gone out
    “_from the presence of the Lord_” (_Gen. 4:16_). On the
    consequences of the Fall to Adam, see Edwards, Works, 2:390-405;
    Hopkins, Works, 1:206-246; Dwight, Theology, 1:393-434; Watson,
    Institutes, 2:19-42; Martensen, Dogmatics, 155-173; Van Oosterzee,
    Dogmatics, 402-412.



Section V.—Imputation Of Adam’s Sin To His Posterity.


We have seen that all mankind are sinners; that all men are by nature
depraved, guilty, and condemnable; and that the transgression of our first
parents, so far as respects the human race, was the first sin. We have
still to consider the connection between Adam’s sin and the depravity,
guilt, and condemnation of the race.

(_a_) The Scriptures teach that the transgression of our first parents
constituted their posterity sinners (Rom. 5:19—“through the one man’s
disobedience the many were made sinners”), so that Adam’s sin is imputed,
reckoned, or charged to every member of the race of which he was the germ
and head (Rom. 5:16—“the judgment came of one [offence] unto
condemnation”). It is because of Adam’s sin that we are born depraved and
subject to God’s penal inflictions (Rom. 5:12—“through one man sin entered
into the world, and death through sin”; Eph. 2:3—“by nature children of
wrath”). Two questions demand answer,—first, how we can be responsible for
a depraved nature which we did not personally and consciously originate;
and, secondly, how God can justly charge to our account the sin of the
first father of the race. These questions are substantially the same, and
the Scriptures intimate the true answer to the problem when they declare
that “in Adam all die” (1 Cor. 15:22) and “that death passed unto all men,
for that all sinned” when “through one man sin entered into the world”
(Rom. 5:12). In other words, Adam’s sin is the cause and ground of the
depravity, guilt, and condemnation of all his posterity, simply because
Adam and his posterity are one, and, by virtue of their organic unity, the
sin of Adam is the sin of the race.


    Amiel says that “the best measure of the profundity of any
    religious doctrine is given by its conception of sin and of the
    cure of sin.” We have seen that sin is a state; a state of the
    will; a selfish state of the will; a selfish state of the will
    inborn and universal; a selfish state of the will inborn and
    universal by reason of man’s free act. Connecting the present
    discussion with the preceding doctrines of theology, the steps of
    our treatment thus far are as follows: 1. God’s holiness is purity
    of nature. 2. God’s law demands purity of nature. 3. Sin is impure
    nature. 4. All men have this impure nature. 5. Adam originated
    this impure nature. In the present section we expect to add: 6.
    Adam and we are one; and, in the succeeding section, to complete
    the doctrine with: 7. The guilt and penalty of Adam’s sin are
    ours.


(_b_) According as we regard this twofold problem from the point of view
of the abnormal human condition, or of the divine treatment of it, we may
call it the problem of original sin, or the problem of imputation. Neither
of these terms is objectionable when its meaning is defined. By imputation
of sin we mean, not the arbitrary and mechanical charging to a man of that
for which he is not naturally responsible, but the reckoning to a man of a
guilt which is properly his own, whether by virtue of his individual acts,
or by virtue of his connection with the race. By original sin we mean that
participation in the common sin of the race with which God charges us, in
virtue of our descent from Adam, its first father and head.


    We should not permit our use of the term “imputation” to be
    hindered or prejudiced by the fact that certain schools of
    theology, notably the Federal school, have attached to it an
    arbitrary, external, and mechanical meaning—holding that God
    imputes sin to men, not because they are sinners, but upon the
    ground of a legal fiction whereby Adam, without their consent, was
    made their representative. We shall see, on the contrary, that (1)
    in the case of Adam’s sin imputed to us, (2) in the case of our
    sins imputed to Christ, and (3) in the case of Christ’s
    righteousness imputed to the believer, there is always a realistic
    basis for the imputation, namely, a real union, (1) between Adam
    and his descendants, (2) between Christ and the race, and (3)
    between believers and Christ, such as gives in each case community
    of life, and enables us to say that God imputes to no man what
    does not properly belong to him.

    Dr. E. G. Robinson used to say that “imputed righteousness and
    imputed sin are as absurd as any notion that ever took possession
    of human nature.” He had in mind, however, only that constructive
    guilt and merit which was advocated by Princeton theologians. He
    did not mean to deny the imputation to men of that which is their
    own. He recognized the fact that all men are sinners by
    inheritance as well as by voluntary act, and he found this taught
    in Scripture, both in the O. T. and in the N. T.; _e. g._, _Neh.
    1:6_—“_I confess the sins of the children of Israel, which we have
    sinned against thee. Yea, I and my father’s house have sinned_”;
    _Jer. 3:25_—“_Let us lie down in our shame, and let our confusion
    cover us; for we have sinned against Jehovah our God, we and our
    fathers_”; _14:20_—“_We acknowledge, O Jehovah, our wickedness,
    and the iniquity of our fathers; for we have sinned against
    thee._” The word “_imputed_” is itself found in the N. T.; _e.
    g._, _2 Tim. 4:16_—“_At my first defence no one took my part: may
    it not be laid to their account,_” or “_imputed to them_”—μὴ
    αὐτοῖς λογισθείη. _Rom. 5:13_—“_sin is not imputed when there is
    no law_”—οὐκ ἐλλογᾶται.

    Not only the saints of Scripture times, but modern saints also,
    have imputed to themselves the sins of others, of their people, of
    their times, of the whole world. Jonathan Edwards, Resolutions,
    quoted by Allen, 28—“I will take it for granted that no one is so
    evil as myself; I will identify myself with all men and act as if
    their evil were my own, as if I had committed the same sins and
    had the same infirmities, so that the knowledge of their failings
    will promote in me nothing but a sense of shame.” Frederick
    Denison Maurice: “I wish to confess the sins of the time as my
    own.” Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 87—“The phrase
    ‘solidarity of humanity’ is growing every day in depth and
    significance. Whatever we do, we do not for ourselves alone. It is
    not as an individual alone that I can be measured or judged.”
    Royce, World and Individual, 2:404—“The problem of evil indeed
    demands the presence of free will in the world; while, on the
    other hand, it is equally true that no moral world whatever can be
    made consistent with the realistic thesis according to which free
    will agents are, in fortune and in penalty, independent of the
    deeds of other moral agents. It follows that, in our moral world,
    the righteous can suffer without individually deserving their
    suffering, just because their lives have no independent being, but
    are linked with all life—God himself also sharing in their
    suffering.”

    The above quotations illustrate the belief in a human
    responsibility that goes beyond the bounds of personal sins. What
    this responsibility is, and what its limits are, we have yet to
    define. The problem is stated, but not solved, by A. H. Bradford,
    Heredity, 198, and The Age of Faith, 235—“Stephen prays: ‘_Lord,
    lay not this sin to their charge_’ (_Acts 7:60_). To whose charge
    then? We all have a share in one another’s sins. We too stood by
    and consented, as Paul did. ‘My sins gave sharpness to the nails,
    And pointed every thorn’ that pierced the brow of Jesus.... Yet in
    England and Wales the severer forms of this teaching [with regard
    to sin] have almost disappeared; not because of more thorough
    study of the Scripture, but because the awful congestion of
    population, with its attendant miseries, has convinced the
    majority of Christian thinkers that the old interpretations were
    too small for the near and terrible facts of human life, such as
    women with babies in their arms at the London gin-shops giving the
    infants sips of liquor out of their glasses, and a tavern keeper
    setting his four or five year old boy upon the counter to drink
    and swear and fight in imitation of his elders.”


(_c_) There are two fundamental principles which the Scriptures already
cited seem clearly to substantiate, and which other Scriptures
corroborate. The first is that man’s relations to moral law extend beyond
the sphere of conscious and actual transgression, and embrace those moral
tendencies and qualities of his being which he has in common with every
other member of the race. The second is, that God’s moral government is a
government which not only takes account of persons and personal acts, but
also recognizes race responsibilities and inflicts race-penalties; or, in
other words, judges mankind, not simply as a collection of separate
individuals, but also as an organic whole, which can collectively revolt
from God and incur the curse of the violated law.


    On race-responsibility, see H. R. Smith, System of Theology,
    288-302—“No one can apprehend the doctrine of original sin, nor
    the doctrine of redemption, who insists that the whole moral
    government of God has respect only to individual desert, who does
    not allow that the moral government of God, _as_ moral, has a
    wider scope and larger relations, so that God may dispense
    suffering and happiness (in his all-wise and inscrutable
    providence) on other grounds than that of personal merit and
    demerit. The dilemma here is: the facts connected with native
    depravity and with the redemption through Christ either belong to
    the moral government of God, or not. If they do, then that
    government has to do with other considerations than those of
    personal merit and demerit (since our disabilities in consequence
    of sin and the grace offered in Christ are not in any sense the
    result of our personal choice, though we do choose in our
    relations to both). If they do not belong to the moral government
    of God, where shall we assign them? To the physical? That
    certainly can not be. To the divine sovereignty? But that does not
    relieve any difficulty; for the question still remains, Is that
    sovereignty, as thus exercised, just or unjust? We must take one
    or the other of these. The whole (of sin and grace) is either a
    mystery of sovereignty—of mere omnipotence—or a proceeding of
    moral government. The question will arise with respect to grace as
    well as to sin: How can the theory that all moral government has
    respect only to the merit or demerit of personal acts be applied
    to our justification? If all sin is in sinning, with a personal
    desert of everlasting death, by parity of reasoning all holiness
    must consist in a holy choice with personal merit of eternal life.
    We say then, generally, that all definitions of sin which mean _a_
    sin are irrelevant here.” Dr. Smith quotes Edwards,
    2:309—“Original sin, the innate sinful depravity of the heart,
    includes not only the depravity of nature but the imputation of
    Adam’s first sin, or, in other words, the liableness or
    exposedness of Adam’s posterity, in the divine judgment, to
    partake of the punishment of that sin.”

    The watchword of a large class of theologians—popularly called
    “New School”—is that “all sin consists in sinning,”—that is, all
    sin is sin of act. But we have seen that the dispositions and
    states in which a man is unlike God and his purity are also sin
    according to the meaning of the law. We have now to add that each
    man is responsible also for that sin of our first father in which
    the human race apostatized from God. In other words, we recognize
    the guilt of race-sin as well as of personal sin. We desire to say
    at the outset, however, that our view, and, as we believe, the
    Scriptural view, requires us also to hold to certain
    qualifications of the doctrine which to some extent alleviate its
    harshness and furnish its proper explanation. These qualifications
    we now proceed to mention.


(_d_) In recognizing the guilt of race-sin, we are to bear in mind: (1)
that actual sin, in which the personal agent reaffirms the underlying
determination of his will, is more guilty than original sin alone; (2)
that no human being is finally condemned solely on account of original
sin; but that all who, like infants, do not commit personal
transgressions, are saved through the application of Christ’s atonement;
(3) that our responsibility for inborn evil dispositions, or for the
depravity common to the race, can be maintained only upon the ground that
this depravity was caused by an original and conscious act of free will,
when the race revolted from God in Adam; (4) that the doctrine of original
sin is only the ethical interpretation of biological facts—the facts of
heredity and of universal congenital ills, which demand an ethical ground
and explanation; and (5) that the idea of original sin has for its
correlate the idea of original grace, or the abiding presence and
operation of Christ, the immanent God, in every member of the race, in
spite of his sin, to counteract the evil and to prepare the way, so far as
man will permit, for individual and collective salvation.


    Over against the maxim: “All sin consists in sinning,” we put the
    more correct statement: Personal sin consists in sinning, but in
    Adam’s first sinning the race also sinned, so that “_in Adam all
    die_” (_1 Cor. 15:22_). Denney, Studies in Theology, 86—“Sin is
    not only personal but social; not only social but organic;
    character and all that is involved in character are capable of
    being attributed not only to individuals but to societies, and
    eventually to the human race itself; in short, there are not only
    isolated sins and individual sinners, but what has been called a
    kingdom of sin upon earth.” Leslie Stephen: “Man not dependent on
    a race is as meaningless a phrase as an apple that does not grow
    on a tree.” “Yet Aaron Burr and Abraham Lincoln show how a man may
    throw away every advantage of the best heredity and environment,
    while another can triumph over the worst. Man does not take his
    character from external causes, but shapes it by his own willing
    submission to influences from beneath or from above.”

    Wm. Adams Brown: “The idea of inherited guilt can be accepted only
    if paralleled by the idea of inherited good. The consequences of
    sin have often been regarded as social, while the consequences of
    good have been regarded as only individual. But heredity transmits
    both good and evil.” Mrs. Lydia Avery Coonley Ward: “Why bowest
    thou, O soul of mine, Crushed by ancestral sin? Thou hast a noble
    heritage, That bids thee victory win. The tainted past may bring
    forth flowers, As blossomed Aaron’s rod: No legacy of sin annuls
    Heredity from God.” For further statements with regard to
    race-responsibility, see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:29-39 (System
    Doctrine, 2:324-333). For the modern view of the Fall, and its
    reconciliation with the doctrine of evolution, see J. H. Bernard,
    art.: The Fall, in Hastings’ Dict. of Bible; A. H. Strong, Christ
    in Creation, 163-180; Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ.


(_e_) There is a race-sin, therefore, as well as a personal sin; and that
race-sin was committed by the first father of the race, when he comprised
the whole race in himself. All mankind since that time have been born in
the state into which he fell—a state of depravity, guilt, and
condemnation. To vindicate God’s justice in imputing to us the sin of our
first father, many theories have been devised, a part of which must be
regarded as only attempts to evade the problem by denying the facts set
before us in the Scriptures. Among these attempted explanations of the
Scripture statements, we proceed to examine the six theories which seem
most worthy of attention.


    The first three of the theories which we discuss may be said to be
    evasions of the problem of original sin; all, in one form or
    another, deny that God imputes to all men Adam’s sin, in such a
    sense that all are guilty for it. These theories are the Pelagian,
    the Arminian, and the New School. The last three of the theories
    which we are about to treat, namely, the Federal theory, the
    theory of Mediate Imputation, and the theory of Adam’s Natural
    Headship, are all Old School theories, and have for their common
    characteristic that they assert the guilt of inborn depravity. All
    three, moreover, hold that we are in some way responsible for
    Adam’s sin, though they differ as to the precise way in which we
    are related to Adam. We must grant that no one, even of these
    latter theories, is wholly satisfactory. We hope, however, to show
    that the last of them—the Augustinian theory, the theory of Adam’s
    natural headship, the theory that Adam and his descendants are
    naturally and organically one—explains the largest number of
    facts, is least open to objection, and is most accordant with
    Scripture.


I. Theories of Imputation.


1. The Pelagian Theory, or Theory of Man’s natural Innocence.


Pelagius, a British monk, propounded his doctrines at Rome, 409. They were
condemned by the Council of Carthage, 418. Pelagianism, however, as
opposed to Augustinianism, designates a complete scheme of doctrine with
regard to sin, of which Pelagius was the most thorough representative,
although every feature of it cannot be ascribed to his authorship.
Socinians and Unitarians are the more modern advocates of this general
scheme.

According to this theory, every human soul is immediately created by God,
and created as innocent, as free from depraved tendencies, and as
perfectly able to obey God, as Adam was at his creation. The only effect
of Adam’s sin upon his posterity is the effect of evil example; it has in
no way corrupted human nature; the only corruption of human nature is that
habit of sinning which each individual contracts by persistent
transgression of known law.

Adam’s sin therefore injured only himself; the sin of Adam is imputed only
to Adam,—it is imputed in no sense to his descendants; God imputes to each
of Adam’s descendants only those acts of sin which he has personally and
consciously committed. Men can be saved by the law as well as by the
gospel; and some have actually obeyed God perfectly, and have thus been
saved. Physical death is therefore not the penalty of sin, but an original
law of nature; Adam would have died whether he had sinned or not; in Rom.
5:12, “death passed unto all men, for that all sinned,” signifies: “all
incurred eternal death by sinning after Adam’s example.”


    Wiggers, Augustinism and Pelagianism, 59, states the seven points
    of the Pelagian doctrine as follows: (1) Adam was created mortal,
    so that he would have died even if he had not sinned; (2) Adam’s
    sin injured, not the human race, but only himself; (3) new-born
    infants are in the same condition as Adam before the Fall; (4) the
    whole human race neither dies on account of Adam’s sin, nor rises
    on account of Christ’s resurrection; (5) infants, even though not
    baptized, attain eternal life; (6) the law is as good a means of
    salvation as the gospel; (7) even before Christ some men lived who
    did not commit sin.

    In Pelagius’ Com. on _Rom. 5:12_, published in Jerome’s Works,
    vol. xi, we learn who these sinless men were, namely, Abel, Enoch,
    Joseph, Job, and, among the heathen, Socrates, Aristides, Numa.
    The virtues of the heathen entitle them to reward. Their worthies
    were not indeed without evil thoughts and inclinations; but, on
    the view of Pelagius that all sin consists in act, these evil
    thoughts and inclinations were not sin. “Non pleni nascimur”: we
    are born, not full, but vacant, of character. Holiness, Pelagius
    thought, could not be concreated. Adam’s descendants are not
    weaker, but stronger, than he; since they have fulfilled many
    commands, while he did not fulfil so much as one. In every man
    there is a natural conscience; he has an ideal of life; he forms
    right resolves; he recognizes the claims of law; he accuses
    himself when he sins,—all these things Pelagius regards as
    indications of a certain holiness in all men, and
    misinterpretation of these facts gives rise to his system; he
    ought to have seen in them evidences of a divine influence
    opposing man’s bent to evil and leading him to repentance. Grace,
    on the Pelagian theory, is simply the grace of _creation_—God’s
    originally endowing man with his high powers of reason and will.
    While Augustinianism regards human nature as _dead_, and
    Semi-Pelagianism regards it as _sick_, Pelagianism proper declares
    it to be _well_.

    Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:43 (Syst. Doct., 2:338)—“Neither the
    body, man’s surroundings, nor the inward operation of God, have
    any determining influence upon the will. God reaches man only
    through external means, such as Christ’s doctrine, example, and
    promise. This clears God of the charge of evil, but also takes
    from him the authorship of good. It is Deism, applied to man’s
    nature. God cannot enter man’s being if he would, and he would not
    if he could. Free will is everything.” _Ib._, 1:626 (Syst. Doct.,
    2:188, 189)—“Pelagianism at one time counts it too great an honor
    that man should be directly moved upon by God, and at another, too
    great a dishonor that man should not be able to do without God. In
    this inconsistent reasoning, it shows its desire to be rid of God
    as much as possible. The true conception of God requires a living
    relation to man, as well as to the external universe. The true
    conception of man requires satisfaction of his longings and powers
    by reception of impulses and strength from God. Pelagianism, in
    seeking for man a development only like that of nature, shows that
    its high estimate of man is only a delusive one; it really
    degrades him, by ignoring his true dignity and destiny.” See
    _Ib._, 1:124, 125 (Syst. Doct., 1:136, 137); 2:43-45 (Syst. Doct.,
    2:338, 339); 2:148 (Syst. Doct., 3:44). Also Schaff, Church
    History, 2:783-856; Doctrines of the Early Socinians, in Princeton
    Essays, 1:194-211; Wörter, Pelagianismus. For substantially
    Pelagian statements, see Sheldon, Sin and Redemption; Ellis, Half
    Century of Unitarian Controversy, 76.


Of the Pelagian theory of sin, we may say:

A. It has never been recognized as Scriptural, nor has it been formulated
in confessions, by any branch of the Christian church. Held only
sporadically and by individuals, it has ever been regarded by the church
at large as heresy. This constitutes at least a presumption against its
truth.


    As slavery was “the sum of all villainy,” so the Pelagian doctrine
    may be called the sum of all false doctrine. Pelagianism is a
    survival of paganism, in its majestic egoism and self-complacency.
    “Cicero, in his Natura Deorum, says that men thank the gods for
    external advantages, but no man ever thanks the gods for his
    virtues—that he is honest or pure or merciful. Pelagius was first
    roused to opposition by hearing a bishop in the public services of
    the church quote Augustine’s prayer: ‘Da quod jubes, et jube quod
    vis’—‘Give what thou commandest, and command what thou wilt.’ From
    this he was led to formulate the gospel according to St. Cicero,
    so perfectly does the Pelagian doctrine reproduce the Pagan
    teaching.” The impulse of the Christian, on the other hand, is to
    refer all gifts and graces to a divine source in Christ and in the
    Holy Spirit. _Eph. 2:10_—“_For we are his workmanship, created in
    Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we
    should walk in them_”; _John 15:16_—“_Ye did not choose me, but I
    chose you_”; _1:13_—“_who were born, not of blood, nor of the will
    of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God._” H. Auber: “And
    every virtue we possess, And every victory won, And every thought
    of holiness, Are his alone.”

    Augustine had said that “Man is most free when controlled by God
    alone”—“[Deo] solo dominante, liberrimus” (De Mor. Eccl., xxi).
    Gore, in Lux Mundi, 320—“In Christ humanity is perfect, because in
    him it retains no part of that false independence which, in all
    its manifold forms, is the secret of sin.” Pelagianism, on the
    contrary, is man’s declaration of independence. Harnack, Hist.
    Dogma, 5:200—“The essence of Pelagianism, the key to its whole
    mode of thought, lies in this proposition of Julian: ‘Homo libero
    arbitrio emancipatus a Deo’—man, created free, is in his whole
    being independent of God. He has no longer to do with God, but
    with himself alone. God reënters man’s life only at the end, at
    the judgment,—a doctrine of the orphanage of humanity.”


B. It contradicts Scripture in denying: (_a_) that evil disposition and
state, as well as evil acts, are sin; (_b_) that such evil disposition and
state are inborn in all mankind; (_c_) that men universally are guilty of
overt transgression so soon as they come to moral consciousness; (_d_)
that no man is able without divine help to fulfil the law; (_e_) that all
men, without exception, are dependent for salvation upon God’s atoning,
regenerating, sanctifying grace; (_f_) that man’s present state of
corruption, condemnation, and death, is the direct effect of Adam’s
transgression.


    The Westminster Confession, ch. vi. § 4, declares that “we are
    utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and
    wholly inclined to all evil.” To Pelagius, on the contrary, sin is
    a mere incident. He knows only of _sins_, not of _sin_. He holds
    the atomic, or atomistic, theory of sin, which regards it as
    consisting in isolated volitions. Pelegianism, holding, as it
    does, that virtue and vice consist only in single decisions, does
    not account for _character_ at all. There is no such thing as a
    state of sin, or a self-propagating power of sin. And yet upon
    these the Scriptures lay greater emphasis than upon mere acts of
    transgression. _John 3:6_—“_That which is born of the flesh is
    flesh_”—“that which comes of a sinful and guilty stock is itself,
    from the very beginning, sinful and guilty” (Dorner). Witness the
    tendency to degradation in families and nations.

    Amiel says that the great defect of liberal Christianity is its
    superficial conception of sin. The tendency dates far back:
    Tertullian spoke of the soul as naturally Christian—“anima
    naturaliter Christiana.” The tendency has come down to modern
    times: Crane, The Religion of To-morrow, 246—“It is only when
    children grow up, and begin to absorb their environment, that they
    lose their artless loveliness.” A Rochester Unitarian preacher
    publicly declared it to be as much a duty to believe in the
    natural purity of man, as to believe in the natural purity of God.
    Dr. Lyman Abbott speaks of “the shadow which the Manichæan
    theology of Augustine, borrowed by Calvin, cast upon all children,
    in declaring them born to an inheritance of wrath as a viper’s
    brood.” Dr. Abbott forgets that Augustine was the greatest
    opponent of Manichæanism, and that his doctrine of inherited guilt
    may be supplemented by a doctrine of inherited divine influences
    tending to salvation.

    Prof. G. A. Coe tells us that “all children are within the
    household of God”; that “they are already members of his kingdom”;
    that “the adolescent change” is “a step not _into_ the Christian
    life, but _within_ the Christian life.” We are taught that
    salvation is by education. But education is only a way of
    presenting truth. It still remains needful that the soul should
    accept the truth. Pelagianism ignores or denies the presence in
    every child of a congenital selfishness which hinders acceptance
    of the truth, and which, without the working of the divine Spirit,
    will absolutely counteract the influence of the truth. Augustine
    was taught his guilt and helplessness by transgression, while
    Pelagius remained ignorant of the evil of his own heart. Pelagius
    might have said with Wordsworth, Prelude, 534—“I had approached,
    like other youths, the shield Of human nature from the golden
    side; And would have fought, even unto the death, to attest The
    quality of the metal which I saw.”

    Schaff, on the Pelagian controversy, in Bib. Sac., 5:205-243—The
    controversy “resolves itself into the question whether redemption
    and sanctification are the work of man or of God. Pelagianism in
    its whole mode of thinking starts from man and seeks to work
    itself upward gradually, by means of an imaginary good-will, to
    holiness and communion with God. Augustinianism pursues the
    opposite way, deriving from God’s unconditioned and all-working
    grace a new life and all power of working good. The first is led
    from freedom into a legal, self-righteous piety; the other rises
    from the slavery of sin to the glorious liberty of the children of
    God. For the first, revelation is of force only as an outward
    help, or the power of a high example; for the last, it is the
    inmost life, the very marrow and blood of the new man. The first
    involves an Ebionitic view of Christ, as noble man, not
    high-priest or king; the second finds in him one in whom dwells
    all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. The first makes conversion
    a process of gradual moral purification on the ground of original
    nature; with the last, it is a total change, in which the old
    passes away and all becomes new.... Rationalism is simply the form
    in which Pelagianism becomes theoretically complete. The high
    opinion which the Pelagian holds of the natural will is
    transferred with equal right by the Rationalist to the natural
    reason. The one does without grace, as the other does without
    revelation. Pelagian divinity is rationalistic. Rationalistic
    morality is Pelagian.” See this Compendium, page 89.

    Allen, Religious Progress, 98-100—“Most of the mischief of
    religious controversy springs from the desire and determination to
    impute to one’s opponent positions which he does not hold, or to
    draw inferences from his principles, insisting that he shall be
    held responsible for them, even though he declares that he does
    not teach them. We say that he ought to accept them; that he is
    bound logically to do so; that they are necessary deductions from
    his system; that the tendency of his teaching is in these
    directions; and then we denounce and condemn him for what he
    disowns. It was in this way that Augustine filled out for Pelagius
    the gaps in his scheme, which he thought it necessary to do, in
    order to make Pelagius’s teaching consistent and complete; and
    Pelagius, in his turn, drew inferences from the Augustinian
    theology, about which Augustine would have preferred to maintain a
    discreet silence. Neither Augustine nor Calvin was anxious to make
    prominent the doctrine of the reprobation of the wicked to
    damnation, but preferred to dwell on the more attractive, more
    rational tenet of the elect to salvation, as subjects of the
    divine choice and approbation; substituting for the obnoxious word
    reprobation the milder, euphemistic word preterition. It was their
    opponents who were bent on forcing them out of their reserve,
    pushing them into what seemed the consistent sequence of their
    attitude, and then holding it up before the world for execration.
    And the same remark would apply to almost every theological
    contention that has embittered the church’s experience.”


C. It rests upon false philosophical principles; as, for example: (_a_)
that the human will is simply the faculty of volitions; whereas it is
also, and chiefly, the faculty of self-determination to an ultimate end;
(_b_) that the power of a contrary choice is essential to the existence of
will; whereas the will fundamentally determined to self-gratification has
this power only with respect to subordinate choices, and cannot by a
single volition reverse its moral state; (_c_) that ability is the measure
of obligation,—a principle which would diminish the sinner’s
responsibility, just in proportion to his progress in sin; (_d_) that law
consists only in positive enactment; whereas it is the demand of perfect
harmony with God, inwrought into man’s moral nature; (_e_) that each human
soul is immediately created by God, and holds no other relations to moral
law than those which are individual; whereas all human souls are
organically connected with each other, and together have a corporate
relation to God’s law, by virtue of their derivation from one common
stock.

(_a_) Neander, Church History, 2:564-625, holds one of the fundamental
principles of Pelagianism to be “the ability to choose, equally and at any
moment, between good and evil.” There is no recognition of the law by
which acts produce states; the power which repeated acts of evil possess
to give a definite character and tendency to the will itself.—“Volition is
an everlasting ‘tick,’ ‘tick,’ and swinging of the pendulum, but no moving
forward of the hands of the clock follows.” “There is no continuity of
moral life—no _character_, in man, angel, devil, or God.”—(_b_) See art.
on Power of Contrary Choice, in Princeton Essays, 1:212-233; Pelagianism
holds that no confirmation in holiness is possible. Thornwell, Theology:
“The sinner is as free as the saint; the devil as the angel.” Harris,
Philos. Basis of Theism, 399—“The theory that indifference is essential to
freedom implies that will never acquires character; that voluntary action
is atomistic, every act disintegrated from every other; that character, if
acquired, would be incompatible with freedom.” “By mere volition the soul
now a _plenum_ can become a _vacuum_, or now a _vacuum_ can become a
_plenum_.” On the Pelagian view of freedom, see Julius Müller, Doctrine of
Sin, 37-44.


    (_c_) _Ps. 79:8_—“_Remember not against us the iniquities of our
    forefathers_”; _106:6_—“_We have sinned with our fathers._” Notice
    the analogy of individuals who suffer from the effects of parental
    mistakes or of national transgression. Julius Müller, Doct. Sin,
    2:316, 317—“Neither the _atomistic_ nor the _organic_ view of
    human nature is the complete truth.” Each must be complemented by
    the other. For statement of race-responsibility, see Dorner,
    Glaubenslehre, 2:30-39, 51-64, 161, 162 (System of Doctrine,
    2:324-334, 345-359; 3:50-54)—“Among the Scripture proofs of the
    moral connection of the individual with the race are the visiting
    of the sins of the fathers upon the children; the obligation of
    the people to punish the sin of the individual, that the whole
    land may not incur guilt; the offering of sacrifice for a murder,
    the perpetrator of which is unknown. Achan’s crime is charged to
    the whole people. The Jewish race is the better for its parentage,
    and other nations are the worse for theirs. The Hebrew people
    become a legal personality.

    “Is it said that none are punished for the sins of their fathers
    unless they are like their fathers? But to be unlike their fathers
    requires a new heart. They who are not held accountable for the
    sins of their fathers are those who have recognized their
    responsibility for them, and have repented for their likeness to
    their ancestors. Only the self-isolating spirit says: ‘_Am I my
    brother’s keeper?_’ (_Gen. 4:9_), and thinks to construct a
    constant equation between individual misfortune and _individual_
    sin. The calamities of the righteous led to an ethical conception
    of the relation of the individual to the community. Such
    sufferings show that men can love God disinterestedly, that the
    good has unselfish friends. These sufferings are substitutionary,
    when borne as belonging to the sufferer, not foreign to him, the
    guilt of others attaching to him by virtue of his national or
    race-relation to them. So Moses in Ex. 34:9, David in Ps. 51:6,
    Isaiah in Is. 59:9-16, recognize the connection between personal
    sin and race-sin.

    “Christ restores the bond between man and his fellows, turns the
    hearts of the fathers to the children. He is the creator of a new
    race-consciousness. In him as the head we see ourselves bound to,
    and responsible for others. Love finds it morally impossible to
    isolate itself. It restores the consciousness of unity and the
    recognition of common guilt. Does every man stand for himself in
    the N. T.? This would be so, only if each man became a sinner
    solely by free and conscious personal decision, either in the
    present, or in a past state of existence. But this is not
    Scriptural. Something comes before personal transgression: ‘_That
    which is born of the flesh is flesh_’ (_John 3:6_). Personality is
    the stronger for recognizing the race-sin. We have common joy in
    the victories of the good; so in shameful lapses we have sorrow.
    These are not our worst moments, but our best,—there is something
    great in them. Original sin must be displeasing to God; for it
    perverts the reason, destroys likeness to God, excludes from
    communion with God, makes redemption necessary, leads to actual
    sin, influences future generations. But to complain of God for
    permitting its propagation is to complain of his not destroying
    the race,—that is, to complain of one’s own existence.” See Shedd,
    Hist. Doctrine, 2:93-110; Hagenbach, Hist. Doctrine, 1:287,
    296-310; Martensen, Dogmatics, 354-362; Princeton Essays, 1:74-97;
    Dabney, Theology, 296-302, 314, 315.


2. The Arminian Theory, or Theory of voluntarily appropriated Depravity.


Arminius (1560-1609), professor in the University of Leyden, in South
Holland, while formally accepting the doctrine of the Adamic unity of the
race propounded both by Luther and Calvin, gave a very different
interpretation to it—an interpretation which verged toward
Semi-Pelagianism and the anthropology of the Greek Church. The Methodist
body is the modern representative of this view.

According to this theory, all men, as a divinely appointed sequence of
Adam’s transgression, are naturally destitute of original righteousness,
and are exposed to misery and death. By virtue of the infirmity propagated
from Adam to all his descendants, mankind are wholly unable without divine
help perfectly to obey God or to attain eternal life. This inability,
however, is physical and intellectual, but not voluntary. As matter of
justice, therefore, God bestows upon each individual from the first dawn
of consciousness a special influence of the Holy Spirit, which is
sufficient to counteract the effect of the inherited depravity and to make
obedience possible, provided the human will coöperates, which it still has
power to do.

The evil tendency and state may be called sin; but they do not in
themselves involve guilt or punishment; still less are mankind accounted
guilty of Adam’s sin. God imputes to each man his inborn tendencies to
evil, only when he consciously and voluntarily appropriates and ratifies
these in spite of the power to the contrary, which, in justice to man, God
has specially communicated. In Rom. 5:12, “death passed unto all men, for
that all sinned,” signifies that physical and spiritual death is inflicted
upon all men, not as the penalty of a common sin in Adam, but because, by
divine decree, all suffer the consequences of that sin, and because all
personally consent to their inborn sinfulness by acts of transgression.


    See Arminius, Works, 1:252-254, 317-324, 325-327, 523-531,
    575-583. The description given above is a description of
    Arminianism proper. The expressions of Arminius himself are so
    guarded that Moses Stuart (Bib. Repos., 1831) found it possible to
    construct an argument to prove that Arminius was not an Arminian.
    But it is plain that by inherited sin Arminius meant only
    inherited evil, and that it was not of a sort to justify God’s
    condemnation. He denied any inbeing in Adam, such as made us
    justly chargeable with Adam’s sin, except in the sense that we are
    obliged to endure certain consequences of it. This Shedd has shown
    in his History of Doctrine, 2:178-196. The system of Arminius was
    more fully expounded by Limborch and Episcopius. See Limborch,
    Theol. Christ., 3:4:6 (p. 189). The sin with which we are born
    “does not inhere in the soul, for this [soul] is immediately
    created by God, and therefore, if it were infected with sin, that
    sin would be from God.” Many so-called Arminians, such as Whitby
    and John Taylor, were rather Pelagians.

    John Wesley, however, greatly modified and improved the Arminian
    doctrine. Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:329, 330—“Wesleyanism (1) admits
    entire moral depravity; (2) denies that men in this state have any
    power to coöperate with the grace of God; (3) asserts that the
    guilt of all through Adam was removed by the justification of all
    through Christ; (4) ability to coöperate is of the Holy Spirit,
    through the universal influence of the redemption of Christ. The
    order of the decrees is (1) to permit the fall of man; (2) to send
    the Son to be a full satisfaction for the sins of the whole world;
    (3) on that ground to remit all original sin, and to give such
    grace as would enable all to attain eternal life; (4) those who
    improve that grace and persevere to the end are ordained to be
    saved.” We may add that Wesley made the bestowal upon our depraved
    nature of ability to coöperate with God to be a matter of grace,
    while Arminius regarded it as a matter of justice, man without it
    not being accountable.

    Wesleyanism was systematized by Watson, who, in his Institutes,
    2:53-55, 59, 77, although denying the imputation of Adam’s sin in
    any proper sense, yet declares that “Limborch and others
    materially departed from the tenets of Arminius in denying inward
    lusts and tendencies to be sinful till complied with and augmented
    by the will. But men universally choose to ratify these
    tendencies; therefore they are corrupt in heart. If there be a
    universal depravity of will previous to the actual choice, then it
    inevitably follows that though infants do not commit actual sin,
    yet that theirs is a sinful nature....As to infants, they are not
    indeed born justified and regenerate; so that to say original sin
    is taken away, as to infants, by Christ, is not the correct view
    of the case, for the reasons before given; but they are all born
    under ‘the free gift,’ the effects of the ‘righteousness’ of one,
    which is extended to all men; and this free gift is bestowed on
    them in order to justification of life, the adjudging of the
    condemned to live....Justification in adults is connected with
    repentance and faith; in infants, we do not know how. The Holy
    Spirit may be given to children. Divine and effectual influence
    may be exerted on them, to cure the spiritual death and corrupt
    tendency of their nature.”

    It will be observed that Watson’s Wesleyanism is much more near to
    Scripture than what we have described, and properly described, as
    Arminianism proper. Pope, in his Theology, follows Wesley and
    Watson, and (2:70-86) gives a valuable synopsis of the differences
    between Arminius and Wesley. Whedon and Raymond, in America,
    better represent original Arminianism. They hold that God was
    under _obligation_ to restore man’s ability, and yet they
    inconsistently speak of this ability as a _gracious_ ability. Two
    passages from Raymond’s Theology show the inconsistency of calling
    that “grace,” which God is bound in justice to bestow, in order to
    make man responsible: 2:84-86—“The race came into existence under
    grace. Existence and justification are secured for it only through
    Christ; for, apart from Christ, punishment and destruction would
    have followed the first sin. So all gifts of the Spirit necessary
    to qualify him for the putting forth of free moral choices are
    secured for him through Christ. The Spirit of God is not a
    bystander, but a quickening power. So man is by grace, not by his
    fallen nature, a moral being capable of knowing, loving, obeying,
    and enjoying God. Such he ever will be, if he does not frustrate
    the grace of God. Not till the Spirit takes his final flight is he
    in a condition of total depravity.”

    Compare with this the following passage of the same work in which
    this “grace” is called a debt: 2:317—“The relations of the
    posterity of Adam to God are substantially those of newly created
    beings. Each individual person is obligated to God, and God to
    him, precisely the same as if God had created him such as he is.
    Ability must equal obligation. God was not obligated to provide a
    Redeemer for the first transgressors, but having provided
    Redemption for them, and through it having permitted them to
    propagate a degenerate race, an adequate compensation is due. The
    gracious influences of the Spirit are then a debt due to man—a
    compensation for the disabilities of inherited depravity.”
    McClintock and Strong (Cyclopædia, art.: Arminius) endorse
    Whedon’s art. in the Bib. Sac., 19:241, as an exhibition of
    Arminianism, and Whedon himself claims it to be such. See
    Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:214-216.


With regard to the Arminian theory we remark:

A. We grant that there is a universal gift of the Holy Spirit, if by the
Holy Spirit is meant the natural light of reason and conscience, and the
manifold impulses to good which struggle against the evil of man’s nature.
But we regard as wholly unscriptural the assumptions: (_a_) that this gift
of the Holy Spirit of itself removes the depravity or condemnation derived
from Adam’s fall; (_b_) that without this gift man would not be
responsible for being morally imperfect; and (_c_) that at the beginning
of moral life men consciously appropriate their inborn tendencies to evil.


    John Wesley adduced in proof of universal grace the text: _John
    1:9_—“_the light which lighteth every man_”—which refers to the
    natural light of reason and conscience which the preincarnate
    Logos bestowed on all men, though in different degrees, before his
    coming in the flesh. This light can be called the Holy Spirit,
    because it was “_the Spirit of Christ_” (_1 Pet. 1:11_). The
    Arminian view has a large element of truth in its recognition of
    an influence of Christ, the immanent God, which mitigates the
    effects of the Fall and strives to prepare men for salvation. But
    Arminianism does not fully recognize the evil to be removed, and
    it therefore exaggerates the effect of this divine working.
    Universal grace does not remove man’s depravity or man’s
    condemnation; as is evident from a proper interpretation of _Rom.
    5:12-19_ and of _Eph. 2:3_; it only puts side by side with that
    depravity and condemnation influences and impulses which
    counteract the evil and urge the sinner to repentance: _John
    1:5_—“_the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness
    apprehended it not._” John Wesley also referred to _Rom.
    5:18_—“_through one act of righteousness the free gift came unto
    all men to justification of life_”—but here the “all men” is
    conterminous with “the many” who are “_made righteous_” in _verse
    19_, and with the “_all_” who are “_made alive_” in _1 Cor.
    15:22_; in other words, the “_all_” in this case is “all
    believers”: else the passage teaches, not universal gift of the
    Spirit, but universal salvation.

    Arminianism holds to inherited sin, in the sense of infirmity and
    evil tendency, but not to inherited guilt. John Wesley, however,
    by holding also that the giving of ability is a matter of grace
    and not of justice, seems to imply that there is a common guilt as
    well as a common sin, before consciousness. American Arminians are
    more logical, but less Scriptural. Sheldon, Syst. Christian
    Doctrine, 321, tells us that “guilt cannot possibly be a matter of
    inheritance, and consequently original sin can be affirmed of the
    posterity of Adam only in the sense of hereditary corruption,
    which first becomes an occasion of guilt when it is embraced by
    the will of the individual.” How little the Arminian means by
    “sin,” can be inferred from the saying of Bishop Simpson that
    “Christ inherited sin.” He meant of course only physical and
    intellectual infirmity, without a tinge of guilt. “A child
    inherits its parent’s nature,” it is said, “not as a punishment,
    but by natural law.” But we reply that this natural law is itself
    an expression of God’s moral nature, and the inheritance of evil
    can be justified only upon the ground of a common non-conformity
    to God in both the parent and the child, or a participation of
    each member in the common guilt of the race.

    In the light of our preceding treatment, we can estimate the
    element of good and the element of evil in Pfleiderer, Philos.
    Religion, 1:232—“It is an exaggeration when original sin is
    considered as personally imputable guilt; and it is going too far
    when it is held to be the whole state of the natural man, and yet
    the actually present good, the ‘original grace,’ is
    overlooked....We may say, with Schleiermacher, that original sin
    is the common deed and common guilt of the human race. But the
    individual always participates in this collective guilt in the
    measure in which he takes part with his personal doing in the
    collective act that is directed to the furtherance of the bad.”
    Dabney, Theology, 315, 316—“Arminianism is orthodox as to the
    legal consequences of Adam’s sin to his posterity; but what it
    gives with one hand, it takes back with the other, attributing to
    grace the restoration of this natural ability lost by the Fall. If
    the effects of Adam’s Fall on his posterity are such that they
    would have been unjust if not repaired by a redeeming plan that
    was to follow it, then God’s act in providing a Redeemer was not
    an act of pure grace. He was under obligation to do some such
    thing,—salvation is not grace, but debt.” A. J. Gordon, Ministry
    of the Spirit, 187 _sq._, denies the universal gift of the Spirit,
    quoting _John 14:17_—“_whom the world cannot receive; for it
    beholdeth him not, neither knoweth him_”; _16:7_—“_if I go, I will
    send him unto you_”; _i. e._, Christ’s disciples were to be the
    recipients and distributers of the Holy Spirit, and his church the
    mediator between the Spirit and the world. Therefore _Mark
    16:15_—“_Go ye into all the world, and preach,_” implies that the
    Spirit shall go only with them. Conviction of the Spirit does not
    go beyond the church’s evangelizing. But we reply that _Gen. 6:3_
    implies a wider striving of the Holy Spirit.


B. It contradicts Scripture in maintaining: (_a_) that inherited moral
evil does not involve guilt; (_b_) that the gift of the Spirit, and the
regeneration of infants, are matters of justice; (_c_) that the effect of
grace is simply to restore man’s natural ability, instead of disposing him
to use that ability aright; (_d_) that election is God’s choice of certain
men to be saved upon the ground of their foreseen faith, instead of being
God’s choice to make certain men believers; (_e_) that physical death is
not the just penalty of sin, but is a matter of arbitrary decree.


    (_a_) See Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:58 (System of Doctrine,
    2:352-359)—“With Arminius, original sin is original _evil_ only,
    not _guilt_. He explained the problem of original sin by denying
    the fact, and turning the native sinfulness into a morally
    indifferent thing. No sin without consent; no consent at the
    beginning of human development; therefore, no guilt in evil
    desire. This is the same as the Romanist doctrine of
    concupiscence, and like that leads to blaming God for an
    originally bad constitution of our nature....Original sin is
    merely an enticement to evil addressed to the free will. All
    internal disorder and vitiosity is morally indifferent, and
    becomes sin only through appropriation by free will. But
    involuntary, loveless, proud thoughts are recognized in Scripture
    as sin; yet they spring from the heart without our conscious
    consent. Undeliberate and deliberate sins run into each other, so
    that it is impossible to draw a line between them. The doctrine
    that there is no sin without consent implies power to withhold
    consent. But this contradicts the universal need of redemption and
    our observation that none have ever thus entirely withheld consent
    from sin.”

    (_b_) H. B. Smith’s Review of Whedon on the Will, in Faith and
    Philosophy, 359-399—“A child, upon the old view, needs only growth
    to make him guilty of actual sin; whereas, upon this view, he
    needs growth and grace too.” See Bib. Sac., 20:327, 328. According
    to Whedon, Com. on _Rom. 5:12_, “the condition of an infant apart
    from Christ is that of a sinner, _as one sure to sin_, yet never
    actually condemned before personal apostasy. This _would_ be its
    condition, rather, for in Christ the infant is regenerate and
    justified and endowed with the Holy Spirit. Hence all actual
    sinners are apostates from a state of grace.” But we ask: 1. Why
    then do infants die before they have committed actual sin? Surely
    not on account of Adam’s sin, for they are delivered from all the
    evils of that, through Christ. It must be because they are still
    somehow sinners. 2. How can we account for all infants sinning so
    soon as they begin morally to act, if, before they sin, they are
    in a state of grace and sanctification? It must be because they
    were still somehow sinners. In other words, the universal
    regeneration and justification of infants contradict Scripture and
    observation.

    (_c_) Notice that this “gracious” ability does not involve saving
    grace to the recipient, because it is given equally to all men.
    Nor is it more than a restoring to man of his natural ability lost
    by Adam’s sin. It is not sufficient to explain why one man who has
    the gracious ability chooses God, while another who has the same
    gracious ability chooses self. _1 Cor. 4:7_—“_who maketh thee to
    differ?_” Not God, but thyself. Over against this doctrine of
    Arminians, who hold to universal, resistible grace, restoring
    natural ability, Calvinists and Augustinians hold to particular,
    irresistible grace, giving moral ability, or, in other words,
    bestowing the disposition to use natural ability aright. “Grace”
    is a word much used by Arminians. Methodist Doctrine and
    Discipline, Articles of Religion, viii—“The condition of man after
    the fall of Adam is such that he cannot turn and prepare himself,
    by his own natural strength and works, to faith, and calling upon
    God; wherefore we have no power to do good works, pleasant and
    acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing
    us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we
    have that good will.” It is important to understand that, in
    Arminian usage, grace is simply the restoration of man’s natural
    ability to act for himself; it never actually saves him, but only
    enables him to save himself—if he will. Arminian grace is evenly
    bestowed grace of spiritual endowment, as Pelagian grace is evenly
    bestowed grace of creation. It regards redemption as a
    compensation for innate and consequently irresponsible depravity.

    (_d_) In the Arminian system, the order of salvation is, (1)
    faith—by an unrenewed but convicted man; (2) justification; (3)
    regeneration, or a holy heart. God decrees not to _originate_
    faith, but to _reward_ it. Hence Wesleyans make faith a work, and
    regard election as God’s ordaining those who, he foresees, will of
    their own accord believe. The Augustinian order, on the contrary,
    is (1) regeneration; (2) faith; (3) justification. Memoir of
    Adolph Saphir, 255—“My objection to the Arminian or semi-Arminian
    is not that they make the entrance very wide; but that they do not
    give you anything definite, safe and real, when you have
    entered.... Do not believe the devil’s gospel, which is a _chance_
    of salvation: chance of salvation is chance of damnation.” Grace
    is not a _reward_ for good deeds done, but a _power_ enabling us
    to do them. Francis Rous of Truro, in the Parliament of 1629,
    spoke as a man nearly frantic with horror at the increase of that
    “error of Arminianism which makes the grace of God lackey it after
    the will of man”; see Masson, Life of Milton, 1:277. Arminian
    converts say: “I gave my heart to the Lord”; Augustinian converts
    say: “The Holy Spirit convicted me of sin and renewed my heart.”
    Arminianism tends to self-sufficiency; Augustinianism promotes
    dependence upon God.


C. It rests upon false philosophical principles, as for example: (_a_)
That the will is simply the faculty of volitions. (_b_) That the power of
contrary choice, in the sense of power by a single act to reverse one’s
moral state, is essential to will. (_c_) That previous certainty of any
given moral act is incompatible with its freedom. (_d_) That ability is
the measure of obligation. (_e_) That law condemns only volitional
transgression. (_f_) That man has no organic moral connection with the
race.


    (_b_) Raymond says: “Man is responsible for character, but only so
    far as that character is self-imposed. We are not responsible for
    character irrespective of its origin. Freedom _from_ an act is as
    essential to responsibility as freedom _to_ it. If power to the
    contrary is impossible, then freedom does not exist in God or man.
    Sin was a necessity, and God was the author of it.” But this is a
    denial that there is any such thing as character; that the will
    can give itself a bent which no single volition can change; that
    the wicked man can become the slave of sin; that Satan, though
    without power now in himself to turn to God, is yet responsible
    for his sin. The power of contrary choice which Adam had exists no
    longer in its entirety; it is narrowed down to a power to the
    contrary in temporary and subordinate choices; it no longer is
    equal to the work of changing the fundamental determination of the
    being to selfishness as an ultimate end. Yet for this very
    inability, because originated by will, man is responsible.

    Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:28—“Formal freedom leads the way
    to real freedom. The starting-point is a freedom which does not
    yet involve an inner necessity, but the possibility of something
    else; the goal is the freedom which is identical with necessity.
    The first is a means to the last. When the will has fully and
    truly chosen, the power of acting otherwise may still be said to
    exist in a metaphysical sense; but morally, _i. e._, with
    reference to the contrast of good and evil, it is entirely done
    away. Formal freedom is freedom of choice, in the sense of
    volition with the express consciousness of other possibilities.”
    Real freedom is freedom to choose the good only, with no remaining
    possibility that evil will exert a counter attraction. But as the
    will can reach a “moral necessity” of good, so it can through sin
    reach a “moral necessity” of evil.

    (_c_) Park: “The great philosophical objection to Arminianism is
    its denial of the _certainty_ of human action—the idea that a man
    may act either way without certainty how he will act—power of a
    contrary choice in the sense of a moral indifference which can
    choose without motive, or contrary to the strongest motive. The
    New School view is better than this, for that holds to the
    certainty of wrong choice, while yet the soul has power to make a
    right one.... The Arminians believe that it is objectively
    uncertain whether a man shall act in this way or in that, right or
    wrong. There is nothing, antecedently to choice, to decide the
    choice. It was the whole aim of Edwards to refute the idea that
    man would not _certainly_ sin. The old Calvinists believe that
    antecedently to the Fall Adam was in this state of objective
    uncertainty, but that after the Fall it was certain he would sin,
    and his probation therefore was closed. Edwards affirms that no
    such objective uncertainty or power to the contrary ever existed,
    and that man now has all the liberty he ever had or could have.
    The truth in ‘power to the contrary’ is simply the power of the
    will to act contrary to the way it does act. President Edwards
    believed in this, though he is commonly understood as reasoning to
    the contrary. The false ‘power to the contrary’ is _uncertainty_
    how one will act, or a willingness to act otherwise than one does
    act. This is the Arminian power to the contrary, and it is this
    that Edwards opposes.”

    (_e_) Whedon, On the Will, 338-360, 388-395—“Prior to free
    volition, man may be unconformed to law, yet not a subject of
    retribution. The law has two offices, one judicatory and critical,
    the other retributive and penal. Hereditary evil may not be
    visited with retribution, as Adam’s concreated purity was not
    meritorious. Passive, prevolitional holiness is moral rectitude,
    but not moral desert. Passive, prevolitional impurity needs
    concurrence of active will to make it condemnable.”


D. It renders uncertain either the universality of sin or man’s
responsibility for it. If man has full power to refuse consent to inborn
depravity, then the universality of sin and the universal need of a Savior
are merely hypothetical. If sin, however, be universal, there must have
been an absence of free consent; and the objective certainty of man’s
sinning, according to the theory, destroys his responsibility.


    Raymond, Syst. Theol., 2:86-89, holds it “theoretically possible
    that a child may be so trained and educated in the nurture and
    admonition of the Lord, as that he will never knowingly and
    willingly transgress the law of God; in which case he will
    certainly grow up into regeneration and final salvation. But it is
    grace that preserves him from sin—[common grace?]. We do not know,
    either from experience or Scripture, that none have been free from
    known and wilful transgressions.” J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and
    Spir. Freedom, 26-33—“It is possible to walk from the cradle to
    the grave, not indeed altogether without sin, but without any
    period of alienation from God, and with the heavenly life
    developing along with the earthly, as it did in Christ, from the
    first.” But, since grace merely restores ability without giving
    the disposition to use that ability aright, Arminianism does not
    logically provide for the certain salvation of any infant.
    Calvinism can provide for the salvation of all dying in infancy,
    for it knows of a divine power to renew the will, but Arminianism
    knows of no such power, and so is furthest from a solution of the
    problem of infant salvation. See Julius Müller, Doct. Sin,
    2:320-326; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 479-494; Bib. Sac. 23:206;
    28:279; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:56 _sq._


3. The New School Theory, or Theory of uncondemnable Vitiosity.


This theory is called New School, because of its recession from the old
Puritan anthropology of which Edwards and Bellamy in the last century were
the expounders. The New School theory is a general scheme built up by the
successive labors of Hopkins, Emmons, Dwight, Taylor, and Finney. It is
held at present by New School Presbyterians, and by the larger part of the
Congregational body.

According to this theory, all men are born with a physical and moral
constitution which predisposes them to sin, and all men do actually sin so
soon as they come to moral consciousness. This vitiosity of nature may be
called sinful, because it uniformly leads to sin; but it is not itself
sin, since nothing is to be properly denominated sin but the voluntary act
of transgressing known law.

God imputes to men only their own acts of personal transgression; he does
not impute to them Adam’s sin; neither original vitiosity nor physical
death are penal inflictions; they are simply consequences which God has in
his sovereignty ordained to mark his displeasure at Adam’s transgression,
and subject to which evils God immediately creates each human soul. In
Rom. 5:12, “death passed unto all men, for that all sinned,” signifies:
“spiritual death passed on all men, because all men have actually and
personally sinned.”


    Edwards held that God imputes Adam’s sin to his posterity by
    arbitrarily identifying them with him,—identity, on the theory of
    continuous creation (see pages 415-418), being only what God
    appoints. Since this did not furnish sufficient ground for
    imputation, Edwards joined the Placean doctrine to the other, and
    showed the justice of the condemnation by the fact that man is
    depraved. He adds, moreover, the consideration that man ratifies
    this depravity by his own act. So Edwards tried to combine three
    views. But all were vitiated by his doctrine of continuous
    creation, which logically made God the only cause in the universe,
    and left no freedom, guilt, or responsibility to man. He held that
    preservation is a continuous series of new divine volitions,
    personal identity consisting in consciousness or rather memory,
    with no necessity for identity of substance. He maintained that
    God could give to an absolutely new creation the consciousness of
    one just annihilated, and thereby the two would be identical. He
    maintained this not only as a possibility, but as the actual fact.
    See Lutheran Quarterly, April, 1901:149-169; and H. N. Gardiner,
    in Philos. Rev., Nov. 1900:573-596.

    The idealistic philosophy of Edwards enables us to understand his
    conception of the relation of the race to Adam. He believed in “a
    real union between the root and the branches of the world of
    mankind, established by the author of the whole system of the
    universe ... the full consent of the hearts of Adam’s posterity to
    the first apostasy ... and therefore the sin of the apostasy is
    not theirs merely because God imputes it to them, but it is truly
    and properly theirs, and _on that ground_ God imputes it to them.”
    Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:435-448, esp. 436, quotes from Edwards:
    “The guilt a man has upon his soul at his first existence is one
    and simple, _viz._: the guilt of the original apostasy, the guilt
    of the sin by which the species first rebelled against God.”
    Interpret this by other words of Edwards: “The child and the
    acorn, which come into existence in the course of nature, are
    truly immediately created by God”—_i. e._, continuously created
    (quoted by Dodge, Christian Theology, 188). Allen, Jonathan
    Edwards, 310—“It required but a step from the principle that each
    individual has an identity of consciousness with Adam, to reach
    the conclusion that each individual is Adam and repeats his
    experience. Of every man it might be said that like Adam he comes
    into the world attended by the divine nature, and like him sins
    and falls. In this sense the sin of every man becomes original
    sin.” Adam becomes not the head of humanity but its generic type.
    Hence arises the New School doctrine of exclusively individual sin
    and guilt.

    Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:25, claims Edwards as a Traducianist. But
    Fisher, Discussions, 240, shows that he was not. As we have seen
    (Prolegomena, pages 48, 49), Edwards thought too little of
    _nature_. He tended to Berkeleyanism as applied to mind. Hence the
    chief good was in happiness—a form of _sensibility_. Virtue is
    voluntary _choice_ of this good. Hence union of _acts_ and
    _exercises_ with Adam was sufficient. This God’s will might make
    identity of _being_ with him. Baird, Elohim Revealed, 250 _sq._,
    says well, that “Edwards’s idea that the character of an act was
    to be sought somewhere else than in its cause involves the
    fallacious assumption that acts have a subsistence and moral
    agency of their own apart from that of the actor.” This divergence
    from the truth led to the Exercise-system of Hopkins and Emmons,
    who not only denied moral character prior to individual choices
    (_i. e._, denied sin of nature), but attributed all human acts and
    exercises to the direct efficiency of God. Hopkins declared that
    Adam’s act, in eating the forbidden fruit, was not the act of his
    posterity; therefore they did not sin at the same time that he
    did. The sinfulness of that act could not be transferred to them
    afterwards; because the sinfulness of an act can no more be
    transferred from one person to another than an act itself.
    Therefore, though men became sinners by Adam, according to divine
    constitution, yet they have, and are accountable for, no sins but
    personal. See Woods, History of Andover Theological Seminary, 33.
    So the doctrine of continuous creation led to the Exercise-system,
    and the Exercise-system led to the theology of acts. On Emmons,
    see Works, 4:502-507, and Bib. Sac., 7:479; 20:317; also H. B.
    Smith, in Faith and Philosophy, 215-263.

    N. W. Taylor, of New Haven, agreed with Hopkins and Emmons that
    there is no imputation of Adam’s sin or of inborn depravity. He
    called that depravity physical, not moral. But he repudiated the
    doctrine of divine efficiency in the production of man’s acts and
    exercises, and made all sin to be personal. He held to the power
    of contrary choice. Adam had it, and contrary to the belief of
    Augustinians, he never lost it. Man “not only can if he will, but
    he can if he won’t.” He can, but, without the Spirit, will not. He
    said: “Man can, whatever the Holy Spirit does or does not do”; but
    also: “Man will not, unless the Holy Spirit helps”; “If I were as
    eloquent as the Holy Ghost, I could convert sinners as fast as
    he.” Yet he did not hold to the Arminian liberty of indifference
    or contingence. He believed in the certainty of wrong action, yet
    in power to the contrary. See Moral Government, 2:132—“The error
    of Pelagius was not in asserting that man _can_ obey God without
    grace, but in saying that man does _actually_ obey God without
    grace.” There is a part of the sinner’s nature to which the
    motives of the gospel may appeal—a part of his nature which is
    neither holy nor unholy, _viz._, self-love, or innocent desire for
    happiness. Greatest happiness is the ground of obligation. Under
    the influence of motives appealing to happiness, the sinner can
    suspend his choice of the world as his chief good, and can give
    his heart to God. He can do this, whatever the Holy Spirit does,
    or does not do; but the _moral_ inability can be overcome only by
    the Holy Spirit, who moves the soul, without coercing, by means of
    the truth. On Dr. Taylor’s system, and its connection with prior
    New England theology, see Fisher, Discussions, 285-354.

    This form of New School doctrine suggests the following questions:
    1. Can the sinner suspend his selfishness before he is subdued by
    divine grace? 2. Can his choice of God from mere self-love be a
    holy choice? 3. Since God demands love in every choice, must it
    not be a positively unholy choice? 4. If it is not itself a holy
    choice, how can it be a beginning of holiness? 5. If the sinner
    can become regenerate by preferring God on the ground of
    self-interest, where is the necessity of the Holy Spirit to renew
    the heart? 6. Does not this asserted ability of the sinner to turn
    to God contradict consciousness and Scripture? For Taylor’s Views,
    see his Revealed Theology, 134-309. For criticism of them, see
    Hodge, in Princeton Rev., Jan. 1868:63 sq., and 368-398; also,
    Tyler, Letters on the New Haven Theology. Neither Hopkins and
    Emmons on the one hand, nor Taylor on the other, represent most
    fully the general course of New England theology. Smalley, Dwight,
    Woods, all held to more conservative views than Taylor, or than
    Finney, whose system had much resemblance to Taylor’s. All three
    of these denied the power of contrary choice which Dr. Taylor so
    strenuously maintained, although all agreed with him in denying
    the imputation of Adam’s sin or of our hereditary depravity. These
    are not sinful, except in the sense of being occasions of actual
    sin.

    Dr. Park, of Andover, was understood to teach that the disordered
    state of the sensibilities and faculties with which we are born is
    the _immediate_ occasion of sin, while Adam’s transgression is the
    _remote_ occasion of sin. The will, though influenced by an evil
    tendency, is still free; the evil tendency itself is not free, and
    therefore is not sin. The Statement of New School doctrine given
    in the text is intended to represent the common New England
    doctrine, as taught by Smalley, Dwight, Woods and Park; although
    the historical tendency, even among these theologians, has been to
    emphasize less and less the depraved tendencies prior to actual
    sin, and to maintain that moral character begins only with
    individual choice, most of them, however, holding that this
    individual choice begins at birth. See Bib. Sac., 7:552, 567;
    8:607-647; 20:462-471, 576-593; Van Oosterzee, Christian
    Dogmatics, 407-412; Foster, Hist. N. E. Theology.

    Both Ritschl and Pfleiderer lean toward the New School
    interpretation of sin. Ritschl, Unterricht, 25—“Universal death
    was the consequence of the sin of the first man, and the death of
    his posterity proved that they too had sinned.” Thus death is
    universal, not because of natural generation from Adam, but
    because of the individual sins of Adam’s posterity. Pfleiderer,
    Grundriss, 122—“Sin is a direction of the will which contradicts
    the moral Idea. As preceding personal acts of the will, it is not
    personal guilt but imperfection or evil. When it persists in spite
    of awaking moral consciousness, and by indulgence become habit, it
    is guilty abnormity.”


To the New School theory we object as follows:

A. It contradicts Scripture in maintaining or implying: (_a_) That sin
consists solely in acts, and in the dispositions caused in each case by
man’s individual acts, and that the state which predisposes to acts of sin
is not itself sin. (_b_) That the vitiosity which predisposes to sin is a
part of each man’s nature as it proceeds from the creative hand of God.
(_c_) That physical death in the human race is not a penal consequence of
Adam’s transgression. (_d_) That infants, before moral consciousness, do
not need Christ’s sacrifice to save them. Since they are innocent, no
penalty rests upon them, and none needs to be removed. (_e_) That we are
neither condemned upon the ground of actual inbeing in Adam, nor justified
upon the ground of actual inbeing in Christ.


    If a child may not be unholy before he voluntarily transgresses,
    then, by parity of reasoning, Adam could not have been holy before
    he obeyed the law, nor can a change of heart precede Christian
    action. New School principles would compel us to assert that right
    action precedes change of heart, and that obedience in Adam must
    have preceded his holiness. Emmons held that, if children die
    before they become moral agents, it is most rational to conclude
    that they are annihilated. They are mere animals. The common New
    School doctrine would regard them as saved either on account of
    their innocence, or because the atonement of Christ avails to
    remove the _consequences_ as well as the _penalty_ of sin.

    But to say that infants are pure contradicts _Rom. 5:12_—“_all
    sinned_”; _1 Cor. 7:14_—“_else were your children unclean_”; _Eph.
    2:3_—“_by nature children of wrath._” That Christ’s atonement
    removes natural consequences of sin is nowhere asserted or implied
    in Scripture. See, _per contra_, H. B. Smith, System, 271, where,
    however, it is only maintained that Christ saves from all the
    _just_ consequences of sin. But all _just_ consequences are
    penalty, and should be so called. The exigencies of New School
    doctrine compel it to put the beginning of sin in the infant at
    the very first moment of its separate existence,—in order not to
    contradict those Scriptures which speak of sin as being universal,
    and of the atonement as being needed by all. Dr. Park held that
    infants sin so soon as they are born. He was obliged to hold this,
    or else to say that some members of the human race exist who are
    not sinners. But by putting sin thus early in human experience,
    all meaning is taken out of the New School definition of sin as
    the “voluntary transgression of known law.” It is difficult to
    say, upon this theory, what sort of a _choice_ the infant makes of
    sin, or what sort of a _known law_ it violates.

    The first need in a theory of sin is that of satisfying the
    statements of Scripture. The second need is that it should point
    out an act of man which will justify the infliction of pain,
    suffering, and death upon the whole human race. Our moral sense
    refuses to accept the conclusion that all this is a matter of
    arbitrary sovereignty. We cannot find the act in each man’s
    conscious transgression, nor in sin committed at birth. We do find
    such a voluntary transgression of known law in Adam; and we claim
    that the New School definition of sin is much more consistent with
    this last explanation of sin’s origin than is the theory of a
    multitude of individual transgressions.

    The final test of every theory, however, is its conformity to
    Scripture. We claim that a false philosophy prevents the advocates
    of New School doctrine from understanding the utterances of Paul.
    Their philosophy is a modified survival of atomistic Pelagianism.
    They ignore nature in both God and man, and resolve character into
    transient acts. The unconscious or subconscious state of the will
    they take little or no account of, and the possibility of another
    and higher life interpenetrating and transforming our own life is
    seldom present to their minds. They have no proper idea of the
    union of the believer with Christ, and so they have no proper idea
    of the union of the race with Adam. They need to learn that, as
    all the spiritual life of the race was in Christ, the second Adam,
    so all the natural life of the race was in the first Adam; as we
    derive righteousness from the former, so we derive corruption from
    the latter. Because Christ’s life is in them, Paul can say that
    all believers rose in Christ’s resurrection; because Adam’s life
    is in them, he can say that in Adam all die. We should prefer to
    say with Pfleiderer that Paul teaches this doctrine but that Paul
    is no authority for us, rather than to profess acceptance of
    Paul’s teaching while we ingeniously evade the force of his
    argument. We agree with Stevens, Pauline Theology, 135, 136, that
    all men “sinned in the same sense in which believers were
    crucified to the world and died unto sin when Christ died upon the
    cross.” But we protest that to make Christ’s death the mere
    _occasion_ of the death of the believer, and Adam’s sin the mere
    _occasion_ of the sins of men, is to ignore the central truths of
    Paul’s teaching—the _vital union_ of the believer with Christ, and
    the _vital union_ of the race with Adam.


B. It rests upon false philosophical principles, as for example: (_a_)
That the soul is immediately created by God. (_b_) That the law of God
consists wholly in outward command. (_c_) That present natural ability to
obey the law is the measure of obligation. (_d_) That man’s relations to
moral law are exclusively individual. (_e_) That the will is merely the
faculty of individual and personal choices. (_f_) That the will, at man’s
birth, has no moral state or character.


    See Baird, Elohim Revealed, 250 _sq._—“Personality is inseparable
    from nature. The one duty is love. Unless any given duty is
    performed through the activity of a principle of love springing up
    in the nature, it is not performed at all. _The law addresses the
    nature._ The efficient cause of moral action is the proper subject
    of moral law. It is only in the perversity of unscriptural
    theology that we find the absurdity of separating the moral
    character from the substance of the soul, and tying it to the
    vanishing deeds of life. The idea that responsibility and sin are
    predicable of actions merely is only consistent with an utter
    denial that man’s nature as such owes anything to God, or has an
    office to perform in showing forth his glory. It ignores the fact
    that actions are empty phenomena, which in themselves have no
    possible value. It is the heart, soul, might, mind, strength, with
    which we are to love. Christ conformed to the law, by being ‘_that
    holy thing_’ (_Luke 1:35_, marg.).”

    Erroneous philosophical principles lie at the basis of New School
    interpretations of Scripture. The solidarity of the race is
    ignored, and all moral action is held to be individual. In our
    discussion of the Augustinian theory of sin, we shall hope to show
    that underlying Paul’s doctrine there is quite another philosophy.
    Such a philosophy together with a deeper Christian experience
    would have corrected the following statement of Paul’s view of
    sin, by Orello Cone, in Am. Jour. Theology, April, 1898:241-267.
    On the phrase _Rom. 5:12_—“_for that all sinned,_” he remarks: “If
    under the new order men do not become righteous simply because of
    the righteousness of Christ and without their choice, neither
    under the old order did Paul think them to be subject to death
    without their own acts of sin. Each representative head is
    conceived only as the occasion of the results of his work, on the
    one hand in the tragic order of death, and on the other hand in
    the blessed order of life—the occasion indispensable to all that
    follows in either order.... It may be questioned whether
    Pfleiderer does not state the case too strongly when he says that
    the sin of Adam’s posterity is regarded as ‘the necessary
    consequence’ of the sin of Adam. It does not follow from the
    employment of the aorist ἥμαρτον that the sinning of all is
    contained in that of Adam, although this sense must be considered
    as grammatically possible. It is not however the only
    grammatically defensible sense. In _Rom. 3:23_, ἥμαρτον certainly
    does not denote such a definite past act filling only one point of
    time.” But we reply that the context determines that in _Rom.
    5:12_, ἥμαρτον does denote such a definite past act; see our
    interpretation of the whole passage, under the Augustinian Theory,
    pages 625-627.


C. It impugns the justice of God:

(_a_) By regarding him as the direct creator of a vicious nature which
infallibly leads every human being into actual transgression. To maintain
that, in consequence of Adam’s act, God brings it about that all men
become sinners, and this, not by virtue of inherent laws of propagation,
but by the direct creation in each case of a vicious nature, is to make
God indirectly the author of sin.

(_b_) By representing him as the inflicter of suffering and death upon
millions of human beings who in the present life do not come to moral
consciousness, and who are therefore, according to the theory, perfectly
innocent. This is to make him visit Adam’s sin on his posterity, while at
the same time it denies that moral connection between Adam and his
posterity which alone could make such visitation just.

(_c_) By holding that the probation which God appoints to men is a
separate probation of each soul, when it first comes to moral
consciousness and is least qualified to decide aright. It is much more
consonant with our ideas of the divine justice that the decision should
have been made by the whole race, in one whose nature was pure and who
perfectly understood God’s law, than that heaven and hell should have been
determined for each of us by a decision made in our own inexperienced
childhood, under the influence of a vitiated nature.


    On this theory, God determines, in his mere sovereignty, that
    because one man sinned, all men should be called into existence
    depraved, under a constitution which secures the certainty of
    their sinning. But we claim that it is unjust that any should
    suffer without ill-desert. To say that God thus marks his sense of
    the guilt of Adam’s sin is to contradict the main principle of the
    theory, namely, that men are held responsible only for their own
    sins. We prefer to justify God by holding that there is a reason
    for this infliction, and that this reason is the connection of the
    infant with Adam. If mere tendency to sin is innocent, then Christ
    might have taken it, when he took our nature. But if he had taken
    it, it would not explain the fact of the atonement, for upon this
    theory it would not need to be atoned for. To say that the child
    inherits a sinful nature, not as penalty, but by natural law, is
    to ignore the fact that this natural law is simply the regular
    action of God, the expression of his moral nature, and so is
    itself penalty.

    “Man kills a snake,” says Raymond, “because it is a snake, and not
    because it is to blame for being a snake,”—which seems to us a new
    proof that the advocates of innocent depravity regard infants, not
    as moral beings, but as mere animals. “We must distinguish
    automatic excellence or badness,” says Raymond again, “from moral
    desert, whether good or ill.” This seems to us a doctrine of
    punishment without guilt. Princeton Essays, 1:138, quote
    Coleridge: “It is an outrage on common sense to affirm that it is
    no evil for men to be placed on their probation under such
    circumstances that not one of ten thousand millions ever escapes
    sin and condemnation to eternal death. There is evil inflicted on
    us, as a consequence of Adam’s sin, antecedent to our personal
    transgressions. It matters not what this evil is, whether temporal
    death, corruption of nature, certainty of sin, or death in its
    more extended sense; if the ground of the evil’s coming on us is
    Adam’s sin, the principle is the same.” Baird, Elohim Revealed,
    488—So, it seems, “if a creature is punished, it implies that some
    one has sinned, but does not necessarily intimate the sufferer to
    be the sinner! But this is wholly contrary to the argument of the
    apostle in _Rom. 5:12-19_, which is based upon the opposite
    doctrine, and it is also contrary to the justice of God, who
    punishes only those who deserve it.” See Julius Müller, Doct. Sin.
    2:67-74.


D. Its limitation of responsibility to the evil choices of the individual
and the dispositions caused thereby is inconsistent with the following
facts:

(_a_) The first moral choice of each individual is so undeliberate as not
to be remembered. Put forth at birth, as the chief advocates of the New
School theory maintain, it does not answer to their definition of sin as a
voluntary transgression of known law. Responsibility for such choice does
not differ from responsibility for the inborn evil state of the will which
manifests itself in that choice.

(_b_) The uniformity of sinful action among men cannot be explained by the
existence of a mere faculty of choices. That men should uniformly choose
may be thus explained; but that men should uniformly choose evil requires
us to postulate an evil tendency or state of the will itself, prior to
these separate acts of choice. This evil tendency or inborn determination
to evil, since it is the real cause of actual sins, must itself be sin,
and as such must be guilty and condemnable.

(_c_) Power in the will to prevent the inborn vitiosity from developing
itself is upon this theory a necessary condition of responsibility for
actual sins. But the absolute uniformity of actual transgression is
evidence that the will is practically impotent. If responsibility
diminishes as the difficulties in the way of free decision increase, the
fact that these difficulties are insuperable shows that there can be no
responsibility at all. To deny the guilt of inborn sin is therefore
virtually to deny the guilt of the actual sin which springs therefrom.


    The aim of all the theories is to find a decision of the will
    which will justify God in condemning men. Where shall we find such
    a decision? At the age of fifteen, ten, five? Then all who die
    before this age are not sinners, cannot justly be punished with
    death, do not need a Savior. Is it at birth? But decision at such
    a time is not such a conscious decision against God as, according
    to this theory, would make it the proper determiner of our future
    destiny. We claim that the theory of Augustine—that of a sin of
    the race in Adam—is the only one that shows a conscious
    transgression fit to be the cause and ground of man’s guilt and
    condemnation.

    Wm. Adams Brown: “Who can tell how far his own acts are caused by
    his own will, and how far by the nature he has inherited? Men do
    feel guilty for acts which are largely due to their inherited
    natures, which inherited corruption is guilt, deserving of
    punishment and certain to receive it.” H. B. Smith, System, 350,
    note—“It has been said, in the way of a taunt against the older
    theology, that men are very willing to speculate about sinning in
    Adam, so as to have their attention diverted from the sense of
    personal guilt. But the whole history of theology bears witness
    that those who have believed most fully in our native and strictly
    moral corruption—as Augustine, Calvin, and Edwards—have ever had
    the deepest sense of their personal demerit. We know the full evil
    of sin only when we know its roots as well as its fruits.”

    “Causa causæ est causa causati.” Inborn depravity is the cause of
    the first actual sin. The cause of inborn depravity is the sin of
    Adam. If there be no guilt in original sin, then the actual sin
    that springs therefrom cannot be guilty. There are subsequent
    presumptuous sins in which the personal element overbears the
    element of race and heredity. But this cannot be said of the first
    acts which make man a sinner. These are so naturally and uniformly
    the result of the inborn determination of the will, that they
    cannot be guilty, unless that inborn determination is also guilty.
    In short, not all sin is personal. There must be a sin of nature—a
    race-sin—or the beginnings of actual sin cannot be accounted for
    or regarded as objects of God’s condemnation. Julius Müller,
    Doctrine of Sin, 2:320-328, 341—“If the deep-rooted depravity
    which we bring with us into the world be not our sin, it at once
    becomes an excuse for our actual sins.” Princeton Essays, 1:138,
    139—Alternative: 1. May a man by his own power prevent the
    development of this hereditary depravity? Then we do not know that
    all men are sinners, or that Christ’s salvation is needed by all.
    2. Is actual sin a necessary consequence of hereditary depravity?
    Then it is, on this theory, a free act no longer, and is not
    guilty, since guilt is predicable only of voluntary transgression
    of known law. See Baird, Elohim Revealed, 256 sq.; Hodge, Essays,
    571-638; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:61-73; Edwards on the Will,
    part iii, sec. 4; Bib. Sac., 20:317-320.


4. The Federal Theory, or Theory of Condemnation by Covenant.


The Federal theory, or theory of the Covenants, had its origin with
Cocceius (1608-1669), professor at Leyden, but was more fully elaborated
by Turretin (1623-1687). It has become a tenet of the Reformed as
distinguished from the Lutheran church, and in this country it has its
main advocates in the Princeton school of theologians, of whom Dr. Charles
Hodge was the representative.

According to this view, Adam was constituted by God’s sovereign
appointment the representative of the whole human race. With Adam as their
representative, God entered into covenant, agreeing to bestow upon them
eternal life on condition of his obedience, but making the penalty of his
disobedience to be the corruption and death of all his posterity. In
accordance with the terms of this covenant, since Adam sinned, God
accounts all his descendants as sinners, and condemns them because of
Adam’s transgression.

In execution of this sentence of condemnation, God immediately creates
each soul of Adam’s posterity with a corrupt and depraved nature, which
infallibly leads to sin, and which is itself sin. The theory is therefore
a theory of the immediate imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity, their
corruption of nature not being the cause of that imputation, but the
effect of it. In Rom. 5:12, “death passed unto all men, for that all
sinned,” signifies: “physical, spiritual, and eternal death came to all,
because all were regarded and treated as sinners.”


    Fisher, Discussions, 355-409, compares the Augustinian and Federal
    theories of Original Sin. His account of the Federal theory and
    its origin is substantially as follows: The Federal theory is a
    theory of the covenants (_fœdus_, a covenant). 1. The covenant is
    a sovereign constitution imposed by God. 2. Federal union is the
    legal ground of imputation, though kinship to Adam is the reason
    why Adam and not another was selected as our representative. 3.
    Our guilt for Adam’s sin is simply a legal responsibility. 4. That
    imputed sin is punished by inborn depravity, and that inborn
    depravity by eternal death. Augustine could not reconcile inherent
    depravity with the justice of God; hence he held that we sinned in
    Adam.

    So Anselm says: “Because the whole human nature was in them (Adam
    and Eve), and outside of them there was nothing of it, the whole
    was weakened and corrupted.” After the first sin “this nature was
    propagated just as it had made itself by sinning.” All sin belongs
    to the will; but this is a part of our inheritance. The
    descendants of Adam were not in him as individuals; yet what he
    did as a person, he did not do _sine natura_, and this nature is
    ours as well as his. So Peter Lombard. Sins of our immediate
    ancestors, because they are qualities which are purely personal,
    are not propagated. After Adam’s first sin, the actual qualities
    of the first parent or of other later parents do not corrupt the
    nature as concerns its qualities, but only as concerns the
    qualities of the _person_.

    Calvin maintained two propositions: 1. We are not condemned for
    Adam’s sin apart from our own inherent depravity which is derived
    from him. The sin for which we are condemned is our own sin. 2.
    This sin is ours, for the reason that our nature is vitiated in
    Adam, and we receive it in the condition in which it was put by
    the first transgression. Melanchthon also held to an imputation of
    the first sin conditioned upon our innate depravity. The impulse
    to Federalism was given by the difficulty, on the pure Augustinian
    theory, of accounting for the non-imputation of Adam’s subsequent
    sins, and those of his posterity.

    Cocceius (Dutch, Coch: English, Cook), the author of the
    covenant-theory, conceived that he had solved this difficulty by
    making Adam’s sin to be imputed to us upon the ground of a
    covenant between God and Adam, according to which Adam was to
    stand as the representative of his posterity. In Cocceius’s use of
    the term, however, the only difference between covenant and
    command is found in the promise attached to the keeping of it.
    Fisher remarks on the mistake, in modern defenders of imputation,
    of ignoring the capital fact of a true and real participation in
    Adam’s sin. The great body of Calvinistic theologians in the 17th
    century were Augustinians as well as Federalists. So Owen and the
    Westminster Confession. Turretin, however, almost merged the
    natural relation to Adam in the federal.

    Edwards fell back on the old doctrine of Aquinas and Augustine. He
    tried to make out a real participation in the first sin. The first
    rising of sinful inclination, by a divinely constituted identity,
    _is_ this participation. But Hopkins and Emmons regarded the
    sinful inclination, not as a _real_ participation, but only as a
    _constructive_ consent to Adam’s first sin. Hence the New School
    theology, in which the imputation of Adam’s sin was given up. On
    the contrary, Calvinists of the Princeton school planted
    themselves on the Federal theory, and taking Turretin as their
    text book, waged war on New England views, not wholly sparing
    Edwards himself. After this review of the origin of the theory,
    for which we are mainly indebted to Fisher, it can be easily seen
    how little show of truth there is in the assumption of the
    Princeton theologians that the Federal theory is “the immemorial
    doctrine of the church of God.”

    Statements of the theory are found in Cocceius, Summa Doctrinæ de
    Fœdere, cap. 1, 5; Turretin, Inst., loc. 9, quæs. 9; Princeton
    Essays, 1:98-185. esp. 120—“In imputation there is, first, an
    ascription of something to those concerned; secondly, a
    determination to deal with them accordingly.” The ground for this
    imputation is “the union between Adam and his posterity, which is
    twofold,—a natural union, as between father and children, and the
    union of representation, _which is the main idea here insisted
    on_.” 123—“As in Christ we are constituted righteous by the
    imputation of righteousness, so in Adam we are made sinners by the
    imputation of his sin.... Guilt is liability or exposedness to
    punishment; it does not in theological usage imply moral turpitude
    or criminality.” 162—Turretin is quoted: “The foundation,
    therefore, of imputation is not merely the _natural_ connection
    which exists between us and Adam—for, were this the case, all his
    sins would be imputed to us, but principally the _moral_ and
    _federal_, on the ground of which God entered into covenant with
    him as our head. Hence in that sin Adam acted not as a private but
    a public person and representative.” The oneness results from
    contract; the natural union is frequently not mentioned at all.
    Marck: All men sinned in Adam, “_eos representante_.” The acts of
    Adam and of Christ are ours “_jure representationis_.”

    G. W. Northrup makes the order of the Federal theory to be: “(1)
    imputation of Adam’s guilt; (2) condemnation on the ground of this
    imputed guilt; (3) corruption of nature consequent upon treatment
    as condemned. So judicial imputation of Adam’s sin is the cause
    and ground of innate corruption.... All the acts, with the single
    exception of the sin of Adam, are divine acts: the appointment of
    Adam, the creation of his descendants, the imputation of his
    guilt, the condemnation of his posterity, their consequent
    corruption. Here we have guilt without sin, exposure to divine
    wrath without ill-desert, God regarding men as being what they are
    not, punishing them on the ground of a sin committed before they
    existed, and visiting them with gratuitous condemnation and
    gratuitous reprobation. Here are arbitrary representation,
    fictitious imputation, constructive guilt, limited atonement.” The
    Presb. Rev., Jan. 1882:30, claims that Kloppenburg (1642) preceded
    Cocceius (1648) in holding to the theory of the Covenants, as did
    also the Canons of Dort. For additional statements of Federalism,
    see Hodge, Essays, 49-86, and Syst. Theol., 2:192-204; Bib. Sac.,
    21:95-107; Cunningham, Historical Theology.


To the Federal theory we object:

A. It is extra-Scriptural, there being no mention of such a covenant with
Adam in the account of man’s trial. The assumed allusion to Adam’s
apostasy in Hosea 6:7, where the word “covenant” is used, is too
precarious and too obviously metaphorical to afford the basis for a scheme
of imputation (see Henderson, Com. on Minor Prophets, _in loco_). In Heb.
8:8—“new covenant”—there is suggested a contrast, not with an Adamic, but
with the Mosaic, covenant (_cf._ verse 9).


    In _Hosea 6:7_—“_they like Adam_ [marg. “_men_”] _have
    transgressed the covenant_” (Rev. Ver.)—the correct translation is
    given by Henderson, Minor Prophets: “_But they, like men that
    break a covenant, there they proved false to me_.” LXX: αὐτοὶ δέ
    εἰσιν ὡς ἄνθρωπος παραβαίνων διαθήκην. De Wette: “Aber sie
    übertreten den Bund nach Menschenart; daselbst sind sie mir
    treulos.” Here the word _adam_, translated “man,” either means “a
    man,” or “man,” _i. e._, generic man. “Israel had as little regard
    to their covenants with God as men of unprincipled character have
    for ordinary contracts.” “Like a man”—as men do. Compare _Ps.
    82:7_—“_ye shall die like men_”; _Hosea 8:1, 2_—“_they have
    transgressed my covenant_”—an allusion to the Abrahamic or Mosaic
    covenant. _Heb. 8:9_—“_Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that
    I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the
    house of Judah; Not according to the covenant that I made with
    their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them
    forth out of the land of Egypt._”


B. It contradicts Scripture, in making the first result of Adam’s sin to
be God’s _regarding and treating_ the race as sinners. The Scripture, on
the contrary, declares that Adam’s offense _constituted_ us sinners (Rom.
5:19). We are not sinners simply because God regards and treats us as
such, but God regards us as sinners because we are sinners. Death is said
to have “passed unto all men,” not because all were regarded and treated
as sinners, but “because all sinned” (Rom. 5:12).


    For a full exegesis of the passage _Rom. 5:12-19_, see note to the
    discussion of the Theory of Adam’s Natural Headship, pages
    625-627. Dr. Park gave great offence by saying that the so-called
    “covenants” of law and of grace, referred in the Westminster
    Confession as made by God with Adam and Christ respectively, were
    really “made in Holland.” The word _fœdus_, in such a connection,
    could properly mean nothing more than “ordinance”; see Vergil,
    Georgics, 1:60-63—“eterna fœdera.” E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theol.,
    185—“God’s ‘covenant’ with men is simply his method of dealing
    with them according to their knowledge and opportunities.”


C. It impugns the justice of God by implying:

(_a_) That God holds men responsible for the violation of a covenant which
they had no part in establishing. The assumed covenant is only a sovereign
decree; the assumed justice, only arbitrary will.


    We not only never authorized Adam to make such a covenant, but
    there is no evidence that he ever made one at all. It is not even
    certain that Adam knew he should have posterity. In the case of
    the imputation of our sins to Christ, Christ covenanted
    voluntarily to bear them, and joined himself to our nature that he
    might bear them. In the case of the imputation of Christ’s
    righteousness to us, we first become one with Christ, and upon the
    ground of our union with him are justified. But upon the Federal
    theory, we are condemned upon the ground of a covenant which we
    neither instituted, nor participated in, nor assented to.


(_b_) That upon the basis of this covenant God accounts men as sinners who
are not sinners. But God judges according to truth. His condemnations do
not proceed upon a basis of legal fiction. He can regard as responsible
for Adam’s transgression only those who in some real sense have been
concerned, and have had part, in that transgression.


    See Baird, Elohim Revealed, 544—“Here is a sin, which is no crime,
    but a mere condition of being regarded and treated as sinners; and
    a guilt, which is devoid of sinfulness, and which does not imply
    moral demerit or turpitude,”—that is, a sin which is no sin, and a
    guilt which is no guilt. Why might not God as justly reckon Adam’s
    sin to the account of the fallen angels, and punish them for it?
    Dorner, System Doct., 2:351; 3:53, 54—“Hollaz held that God treats
    men in accordance with what he foresaw all would do, if they were
    in Adam’s place” (_scientia media_ and _imputatio metaphysica_).
    Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 141—“Immediate imputation is as
    unjust as _imputatio metaphysica_, _i. e._, God’s condemning us
    for what he knew we would have done in Adam’s place. On such a
    theory there is no need of a trial at all. God might condemn half
    the race at once to hell without probation, on the ground that
    they would ultimately sin and come thither at any rate.”
    Justification can be gratuitous, but not condemnation. “Like the
    social-compact theory of government, the covenant-theory of sin is
    a mere legal fiction. It explains, only to belittle. The theory of
    New England theology, which attributes to mere sovereignty God’s
    making us sinners in consequence of Adam’s sin, is more reasonable
    than the Federal theory” (Fisher).

    Professor Moses Stuart characterized this theory as one of
    “fictitious guilt, but veritable damnation.” The divine economy
    admits of no fictitious substitutions nor forensic evasions. No
    legal quibbles can modify eternal justice. Federalism reverses the
    proper order, and puts the effect before the cause, as is the case
    with the social-compact theory of government. Ritchie, Darwin and
    Hegel, 27—“It is illogical to say that society originated in a
    contract; for contract presupposes society.” Unus homo, nullus
    homo—without society, no persons. T. H. Green, Prolegomena to
    Ethics, 351—“No individual can make a conscience for himself. He
    always needs a society to make it for him....” 200—“Only through
    society is personality actualized.” Boyce, Spirit of Modern
    Philosophy, 209, note—“Organic Interrelationship of individuals is
    the condition even of their relatively independent selfhood.” We
    are “_members one of another_” (_Rom. 12:15_). Schurman,
    Agnosticism, 176—“The individual could never have developed into a
    personality but for his training through society and under law.”
    Imagine a theory that the family originated in a compact! We must
    not define the state by its first crude beginnings, any more than
    we define the oak by the acorn. On the theory of a social-compact,
    see Lowell, Essays on Government, 136-188.


(_c_) That, after accounting men to be sinners who are not sinners, God
makes them sinners by immediately creating each human soul with a corrupt
nature such as will correspond to his decree. This is not only to assume a
false view of the origin of the soul, but also to make God directly the
author of sin. Imputation of sin cannot precede and account for
corruption; on the contrary, corruption must precede and account for
imputation.


    By God’s act we became depraved, as a penal consequence of Adam’s
    act imputed to us solely as _peccatum alienum_. Dabney, Theology,
    342, says the theory regards the soul as originally pure until
    imputation. See Hodge on _Rom. 5:13_; Syst. Theol., 2:203, 210;
    Thornwell, Theology, 1:343-349; Chalmers, Institutes, 1:485, 487.
    The Federal theory “makes sin in us to be the penalty of another’s
    sin, instead of being the penalty of our own sin, as on the
    Augustinian scheme, which regards depravity in us as the
    punishment of our own sin in Adam.... It holds to a sin which does
    not bring eternal punishment, but for which we are legally
    responsible as truly as Adam.” It only remains to say that Dr.
    Hodge always persistently refused to admit the one added element
    which might have made his view less arbitrary and mechanical,
    namely, the traducian theory of the origin of the soul. He was a
    creatianist, and to the end maintained that God immediately
    created the soul, and created it depraved. Acceptance of the
    traducian theory would have compelled him to exchange his
    Federalism for Augustinianism. Creatianism was the one remaining
    element of Pelagian atomism in an otherwise Scriptural theory. Yet
    Dr. Hodge regarded this as an essential part of Biblical teaching.
    His unwavering confidence was like that of Fichte, whom Caroline
    Schelling represented as saying: “Zweifle an der Sonne Klarheit,
    Zweifle an der Sterne Licht, Leser, nur an meiner Wahrheit Und an
    deiner Dummheit, nicht.”

    As a corrective to the atomistic spirit of Federalism we may quote
    a view which seems to us far more tenable, though it perhaps goes
    to the opposite extreme. Dr. H. H. Bawden writes: “The self is the
    product of a social environment. An ascetic self is so far forth
    not a self. Selfhood and consciousness are essentially social. We
    are members one of another. The biological view of selfhood
    regards it as a function, activity, process, inseparable from the
    social matrix out of which it has arisen. Consciousness is simply
    the name for the functioning of an organism. Not that the soul is
    a secretion of the brain, as bile is a secretion of the liver; not
    that the mind is a function of the body in any such materialistic
    sense. But that mind or consciousness is only the growing of an
    organism, while, on the other hand, the organism is just that
    which grows. The psychical is not a second, subtle, parallel form
    of energy causally interactive with the physical; much less is it
    a concomitant series, as the parallelists hold. Consciousness is
    not an order of existence or a thing, but rather a function. It is
    the organization of reality, the universe coming to a focus,
    flowering, so to speak, in a finite centre. Society is an organism
    in the same sense as the human body. The separation of the units
    of society is no greater than the separation of the unit factors
    of the body,—in the microscope the molecules are far apart.
    Society is a great sphere with many smaller spheres within it.

    “Each self is not impervious to other selves. Selves are not
    water-tight compartments, each one of which might remain complete
    in itself, even if all the others were destroyed. But there are
    open sluiceways between all the compartments. Society is a vast
    plexus of interweaving personalities. We are members one of
    another. What affects my neighbor affects me, and what affects me
    ultimately affects my neighbor. The individual is not an
    impenetrable atomic unit.... The self is simply the social whole
    coming to consciousness at some particular point. Every self is
    rooted in the social organism of which it is but a local and
    individual expression. A self is a mere cipher apart from its
    social relations. As the old Greek adage has it: ‘He who lives
    quite alone is either a beast or a god.’ ” While we regard this
    exposition of Dr. Bawden as throwing light upon the origin of
    consciousness and so helping our contention against the Federal
    theory of sin, we do not regard it as proving that consciousness,
    once developed, may not become relatively independent and
    immortal. Back of society, as well as back of the individual, lies
    the consciousness and will of God, in whom alone is the guarantee
    of persistence. For objections to the Federal theory, see Fisher,
    Discussions, 401 _sq._; Bib. Sac., 20:455-462, 577; New Englander,
    1868:551-603; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 305-334, 435-450; Julius
    Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:336; Dabney, Theology, 341-351.


5. Theory of Mediate Imputation, or Theory of Condemnation for Depravity.


This theory was first maintained by Placeus (1606-1655), professor of
Theology at Saumur in France. Placeus originally denied that Adam’s sin
was in any sense imputed to his posterity, but after his doctrine was
condemned by the Synod of the French Reformed Church at Charenton in 1644,
he published the view which now bears his name.

According to this view, all men are born physically and morally depraved;
this native depravity is the source of all actual sin, and is itself sin;
in strictness of speech, it is this native depravity, and this only, which
God imputes to men. So far as man’s physical nature is concerned, this
inborn sinfulness has descended by natural laws of propagation from Adam
to all his posterity. The soul is immediately created by God, but it
becomes actively corrupt so soon as it is united to the body. Inborn
sinfulness is the consequence, though not the penalty, of Adam’s
transgression.

There is a sense, therefore, in which Adam’s sin may be said to be imputed
to his descendants,—it is imputed, not immediately, as if they had been in
Adam or were so represented in him that it could be charged directly to
them, corruption not intervening,—but it is imputed mediately, through and
on account of the intervening corruption which resulted from Adam’s sin.
As on the Federal theory imputation is the cause of depravity, so on this
theory depravity is the cause of imputation. In Rom. 5:12, “death passed
unto all men, for that all sinned,” signifies: “death physical, spiritual,
and eternal passed upon all men, because all sinned by possessing a
depraved nature.”


    See Placeus, De Imputatione Primi Peccati Adami, in Opera,
    1:709—“The sensitive soul is produced from the parent; the
    intellectual or rational soul is directly created. The soul, on
    entering the corrupted physical nature, is not passively
    corrupted, but becomes corrupt actively, accommodating itself to
    the other part of human nature in character.” 710—So this soul
    “contracts from the vitiosity of the dispositions of the body a
    corresponding vitiosity, not so much by the action of the body
    upon the soul, as by that essential appetite of the soul by which
    it unites itself to the body in a way accommodated to the
    dispositions of the body, as liquid put into a bowl accommodates
    itself to the figure of a bowl—sicut vinum in vase acetoso. God
    was therefore neither the author of Adam’s fall, nor of the
    propagation of sin.”

    Herzog, Encyclopædia, art.: Placeus—“In the title of his works we
    read ‘Placæus’; he himself, however, wrote ‘Placeus,’ which is the
    more correct Latin form [of the French ‘de la Place’]. In Adam’s
    first sin, Placeus distinguished between the actual sinning and
    the first habitual sin (corrupted disposition). The former was
    transient; the latter clung to his person, and was propagated to
    all. It is truly sin, and it is imputed to all, since it makes all
    condemnable. Placeus believes in the imputation of this corrupted
    disposition, but not in the imputation of the first act of Adam,
    except mediately, through the imputation of the inherited
    depravity.” Fisher, Discussions, 389—“Mere native corruption is
    the whole of original sin. Placeus justifies his use of the term
    ‘imputation’ by _Rom. 2:26_—‘_If therefore the uncircumcision keep
    the ordinances of the law, shall not his uncircumcision be
    reckoned_ [imputed] _for circumcision?_’ Our own depravity is the
    necessary condition of the imputation of Adam’s sin, just as our
    own faith is the necessary condition of the imputation of Christ’s
    righteousness.”

    Advocates of Mediate Imputation are, in Great Britain, G. Payne,
    in his book entitled: Original Sin; John Caird, Fund. Ideas of
    Christianity, 1:196-332; and James S. Candlish, Biblical Doctrine
    of Sin, 111-122; in America, H. B. Smith, in his System of
    Christian Doctrine, 169, 284, 285, 314-323; and E. G. Robinson,
    Christian Theology. The editor of Dr. Smith’s work says: “On the
    whole, he favored the theory of Mediate Imputation. There is a
    note which reads thus: ‘Neither Mediate nor Immediate Imputation
    is wholly satisfactory.’ Understand by ‘Mediate Imputation’ a full
    statement of the facts in the case, and the author accepted it;
    understand by it a theory professing to give the final explanation
    of the facts, and it was ‘not wholly satisfactory.’ ” Dr. Smith
    himself says, 316—“Original sin is a doctrine respecting the moral
    conditions of human nature as from Adam—generic: and it is not a
    doctrine respecting personal liabilities and desert. For the
    latter, we need more and other circumstances. Strictly speaking,
    it is not sin, which is ill-deserving, but only the sinner. The
    ultimate distinction is here: There is a well-grounded difference
    to be made between personal desert, strictly personal character
    and liabilities (of each individual under the divine law, as
    applied specifically, _e. g._, in the last adjudication), and a
    generic moral condition—the antecedent ground of such personal
    character.

    “The distinction, however, is not between what has moral quality
    and what has not, but between the moral state of each as a member
    of the race, and his personal liabilities and desert as an
    individual. This original sin would wear to us only the character
    of evil, and not of sinfulness, were it not for _the fact_ that we
    feel guilty in view of our corruption when it becomes known to us
    in our own acts. Then there is involved in it not merely a sense
    of evil and misery, but also a sense of guilt; moreover,
    redemption is also necessary to remove it, which shows that it is
    a moral state. Here is the point of junction between the two
    extreme positions, that we sinned in Adam, and that all sin
    consists in sinning. The guilt of Adam’s sin is—this exposure,
    this liability on account of such native corruption, our having
    the same nature in the same moral bias. The guilt of Adam’s sin is
    _not to be separated_ from the existence of this evil disposition.
    And this guilt is what is imputed to us.” See art. on H. B. Smith,
    in Presb. Rev., 1881; “He did not fully acquiesce in Placeus’s
    view, which makes the corrupt nature by descent the only ground of
    imputation.”


The theory of Mediate Imputation is exposed to the following objections:

A. It gives no explanation of man’s responsibility for his inborn
depravity. No explanation of this is possible, which does not regard man’s
depravity as having had its origin in a free personal act, either of the
individual, or of collective human nature in its first father and head.
But this participation of all men in Adam’s sin the theory expressly
denies.


    The theory holds that we are responsible for the effect, but not
    for the cause—“post Adamum, non propter Adamum.” But, says Julius
    Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:209, 331—“If this sinful tendency be in us
    solely through the act of others, and not through our own deed,
    they, and not we, are responsible for it,—it is not our guilt, but
    our misfortune. And even as to actual sins which spring from this
    inherent sinful tendency, these are not strictly our own, but the
    acts of our first parents through us. Why impute them to us as
    actual sins, for which we are to be condemned? Thus, if we deny
    the existence of guilt, we destroy the reality of sin, and _vice
    versa_.” Thornwell, Theology, 1:348, 349—This theory “does not
    explain the sense of guilt, as connected with depravity of
    nature,—how the feeling of ill-desert can arise in relation to a
    state of mind of which we have been only passive recipients. The
    child does not reproach himself for the afflictions which a
    father’s follies have brought upon him. But our inward corruption
    we do feel to be our own fault,—it is our crime as well as our
    shame.”


B. Since the origination of this corrupt nature cannot be charged to the
account of man, man’s inheritance of it must be regarded in the light of
an arbitrary divine infliction—a conclusion which reflects upon the
justice of God. Man is not only condemned for a sinfulness of which God is
the author, but is condemned without any real probation, either individual
or collective.


    Dr. Hovey, Outlines of Theology, objects to the theory of Mediate
    Imputation, because: “1. It casts so faint a light on the justice
    of God in the imputation of Adam’s sin to adults who do as he did.
    2. It casts no light on the justice of God in bringing into
    existence a race inclined to sin by the fall of Adam. The
    inherited bias is still unexplained, and the imputation of it is a
    riddle, or a wrong, to the natural understanding.” It is unjust to
    hold us guilty of the effect, if we be not first guilty of the
    cause.


C. It contradicts those passages of Scripture which refer the origin of
human condemnation, as well as of human depravity, to the sin of our first
parents, and which represent universal death, not as a matter of divine
sovereignty, but as a judicial infliction of penalty upon all men for the
sin of the race in Adam (Rom. 5:16, 18). It moreover does violence to the
Scripture in its unnatural interpretation of “all sinned,” in Rom.
5:12—words which imply the oneness of the race with Adam, and the
causative relation of Adam’s sin to our guilt.


    Certain passages which Dr. H. B. Smith, System, 317, quotes from
    Edwards, as favoring the theory of Mediate Imputation, seem to us
    to favor quite a different view. See Edwards, 2:482 _sq._—“The
    first existing of a corrupt disposition in their hearts is not to
    be looked upon as sin belonging to them distinct from their
    participation in Adam’s first sin; it is, as it were, the extended
    pollution of that sin through the whole tree, by virtue of the
    constituted union of the branches with the root.... I am humbly of
    the opinion that, if any have supposed the children of Adam to
    come into the world with a double guilt, one the guilt of Adam’s
    sin, another the guilt arising from their having a corrupt heart,
    they have not so well considered the matter.” And afterwards:
    “Derivation of evil disposition (or rather co-existence) is in
    consequence of the union,”—but “not properly a consequence of the
    imputation of his sin; nay, rather antecedent to it, as it was in
    Adam himself. The first depravity of heart, and the imputation of
    that sin, are both the consequences of that established union; but
    yet in such order, that the evil disposition is first, and the
    charge of guilt consequent, as it was in the case of Adam
    himself.”

    Edwards quotes Stapfer: “The Reformed divines do not hold
    immediate and mediate imputation _separately_, but always
    together.” And still further, 2:493—“And therefore the sin of the
    apostasy is not theirs, merely because God imputes it to them; but
    it is truly and properly theirs, and on that ground God imputes it
    to them.” It seems to us that Dr. Smith mistakes the drift of
    these passages from Edwards, and that in making the identification
    with Adam primary, and imputation of his sin secondary, they favor
    the theory of Adam’s Natural Headship rather than the theory of
    Mediate Imputation. Edwards regards the order as (1) apostasy; (2)
    depravity; (3) guilt;—but in all three, Adam and we are, by divine
    constitution, one. To be guilty of the depravity, therefore, we
    must first be guilty of the apostasy.

    For the reasons above mentioned we regard the theory of Mediate
    Imputation as a half-way house where there is no permanent
    lodgment. The logical mind can find no satisfaction therein, but
    is driven either forward, to the Augustinian doctrine which we are
    next to consider, or backward, to the New School doctrine with its
    atomistic conception of man and its arbitrary sovereignty of God.
    On the theory of Mediate Imputation, see Cunningham, Historical
    Theology, 1:496-639; Princeton Essays, 1:129, 154, 168; Hodge,
    Syst. Theology, 2:205-214; Shedd, History of Doctrine, 2:158;
    Baird, Elohim Revealed, 46, 47, 474-479, 504-507.


6. The Augustinian Theory, or Theory of Adam’s Natural Headship.


This theory was first elaborated by Augustine (354-430), the great
opponent of Pelagius; although its central feature appears in the writings
of Tertullian (died about 220), Hilary (350), and Ambrose (374). It is
frequently designated as the Augustinian view of sin. It was the view held
by the Reformers, Zwingle excepted. Its principal advocates in this
country are Dr. Shedd and Dr. Baird.

It holds that God imputes the sin of Adam immediately to all his
posterity, in virtue of that organic unity of mankind by which the whole
race at the time of Adam’s transgression existed, not individually, but
seminally, in him as its head. The total life of humanity was then in
Adam; the race as yet had its being only in him. Its essence was not yet
individualized; its forces were not yet distributed; the powers which now
exist in separate men were then unified and localized in Adam; Adam’s will
was yet the will of the species. In Adam’s free act, the will of the race
revolted from God and the nature of the race corrupted itself. The nature
which we now possess is the same nature that corrupted itself in Adam—“not
the same in kind merely, but the same as flowing to us continuously from
him.”

Adam’s sin is imputed to us immediately, therefore, not as something
foreign to us, but because it is ours—we and all other men having existed
as one moral person or one moral whole, in him, and, as the result of that
transgression, possessing a nature destitute of love to God and prone to
evil. In Rom. 5:12—“death passed unto all men, for that all sinned,”
signifies: “death physical, spiritual, and eternal passed unto all men,
because all sinned in Adam their natural head.”


    Milton, Par. Lost, 9:414—“Where likeliest he [Satan] might find
    The only two of mankind, but in them The whole included race, his
    purpos’d prey.” Augustine, De Pec. Mer. et Rem., 3:7—“In Adamo
    omnes tune peccaverunt, quando in ejus natura adhuc omnes ille
    unus fuerunt”; De Civ. Dei, 13, 14—“Omnes enim fuimus in illo uno,
    quando omnes fuimus ille unus.... Nondum erat nobis singillatim
    creata et distributa forma in qua singuli viveremus, sed jam
    natura erat seminalis ex qua propagaremur.” On Augustine’s view,
    see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2; 43-45 (System Doct., 2:338, 339)—In
    opposition to Pelagius who made sin to consist in single acts,
    “Augustine emphasized the sinful state. This was a deprivation of
    original righteousness + inordinate love. Tertullian, Cyprian,
    Hilarius, Ambrose had advocated traducianism, according to which,
    without their personal participation, the sinfulness of all is
    grounded in Adam’s free act. They incur its consequences as an
    evil which is, at the same time, punishment of the inherited
    fault. But Irenæus, Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, say Adam was not
    simply a single individual, but the universal man. We were
    comprehended in him, so that in him we sinned. On the first view,
    the posterity were passive; on the second, they were active, in
    Adam’s sin. Augustine represents both views, desiring to unite the
    universal sinfulness involved in traducianism with the universal
    will and guilt involved in cooperation with Adam’s sin. Adam,
    therefore, to him, is a double conception, and = individual +
    race.”

    Mozley on Predestination, 402—“In Augustine, some passages refer
    all wickedness to original sin; some account for different degrees
    of evil by different degrees of original sin (Op. imp. cont.
    Julianum, 4:128—‘Malitia naturalis.... in aliis minor, in aliis
    major est’); in some, the individual seems to add to original sin
    (De Correp. et Gratia, c. 13—‘Per liberum arbitrium alia insuper
    addiderunt, alii majus, alii minus, sed omnes mali.’ De Grat. et
    Lib. Arbit., 2:1—‘Added to the sin of their birth sins of their
    own commission’; 2:4—‘Neither denies our liberty of will, whether
    to choose an evil or a good life, nor attributes to it so much
    power that it can avail anything without God’s grace, or that it
    can change itself from evil to good’).” These passages seem to
    show that, side by side with the race-sin and its development,
    Augustine recognized a domain of free personal decision, by which
    each man could to some extent modify his character, and make
    himself more or less depraved.

    The theory of Augustine was not the mere result of Augustine’s
    temperament or of Augustine’s sins. Many men have sinned like
    Augustine, but their intellects have only been benumbed and have
    been led into all manner of unbelief. It was the Holy Spirit who
    took possession of the temperament, and so overruled the sin as to
    make it a glass through which Augustine saw the depths of his
    nature. Nor was his doctrine one of exclusive divine
    transcendence, which left man a helpless worm at enmity with
    infinite justice. He was also a passionate believer in the
    immanence of God. He writes: “I could not be, O my God, could not
    be at all, wert not thou in me; rather, were not I in thee, of
    whom are all things, by whom are all things, in whom are are all
    things.... O God, thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is
    restless, till it find rest in thee.—The will of God is the very
    nature of things—Dei voluntas rerum natura est.”

    Allen, Continuity of Christian Thought, Introduction, very
    erroneously declares that “the Augustinian theology rests upon the
    transcendence of Deity as its controlling principle, and at every
    point appears as an inferior rendering of the earlier
    interpretation of the Christian faith.” On the other hand, L. L.
    Paine, Evolution of Trinitarianism, 69, 368-397, shows that, while
    Athanasius held to a dualistic transcendence, Augustine held to a
    theistic immanence: “Thus the Stoic, Neo-Platonic immanence, with
    Augustine, supplants the Platonico-Aristotelian and Athanasian
    transcendence.” Alexander, Theories of the Will, 90—“The theories
    of the early Fathers were indeterministic, and the pronounced
    Augustinianism of Augustine was the result of the rise into
    prominence of the doctrine of original sin.... The early Fathers
    thought of the origin of sin in angels and in Adam as due to free
    will. Augustine thought of the origin of sin in Adam’s posterity
    as due to inherited evil will.” Harnack, Wesen des Christenthums,
    161—“To this day in Catholicism inward and living piety and the
    expression of it is in essence wholly Augustinian.”

    Calvin was essentially Augustinian and realistic; see his
    Institutes, book 2, chap. 1-3; Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 1:505, 506,
    with the quotations and references. Zwingle was not an
    Augustinian. He held that native vitiosity, although it is the
    uniform occasion of sin, is not itself sin: “It is not a crime,
    but a condition and a disease.” See Hagenbach, Hist. Doct. 2:256,
    with references. Zwingle taught that every new-born child—thanks
    to Christ’s making alive of all those who had died in Adam—is as
    free from any taint of sin as Adam was before the fall. The
    Reformers, however, with the single exception of Zwingle, were
    Augustinians, and accounted for the hereditary guilt of mankind,
    not by the fact that all men were represented in Adam, but that
    all men participated in Adam’s sin. This is still the doctrine of
    the Lutheran church.

    The theory of Adam’s Natural Headship regards humanity at large as
    the outgrowth of one germ. Though the leaves of a tree appear as
    disconnected units when we look down upon them from above, a view
    from beneath will discern the common connection with the twigs,
    branches, trunk, and will finally trace their life to the root,
    and to the seed from which it originally sprang. The race of man
    is one because it sprang from one head. Its members are not to be
    regarded atomistically, as segregated individuals; the deeper
    truth is the truth of organic unity. Yet we are not philosophical
    realists; we do not believe in the separate existence of
    universals. We hold, not to _universalia ante rem_, which is
    extreme realism; nor to _universalia post rem_, which is
    nominalism; but to _universalia in re_, which is moderate realism.
    Extreme realism cannot see the trees for the wood; nominalism
    cannot see the wood for the trees; moderate realism sees the wood
    in the trees. We hold to “_universalia in re_, but insist that the
    universals must be recognized as _realities_, as truly as the
    individuals are” (H. B. Smith, System, 319, note). Three acorns
    have a common life, as three spools have not. Moderate realism is
    true of organic things; nominalism is true only of proper names.
    God has not created any new tree nature since he created the first
    tree; nor has he created any new human nature since he created the
    first man. I am but a branch and outgrowth of the tree of
    humanity.

    Our realism then only asserts the real historical connection of
    each member of the race with its first father and head, and such a
    derivation of each from him as makes us partakers of the character
    which he formed. Adam was once the race; and when he fell, the
    race fell. Shedd: “We all existed in Adam in our elementary
    invisible substance. The _Seyn_ of all was there, though the
    _Daseyn_ was not; the _noumenon_, though not the _phenomenon_, was
    in existence.” On realism, see Koehler, Realismus und
    Nominalismus; Neander, Ch. Hist., 4:356; Dorner, Person Christ,
    2:377; Hase, Anselm, 2:77; F. E. Abbott, Scientific Theism,
    Introd., 1-29, and in Mind, Oct. 1882:476, 477; Raymond, Theology,
    2:30-33; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:69-74; Bowne, Theory of Thought
    and Knowledge, 129-132; Ten Broeke, in Baptist Quar. Rev., Jan.
    1892:1-26; Baldwin, Psychology, 280, 281; D. J. Hill, Genetic
    Philosophy, 186; Hours with the Mystics, 1:213; Case, Physical
    Realism, 17-19; Fullerton, Sameness and Identity, 88, 89, and
    Concept of the Infinite, 95-114.

    The new conceptions of the reign of law and of the principle of
    heredity which prevail in modern science are working to the
    advantage of Christian theology. The doctrine of Adam’s Natural
    Headship is only a doctrine of the hereditary transmission of
    character from the first father of the race to his descendants.
    Hence we use the word “imputation” in its proper sense—that of a
    reckoning or charging to us of that which is truly and properly
    ours. See Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:259-357, esp. 328—“The
    problem is: We must allow that the depravity, which all Adam’s
    descendants inherit by natural generation, nevertheless involves
    personal guilt; and yet this depravity, so far as it is natural,
    wants the very conditions on which guilt depends. The only
    satisfactory explanation of this difficulty is the Christian
    doctrine of original sin. Here alone, if its inner possibility can
    be maintained, can the apparently contradictory principles be
    harmonized, viz.: the universal and deep-seated depravity of human
    nature, as the source of actual sin, and individual responsibility
    and guilt.” These words, though written by one who advocates a
    different theory, are nevertheless a valuable argument in
    corroboration of the theory of Adam’s Natural Headship.

    Thornwell, Theology, 1:343—“We must contradict every Scripture
    text and every Scripture doctrine which makes hereditary impurity
    hateful to God and punishable in his sight, or we must maintain
    that we sinned in Adam in his first transgression.” Secretan, in
    his Work on Liberty, held to a _collective_ life of the race in
    Adam. He was answered by Naville, Problem of Evil: “We existed in
    Adam, not individually, but seminally. Each of us, as an
    individual, is responsible only for his personal acts, or, to
    speak more exactly, for the personal part of his acts. But each of
    us, as he is man, is jointly and severally (_solidairement_)
    responsible for the fall of the human race.” Bersier, The Oneness
    of the Race, in its Fall and in its Future: “If we are commanded
    to love our neighbor as ourselves, it is because our neighbor is
    ourself.”

    See Edwards, Original Sin, part 4, chap. 3; Shedd, on Original
    Sin, in Discourses and Essays, 218-271, and references, 261-263,
    also Dogm. Theol., 2:181-195; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 410-435,
    451-460, 494; Schaff, in Bib. Sac., 5:220, and in Lange’s Com., on
    Rom. 5:12; Auberlen, Div. Revelation, 175-180; Philippi,
    Glaubenslehre, 3:28-38, 204-236; Thomasius, Christi Person und
    Werk, 1:269-400; Martensen, Dogmatics, 173-183; Murphy, Scientific
    Bases, 262 _sq._, _cf._ 101; Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 135;
    Bp. Reynolds, Sinfulness of Sin, in Works, 1:102-350; Mozley on
    Original Sin, in Lectures, 136-152; Kendall, on Natural Heirship,
    or All the World Akin, in Nineteenth Century, Oct. 1885:614-626.
    _Per contra_, see Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:157-164, 227-257; Haven,
    in Bib. Sac., 20:451-455; Criticism of Baird’s doctrine, in
    Princeton Rev., Apr. 1880:335-376; of Schaff’s doctrine, in
    Princeton Rev., Apr. 1870:239-262.


We regard this theory of the Natural Headship of Adam as the most
satisfactory of the theories mentioned, and as furnishing the most
important help towards the understanding of the great problem of original
sin. In its favor may be urged the following considerations:

A. It puts the most natural interpretation upon Rom. 5:12-21. In verse 12
of this passage—“death passed unto all men, for that all sinned”—the great
majority of commentators regard the word “sinned” as describing a common
transgression of the race in Adam. The death spoken of is, as the whole
context shows, mainly though not exclusively physical. It has passed upon
all—even upon those who have committed no conscious and personal
transgression whereby to explain its infliction (verse 14). The legal
phraseology of the passage shows that this infliction is not a matter of
sovereign decree, but of judicial penalty (verses 13, 14, 15, 16,
18—“law,” “transgression,” “trespass,” “judgment ... of one unto
condemnation,” “act of righteousness,” “justification”). As the
explanation of this universal subjection to penalty, we are referred to
Adam’s sin. By that one act (“so,” verse 12)—the “trespass of the one” man
(v. 15, 17), the “one trespass” (v. 18)—death came to all men, because all
[not “have sinned”, but] sinned (πάντες ἥμαρτον—aorist of instantaneous
past action)—that is, all sinned in “the one trespass” of “the one” man.
Compare 1 Cor. 15:22—“As in Adam all die”—where the contrast with physical
resurrection shows that physical death is meant; 2 Cor. 5:14—“one died for
all, therefore all died.” See Commentaries of Meyer, Bengel, Olshausen,
Philippi, Wordsworth, Lange, Godet, Shedd. This is also recognized as the
correct interpretation of Paul’s words by Beyschlag, Ritschl, and
Pfleiderer, although no one of these three accepts Paul’s doctrine as
authoritative.


    Beyschlag, N. T. Theology, 2:58-60—“To understand the apostle’s
    view, we must follow the exposition of Bengel (which is favored
    also by Meyer and Pfleiderer): ‘_Because they_—viz., in Adam—_all
    have sinned_’; they all, namely, who were included in Adam
    according to the O. T. view which sees the whole race to its
    founder, acted in his action.” Ritschl: “Certainly Paul treated
    the universal destiny of death as due to the sin of Adam.
    Nevertheless it is not yet suited for a theological rule just for
    the reason that the apostle has formed this idea;” in other words,
    Paul’s teaching it does not make it binding upon our faith.
    Philippi, Com. on Rom., 168—Interpret _Rom. 5:12_—“_one sinned for
    all, therefore all sinned_,” by _2 Cor. 5:15_—“_one died for all,
    therefore all died._” Evans, in Presb. Rev., 1883:294—“_by the
    trespass of the one the many died_,” “_by the trespass of the one,
    death reigned __ through the one_,” “_through the one man’s
    disobedience_”—all these phrases, and the phrases with respect to
    salvation which correspond to them, indicate that the fallen race
    and the redeemed race are each regarded as a multitude, a
    totality. So οἱ πάντεσ in 2 Cor. 5:14 indicates a corresponding
    conception of the organic unity of the race.

    Prof. George B. Stevens, Pauline Theology, 32-40, 129-139, denies
    that Paul taught the sinning of all men in Adam: “They sinned in
    the same sense in which believers were crucified to the world and
    died unto sin when Christ died upon the cross. The believer’s
    renewal is conceived as wrought in advance by those acts and
    experiences of Christ in which it has its ground. As the
    consequences of his vicarious sufferings are traced back to their
    cause, so are the consequences which flowed from the beginning of
    sin in Adam traced back to that original fount of evil and
    identified with it; but the latter statement should no more be
    treated as a rigid logical formula than the former, its
    counterpart.... There is a mystical identification of the
    procuring cause with its effect,—both in the case of Adam and of
    Christ.”

    In our treatment of the New School theory of sin we have pointed
    out that the inability to understand the vital union of the
    believer with Christ incapacitates the New School theologian from
    understanding the organic union of the race with Adam. Paul’s
    phrase “_in Christ_” meant more than that Christ is the type and
    beginner of salvation, and sinning in Adam meant more to Paul than
    following the example or acting in the spirit of our first father.
    In _2 Cor. 5:14_ the argument is that since Christ died, all
    believers died to sin and death in him. Their resurrection-life is
    the same life that died and rose again in his death and
    resurrection. So Adam’s sin is ours because the same life which
    transgressed and became corrupt in him has come down to us and is
    our possession. In _Rom. 5:14_, the individual and conscious sins
    to which the New School theory attaches the condemning sentence
    are expressly excluded, and in _verses 15-19_ the judgment is
    declared to be “_of one trespass_.” Prof. Wm. Arnold Stevens, of
    Rochester, says well: “Paul teaches that Adam’s sin is ours, not
    potentially, but actually.” Of ἥμαρτον, he says: “This might
    conceivably be: (1) the historical aorist proper, used in its
    momentary sense; (2) the comprehensive or collective aorist, as in
    διῆλθεν in the same verse; (3) the aorist used in the sense of the
    English perfect, as in _Rom. 3:23_—πάντες γὰρ ἥμαρτον καὶ
    ὑστεροῦνται. In _5:12_, the context determines with great
    probability that the aorist is used in the first of these senses.”
    We may add that interpreters are not wanting who so take ἥμαρτον
    in _3:23_; see also margin of Rev. Version. But since the passage
    _Rom. 5:12-19_ is so important, we reserve to the close of this
    section a treatment of it in greater detail.


B. It permits whatever of truth there may be in the Federal theory and in
the theory of Mediate Imputation to be combined with it, while neither of
these latter theories can be justified to reason unless they are regarded
as corollaries or accessories of the truth of Adam’s Natural Headship.
Only on this supposition of Natural Headship could God justly constitute
Adam our representative, or hold us responsible for the depraved nature we
have received from him. It moreover justifies God’s ways, in postulating a
real and a fair probation of our common nature as preliminary to
imputation of sin—a truth which the theories just mentioned, in common
with that of the New School, virtually deny,—while it rests upon correct
philosophical principles with regard to will, ability, law, and accepts
the Scriptural representations of the nature of sin, the penal character
of death, the origin of the soul, and the oneness of the race in the
transgression.


    John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:196-232, favors the
    view that sin consists simply in an inherited bias of our nature
    to evil, and that we are guilty from birth because we are sinful
    from birth. But he recognizes in Augustinianism the truth of the
    organic unity of the race and the implication of every member in
    its past history. He tells us that we must not regard man simply
    as an abstract or isolated individual. The atomistic theory
    regards society as having no existence other than that of the
    individuals who compose it. But it is nearer the truth to say that
    it is society which creates the individual, rather than that the
    individual creates society. Man does not come into existence a
    blank tablet on which external agencies may write whatever record
    they will. The individual is steeped in influences which are due
    to the past history of his kind. The individualistic theory runs
    counter to the most obvious facts of observation and experience.
    As a philosophy of life, Augustinianism has a depth and
    significance which the individualistic theory cannot claim.

    Alvah Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 175 (2d ed.)—“Every
    child of Adam is accountable for the degree of sympathy which he
    has for the whole system of evil in the world, and with the primal
    act of disobedience among men. If that sympathy is full, whether
    expressed by deed or thought, if the whole force of his being is
    arrayed against heaven and on the side of hell, it is difficult to
    limit his responsibility.” Schleiermacher held that the guilt of
    original sin attached, not to the individual as an individual, but
    as a member of the race, so that the consciousness of race-union
    carried with it the consciousness of race-guilt. He held all men
    to be equally sinful and to differ only in their different
    reception of or attitude toward grace, sin being the universal
    _malum metaphysicum_ of Spinoza; see Pfleiderer, Prot. Theol. seit
    Kant, 113.


C. While its fundamental presupposition—a determination of the will of
each member of the race prior to his individual consciousness—is an
hypothesis difficult in itself, it is an hypothesis which furnishes the
key to many more difficulties than it suggests. Once allow that the race
was one in its first ancestor and fell in him, and light is thrown on a
problem otherwise insoluble—the problem of our accountability for a sinful
nature which we have not personally and consciously originated. Since we
cannot, with the three theories first mentioned, deny either of the terms
of this problem—inborn depravity or accountability for it,—we accept this
solution as the best attainable.


    Sterrett, Reason and Authority in Religion, 20—“The whole swing of
    the pendulum of thought of to-day is away from the individual and
    towards the social point of view. Theories of society are
    supplementing theories of the individual. The solidarity of man is
    the regnant thought in both the scientific and the historical
    study of man. It is even running into the extreme of a determinism
    that annihilates the individual.” Chapman, Jesus Christ and the
    Present Age, 43—“It was never less possible to deny the truth to
    which theology gives expression in its doctrine of original sin
    than in the present age. It is only one form of the universally
    recognized fact of heredity. There is a collective evil, for which
    the responsibility rests on the whole race of man. Of this common
    evil each man inherits his share; it is organized in his nature;
    it is established in his environment.” E. G. Robinson: “The
    tendency of modern theology [in the last generation] was to
    individualization, to make each man ‘a little Almighty.’ But the
    human race is one in kind, and in a sense is numerically one. The
    race lay potentially in Adam. The entire developing force of the
    race was in him. There is no carrying the race up, except from the
    starting-point of a fallen and guilty humanity.” Goethe said that
    while humanity ever advances, individual man remains the same.

    The true test of a theory is, not that it can itself be explained,
    but that it is capable of explaining. The atomic theory in
    chemistry, the theory of the ether in physics, the theory of
    gravitation, the theory of evolution, are all in themselves
    indemonstrable hypotheses, provisionally accepted simply because,
    if granted, they unify great aggregations of facts. Coleridge said
    that original sin is the one mystery that makes all other things
    clear. In this mystery, however, there is nothing
    self-contradictory or arbitrary. Gladden, What is Left?
    131—“Heredity is God working in us, and environment is God working
    around us.” Whether we adopt the theory of Augustine or not, the
    facts of universal moral obliquity and universal human suffering
    confront us. We are compelled to reconcile these facts with our
    faith in the righteousness and goodness of God. Augustine gives us
    a unifying principle which, better than any other, explains these
    facts and justifies them. On the solidarity of the race, see
    Bruce, The Providential Order, 280-310, and art. on Sin, by
    Bernard, in Hastings’ Bible Dictionary.


D. This theory finds support in the conclusions of modern science: with
regard to the moral law, as requiring right states as well as right acts;
with regard to the human will, as including subconscious and unconscious
bent and determination; with regard to heredity, and the transmission of
evil character; with regard to the unity and solidarity of the human race.
The Augustinian theory may therefore be called an ethical or theological
interpretation of certain incontestable and acknowledged biological facts.


    Ribot, Heredity, 1—“Heredity is that biological law by which all
    beings endowed with life tend to repeat themselves in their
    descendants; it is for the species what personal identity is for
    the individual. By it a groundwork remains unchanged amid
    incessant variations. By it nature ever copies and imitates
    herself.” Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 202-218—“In man’s
    moral condition we find arrested development; reversion to a
    savage type; hypocritical and self-protective mimicry of virtue;
    parasitism; physical and moral abnormality; deep-seated perversion
    of faculty.” Simon, Reconciliation, 154 sq.—“The organism was
    affected before the individuals which are its successive
    differentiations and products were affected.... Humanity as an
    organism received an injury from sin. It received that injury at
    the very beginning.... At the moment when the seed began to
    germinate disease entered and it was smitten with death on account
    of sin.”

    Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 134—“A general notion has
    no actual or possible metaphysical existence. All real existence
    is necessarily singular and individual. The only way to give the
    notion any metaphysical significance is to turn it into a law
    inherent in reality, and this attempt will fail unless we finally
    conceive this law as a rule according to which a basal
    intelligence proceeds in positing individuals.” Sheldon, in the
    Methodist Review, March, 1901:214-227, applies this explanation to
    the doctrine of original sin. Men have a common nature, he says,
    only in the sense that they are resembling personalities. If we
    literally died in Adam, we also literally died in Christ. There is
    no all-inclusive Christ, any more than there is an all-inclusive
    Adam. We regard this argument as proving the precise opposite of
    its intended conclusion. There is an all-inclusive Christ, and the
    fundamental error of most of those who oppose Augustinianism is
    that they misconceive the union of the believer with Christ. “A
    basal intelligence” here “posits individuals.” And so with the
    relation of men to Adam. Here too there is “a law inherent in
    reality”—the regular working of the divine will, according to
    which like produces like, and a sinful germ reproduces itself.


E. We are to remember, however, that while this theory of the method of
our union with Adam is merely a valuable hypothesis, the problem which it
seeks to explain is, in both its terms, presented to us both by conscience
and by Scripture. In connection with this problem a central fact is
announced in Scripture, which we feel compelled to believe upon divine
testimony, even though every attempted explanation should prove
unsatisfactory. That central fact, which constitutes the substance of the
Scripture doctrine of original sin, is simply this: that the sin of Adam
is the immediate cause and ground of inborn depravity, guilt and
condemnation to the whole human race.


    Three things must be received on Scripture testimony: (1) inborn
    depravity; (2) guilt and condemnation therefor; (3) Adam’s sin the
    cause and ground of both. From these three positions of Scripture
    it seems not only natural, but inevitable, to draw the inference
    that we “_all sinned_” in Adam. The Augustinian theory simply puts
    in a link of connection between two sets of facts which otherwise
    would be difficult to reconcile. But, in putting in that link of
    connection, it claims that it is merely bringing out into clear
    light an underlying but implicit assumption of Paul’s reasoning,
    and this it seeks to prove by showing that upon no other
    assumption can Paul’s reasoning be understood at all. Since the
    passage in _Rom. 5:12-19_ is so important, we proceed to examine
    it in greater detail. Our treatment is mainly a reproduction of
    the substance of Shedd’s Commentary, although we have combined
    with it remarks from Meyer, Schaff, Moule, and others.

    _Exposition of Rom. 5:12-19._—_Parallel between the salvation in
    Christ and the ruin that has come through Adam_, in each case
    through no personal act of our own, neither by our earning
    salvation in the case of the life received through Christ, nor by
    our individually sinning in the case of the death received through
    Adam. The statement of the parallel is begun in

    _Verse 12_: “_as through one man sin entered into the world, and
    death through sin, and so death passed unto all men, for that all
    sinned,_” so (as we may complete the interrupted sentence) by one
    man righteousness entered into the world, and life by
    righteousness, and so life passed upon all men, because all became
    partakers of this righteousness. Both physical and spiritual death
    is meant. That it is physical is shown (1) from _verse 14_; (2)
    from the allusion to _Gen. 3:19_; (3) from the universal Jewish
    and Christian assumption that physical death was the result of
    Adam’s sin. See Wisdom 2:23, 24; Sirach 25:24; 2 Esdras 3:7, 21;
    7:11, 46, 48, 118; 9:19; _John 8:44_; _1 Cor. 15:21_. That it is
    spiritual, is evident from _Rom. 5:18, 21_, where ζωή is the
    opposite of θάνατος, and from _2 Tim. 1:10_, where the same
    contrast occurs. The οὔτος in _verse 12_ shows the mode in which
    historically death has come to all, namely, that the _one_ sinned,
    and thereby brought death to all; in other words, death is the
    effect, of which the sin of the one is the cause. By Adam’s act,
    physical and spiritual death passed upon all men, because all
    sinned. ἐφ᾽ ᾦ = because, on the ground of the fact that, for the
    reason that, all sinned. πάντες = all, without exception, infants
    included, as _verse 14_ teaches.

    Ἥμαρτον mentions the particular reason why all men died, _viz._,
    because all men sinned. It is the aorist of momentary past
    action—sinned when, through the one, sin entered into the world.
    It is as much as to say, “because, when Adam sinned, all men
    sinned in and with him.” This is proved by the succeeding
    explanatory context (_verses 15-19_), in which it is reiterated
    five times in succession that one and only one sin is the cause of
    the death that befalls all men. Compare _1 Cor. 15:22_. The senses
    “all were sinful,” “all became sinful,” are inadmissible, for
    ἁμαρτάνειν is not ἁμαρτωλὸν γίγνεσθαι or εἶναι. The sense “death
    passed upon all men, because all have consciously and personally
    sinned,” is contradicted (1) by _verse 14_, in which it is
    asserted that certain persons who are a part of πάντες, the
    subject of ἥμαρτον, and who suffer the death which is the penalty
    of sin, did not commit sins resembling Adam’s first sin, _i. e._,
    individual and conscious transgressions; and (2) by _verses
    15-19_, in which it is asserted repeatedly that only one sin, and
    not millions of transgressions, is the cause of the death of all
    men. This sense would seem to require ἐφ᾽ ᾧ πάντες ἁμαρτάνουσιν.
    Neither can ἥμαρτον have the sense “were accounted and treated as
    sinners”; for (1) there is no other instance in Scripture where
    this active verb has a passive signification; and (2) the passive
    makes ἥμαρτον to denote God’s action, and not man’s. This would
    not furnish the justification of the infliction of death, which
    Paul is seeking,

    _Verse 13_ begins a demonstration of the proposition, in _Verse
    12_, that death comes to all, because all men sinned the one sin
    of the one man. The argument is as follows: Before the law sin
    existed; for there was death, the penalty of sin. But this sin was
    not sin committed against the _Mosaic_ law, because that law was
    not yet in existence. The death in the world prior to that law
    proves that there must have been some other law, against which sin
    had been committed.

    _Verse 14_. Nor could it have been personal and conscious
    violation of an _unwritten_ law, for which death was inflicted;
    for death passed upon multitudes, such as infants and idiots, who
    did not sin in their own persons, as Adam did, by violating some
    known commandment. Infants are not specifically named here,
    because the intention is to include others who, though mature in
    years, have not reached moral consciousness. But since death is
    everywhere and always the penalty of sin, the death of all must
    have been the penalty of the common sin of the race, when πάντες
    ἥμαρτον in Adam. The law which they violated was the Eden statute,
    _Gen. 2:17_. The relation between their sin and Adam’s is not that
    of _resemblance_, but of _identity_. Had the sin by which death
    came upon them been one _like_ Adam’s, there would have been as
    many sins, to be the cause of death and to account for it, as
    there were individuals. Death would have come into the world
    through millions of men, and not “_through one man_” (_verse 12_),
    and judgment would have come upon all men to condemnation through
    millions of trespasses, and not “_through one trespass_” (_v.
    18_). The object, then, of the parenthetical digression in _verses
    13_ and _14_ is to prevent the reader from supposing, from the
    statement that “all men sinned,” that the individual
    transgressions of all men are meant, and to make it clear that
    only the one first sin of the one first man is intended. Those who
    died before Moses must have violated some law. The Mosaic law, and
    the law of conscience, have been ruled out of the case. These
    persons must, therefore, have sinned against the commandment in
    Eden, the probationary statute; and their sin was not _similar_
    (ὁμοίος) to Adam’s, but Adam’s _identical_ sin, the very same sin
    numerically of the “_one man_.” They did not, in their own persons
    and consciously, sin as Adam did; yet in Adam, and in the nature
    common to him and them, they sinned and fell (_versus_ Current
    Discussions in Theology, 5:277, 278). They did not sin _like_
    Adam, but they “sinned _in_ him, and fell _with_ him, in that
    first transgression” (Westminster Larger Catechism, 22).

    _Verses 15-17_ show how the work of grace differs from, and
    surpasses, the work of sin. Over against God’s exact justice in
    punishing all for the first sin which all committed in Adam, is
    set the gratuitous justification of all who are in Christ. Adam’s
    sin is the act of Adam and his posterity together; hence the
    imputation to the posterity is just, and merited. Christ’s
    obedience is the work of Christ alone; hence the imputation of it
    to the elect is gracious and unmerited. Here τοὺς πολλούς is not
    of equal extent with οἱ πολλοί in the first clause, because other
    passages teach that “the many” who die in Adam are not
    conterminous with “_the many_” who live in Christ; see _1 Cor.
    15:22_; _Mat. 25:46_; also, see note on _verse 18_, below. Τοὺς
    πολλούς here refers to the same persons who, in _verse 17_, are
    said to “_receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of
    righteousness_.” _Verse 16_ notices a numerical difference between
    the condemnation and the justification. Condemnation results from
    _one_ offense; justification delivers from _many_ offences. _Verse
    17_ enforces and explains _verse 16_. If the union with Adam in
    his sin was certain to bring destruction, the union with Christ in
    his righteousness is yet more certain to bring salvation.

    _Verse 18_ resumes the parallel between Adam and Christ which was
    commenced in _verse 12_, but was interrupted by the explanatory
    parenthesis in _verses 13-17_. “_As through one trespass ... unto
    all men to condemnation; even so through one act of righteousness
    ... unto all men unto justification of_ [necessary to] _life_.”
    Here the “_all men to condemnation_”—the οἱ πολλοί in _verse 15_;
    and the “_all men unto justification of life_”—the τοὺς πολλούς in
    _verse 15_. There is a totality in each case; but, in the former
    case, it is the “_all men_” who derive their physical life from
    Adam,—in the latter case, it is the “_all men_” who derive their
    spiritual life from Christ (compare _1 Cor. 15:22_—“_For as in
    Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive_”—in which
    last clause Paul is speaking, as the context shows, not of the
    resurrection of all men, both saints and sinners, but only of the
    blessed resurrection of the righteous; in other words, of the
    resurrection of those who are one with Christ).

    _Verse 19._ “_For as through the one man’s disobedience the many
    were constituted sinners, even so through the obedience of the one
    shall the many be constituted righteous._” The many were
    constituted sinners because, according to _verse 12_, they sinned
    in and with Adam in his fall. The verb presupposes the fact of
    natural union between those to whom it relates. All men are
    declared to be sinners on the ground of that “_one trespass_,”
    because, when that one trespass was committed, all men were one
    man—that is, were one common nature in the first human pair. Sin
    is imputed, because it is committed. All men are punished with
    death, because they literally sinned in Adam, and not because they
    are metaphorically reputed to have done so, but in fact did not.
    Οἱ πολλοί is used in contrast with the one forefather, and the
    atonement of Christ is designated as ὑπακοή, in order to contrast
    it with the παρακοή of Adam.

    Κατασταθήσονται has the same signification as in the first part of
    the verse. Δίκαιοι κατασταθήσονται means simply “shall be
    justified,” and is used instead of δικαιωθήσονται, in order to
    make the antithesis of ἁμαρτωλοὶ κατεστάθησαν more perfect. This
    being “_constituted righteous_” presupposes the fact of a union
    between ὁ εἶς and οἱ πολλοί, _i. e._, between Christ and
    believers, just as the being “_constituted sinners_” presupposed
    the fact of a union between ὁ εἶς and οἱ πολλοί, _i. e._, between
    all men and Adam. The future κατασταθήσονται refers to the
    succession of believers; the _justification_ of all was, ideally,
    complete already, but actually, it would await the times of
    individual believing. “_The many_” who shall be “_constituted
    righteous_”—not all mankind, but only “_the many_” to whom, in
    _verse 15_, grace abounded, and who are described, in _verse 17_,
    as “_they that receive abundance of grace and of the gift of
    righteousness_.”

    “But this union differs in several important particulars from that
    between Adam and his posterity. It is not natural and substantial,
    but moral and spiritual; not generic and universal, but individual
    and by election; not caused by the creative act of God, but by his
    regenerating act. All men, without exception, are one with Adam;
    only believing men are one with Christ. The imputation of Adam’s
    sin is not an arbitrary act in the sense that, if God so pleased,
    he could reckon it to the account of any beings in the universe,
    by a volition. The sin of Adam could not be imputed to the fallen
    angels, for example, and punished in them, because they never were
    one with Adam by unity of substance and nature. The fact that they
    have committed actual transgression of their own will not justify
    the imputation of Adam’s sin to them, any more than the fact that
    the posterity of Adam have committed actual transgressions of
    their own would be a sufficient reason for imputing the first sin
    of Adam to them. Nothing but a real union of nature and being can
    justify the imputation of Adam’s sin; and, similarly, the
    obedience of Christ could no more be imputed to an unbelieving man
    than to a lost angel, because neither of these is morally and
    spiritually one with Christ” (Shedd). For a different
    interpretation (ἡμαρτον—sinned personally and individually), see
    Kendrick, in Bap. Rev., 1885:48-72.


No Condemnation Inherited.

                  Pelagian.          Arminian.          New School.

I. Origin of      Immediate          Immediate          Immediate
the soul.         Creation.          creation.          creation.
II. Man’s state   Innocent, and      Depraved, but      Depraved and
at birth.         able to obey       still able to      vicious, but
                  God.               co-operate with    this not sin.
                                     the Spirit.
III. Effects of   Only upon          To corrupt his     To communicate
Adam’s sin.       himself.           posterity          visiosity to the
                                     physically and     whole race.
                                     intellectually.
                                     No guilt of
                                     Adam’s sin
                                     imputed.
IV. How did all   By following       By consciously     By voluntary
sin?              Adam’s example.    ratifying Adam’s   transgression of
                                     own deed, in       known law.
                                     spite of the
                                     Spirit’s aid.
V. What is        Only of evil       Evil tendencies    Uncondemnable,
corruption?       habit, in each     kept in spite of   but evil
                  case.              the Spirit.        tendencies.
VI. What is       Every man’s own    Only man’s own     Man’s individual
imputed?          sins.              sins and           acts of
                                     ratifying of       transgression.
                                     this nature.
VII. What is      Spiritual and      Physical and       Spiritual and
the death         eternal.           spiritual death    eternal death
incurred?                            by decree.         only.
VIII. How are     By following       By co-operating    By accepting
men saved?        Christ’s           with the Spirit    Christ under
                  example.           given to all.      influence of
                                                        truth presented
                                                        by the Spirit.

Condemnation Inherited.

                  Federal.           Placean.           Augustinian.

I. Origin of      Immediate          Immediate          Immediate
the soul.         creation.          creation.          creation.
II. Man’s state   Depraved,          Depraved,          Depraved,
at birth.         unable, and        unable, and        unable, and
                  condemnable.       condemnable.       condemnable.
III. Effects of   To insure          Natural            Guilt of Adam’s
Adam’s sin.       condemnation of    connection of      sin, corruption,
                  his fellows in     depravity in all   and death.
                  covenant, and      his descendants.
                  their creation
                  as depraved.
IV. How did all   By being           By possessing a    By having part
sin?              accounted          depraved nature.   in the sin of
                  sinners in                            Adam, as seminal
                  Adam’s sin.                           head of the
                                                        race.
V. What is        Condemnable,       Condemnable,       Condemnable,
corruption?       evil disposition   evil disposition   evil disposition
                  and state.         and state.         and state.
VI. What is       Adam’s sin,        Only depraved      Adam’s sin, our
imputed?          man’s own          nature and man’s   depravity, and
                  corruption, and    own sin.           our own sins.
                  man’s own sins.
VII. What is      Physical,          Physical,          Physical,
the death         spiritual, and     spiritual, and     spiritual, and
incurred?         eternal.           eternal.           eternal.
VIII. How are     By being           By becoming        By Christ’s
men saved?        accounted          possessors of a    work, with whom
                  righteous          new nature in      we are one.
                  through the act    Christ.
                  of Christ.


II.—Objections to the Augustinian Doctrine of Imputation.


The doctrine of Imputation, to which we have thus arrived, is met by its
opponents with the following objections. In discussing them, we are to
remember that a truth revealed in Scripture may have claims to our belief,
in spite of difficulties to us insoluble. Yet it is hoped that examination
will show the objections in question to rest either upon false
philosophical principles or upon misconception of the doctrine assailed.

A. That there can be no sin apart from and prior to consciousness.

This we deny. The larger part of men’s evil dispositions and acts are
imperfectly conscious, and of many such dispositions and acts the evil
quality is not discerned at all. The objection rests upon the assumption
that law is confined to published statutes or to standards formally
recognized by its subjects. A profounder view of law as identical with the
constituent principles of being, as binding the nature to conformity with
the nature of God, as demanding right volitions only because these are
manifestations of a right state, as having claims upon men in their
corporate capacity, deprives this objection of all its force.


    If our aim is to find a conscious act of transgression upon which
    to base God’s charge of guilt and man’s condemnation, we can find
    this more easily in Adam’s sin than at the beginning of each man’s
    personal history; for no human being can remember his first sin.
    The main question at issue is therefore this: Is all sin personal?
    We claim that both Scripture and reason answer this question in
    the negative. There is such a thing as race-sin and
    race-responsibility.


B. That man cannot be responsible for a sinful nature which he did not
personally originate.

We reply that the objection ignores the testimony of conscience and of
Scripture. These assert that we are responsible for what we are. The
sinful nature is not something external to us, but is our inmost selves.
If man’s original righteousness and the new affection implanted in
regeneration have moral character, then the inborn tendency to evil has
moral character; as the former are commendable, so the latter is
condemnable.


    If it be said that sin is the act of a person, and not of a
    nature, we reply that in Adam the whole human nature once
    subsisted in the form of a single personality, and the act of the
    person could be at the same time the act of the nature. That which
    could not be at any subsequent point of time, could be and was, at
    that time. Human nature could fall _in Adam_, though that fall
    could not be repeated in the case of any one of his descendants.
    Hovey, Outlines, 129—“Shall we say that _will_ is the cause of sin
    in holy beings, while _wrong desire_ is the cause of sin in unholy
    beings? Augustine held this.” Pepper, Outlines, 112—“We do not
    fall each one by himself. We were so on probation in Adam, that
    his fall was our fall.”


C. That Adam’s sin cannot be imputed to us, since we cannot repent of it.

The objection has plausibility only so long as we fail to distinguish
between Adam’s sin as the inward apostasy of the nature from God, and
Adam’s sin as the outward act of transgression which followed and
manifested that apostasy. We cannot indeed repent of Adam’s sin as our
personal act or as Adam’s personal act, but regarding his sin as the
apostasy of our common nature—an apostasy which manifests itself in our
personal transgressions as it did in his, we can repent of it and do
repent of it. In truth it is this nature, as self-corrupted and averse to
God, for which the Christian most deeply repents.


    God, we know, has not made our nature as we find it. We are
    conscious of our depravity and apostasy from God. We know that God
    cannot be responsible for this; we know that our nature is
    responsible. But this it could not be, unless its corruption were
    self-corruption. For this self-corrupted nature we should repent,
    and do repent. Anselm, De Concep. Virg., 23—“Adam sinned in one
    point of view as a person, in another as man (_i. e._, as human
    nature which at that time existed in him alone). But since Adam
    and humanity could not be separated, the sin of the person
    necessarily affected the _nature_. This nature is what Adam
    transmitted to his posterity, and transmitted it such as his sin
    had made it, burdened with a debt which it could not pay, robbed
    of the righteousness with which God had originally invested it;
    and in every one of his descendants this impaired nature makes the
    _persons_ sinners. Yet not in the same degree sinners as Adam was,
    for the latter sinned both as human nature and as a person, while
    new-born infants sin only as they possess the nature.”—more
    briefly, in Adam a person made nature sinful; in his posterity,
    nature makes persons sinful.


D. That, if we be responsible for Adam’s first sin, we must also be
responsible not only for every other sin of Adam, but for the sins of our
immediate ancestors.

We reply that the apostasy of human nature could occur but once. It
occurred in Adam before the eating of the forbidden fruit, and revealed
itself in that eating. The subsequent sins of Adam and of our immediate
ancestors are no longer acts which determine or change the nature,—they
only show what the nature is. Here is the truth and the limitation of the
Scripture declaration that “the son shall not bear the iniquity of the
father” (Ez. 18:20; _cf._ Luke 13:2, 3; John 9:2, 3). Man is not
responsible for the specifically evil tendencies communicated to him from
his immediate ancestors, as distinct from the nature he possesses; nor is
he responsible for the sins of those ancestors which originated these
tendencies. But he is responsible for that original apostasy which
constituted the one and final revolt of the race from God, and for the
personal depravity and disobedience which in his own case has resulted
therefrom.


    Augustine, Encheiridion, 46, 47, leans toward an imputing of the
    sins of immediate ancestors, but intimates that, as a matter of
    grace, this may be limited to “_the third and fourth generation_”
    (_Ex. 20:5_). Aquinas thinks this last is said by God, because
    fathers live to see the third and fourth generation of their
    descendants, and influence them by their example to become
    voluntarily like themselves. Burgesse, Original Sin, 397, adds the
    covenant-idea to that of natural generation, in order to prevent
    imputation of the sins of immediate ancestors as well as those of
    Adam. So also Shedd. But Baird, Elohim Revealed, 508, gives a
    better explanation, when he distinguishes between the first sin of
    nature when it apostatized, and those subsequent personal actions
    which merely manifest the nature but do not change it. Imagine
    Adam to have remained innocent, but one of his posterity to have
    fallen. Then the descendants of that one would have been guilty
    for the change of nature in him, but not guilty for the sins of
    ancestors intervening between him and them.

    We add that man may direct the course of a lava-stream, already
    flowing downward, into some particular channel, and may even dig a
    new channel for it down the mountain. But the stream is constant
    in its quantity and quality, and is under the same influence of
    gravitation in all stages of its progress. I am responsible for
    the downward tendency which my nature gave itself at the
    beginning; but I am not responsible for inherited and specifically
    evil tendencies as something apart from the nature,—for they are
    not apart from it,—they are forms or manifestations of it. These
    tendencies run out after a time,—not so with sin of nature. The
    declaration of Ezekiel (_18:20_), “_the son shall not bear the
    iniquity of the father,_” like Christ’s denial that blindness was
    due to the blind man’s individual sins or those of his parents
    (_John 9:2, 3_), simply shows that God does not impute to us the
    sins of our immediate ancestors; it is not inconsistent with the
    doctrine that all the physical and moral evil of the world is the
    result of a sin of Adam with which the whole race is chargeable.

    Peculiar tendencies to avarice or sensuality inherited from one’s
    immediate ancestry are merely wrinkles in native depravity which
    add nothing to its amount or its guilt. Shedd, Dogm. Theol.,
    2:88-94—“To inherit a temperament is to inherit a secondary
    trait.” H. B. Smith, System, 296—“Ezekiel 18 does not deny that
    descendants are involved in the evil results of ancestral sins,
    under God’s moral government; but simply shows that there is
    opportunity for extrication, in personal repentance and
    obedience.” Mozley on Predestination, 179—“Augustine says that
    Ezekiel’s declarations that the son shall not bear the iniquity of
    the father are not a universal law of the divine dealings, but
    only a special prophetical one, as alluding to the divine mercy
    under the gospel dispensation and the covenant of grace, under
    which the effect of original sin and the punishment of mankind for
    the sin of their first parent was removed.” See also Dorner,
    Glaubenslehre, 2:31 (Syst. Doct., 2:326, 327), where God’s
    visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children (Ex. 20:5) is
    explained by the fact that the children repeat the sins of the
    parents. German proverb: “The apple does not fall far from the
    tree.”


E. That if Adam’s sin and condemnation can be ours by propagation, the
righteousness and faith of the believer should be propagable also.

We reply that no merely personal qualities, whether of sin or
righteousness, are communicated by propagation. Ordinary generation does
not transmit _personal_ guilt, but only that guilt which belongs to the
whole _species_. So personal faith and righteousness are not propagable.
“Original sin is the consequent of man’s _nature_, whereas the parents’
grace is a _personal_ excellence, and cannot be transmitted” (Burgesse).


    Thornwell, Selected Writings, 1:543, says the Augustinian doctrine
    would imply that Adam, penitent and believing, must have begotten
    penitent and believing children, seeing that the nature as it is
    in the parent always flows from parent to child. But see Fisher,
    Discussions, 370, where Aquinas holds that no quality or guilt
    that is _personal_ is propagated (Thomas Aquinas, 2:629). Anselm
    (De Concept. Virg. et Origin. Peccato, 98) will not decide the
    question. “The original nature of the tree is propagated—not the
    nature of the graft”—when seed from the graft is planted.
    Burgesse: “Learned parents do not convey learning to their
    children, but they are born in ignorance as others.” Augustine: “A
    Jew that was circumcised begat children not circumcised, but
    uncircumcised; and the seed that was sown without husks, yet
    produced corn with husks.”

    The recent modification of Darwinism by Weismann has confirmed the
    doctrine of the text. Lamarck’s view was that development of each
    race has taken place through the _effort_ of the individuals,—the
    giraffe has a long neck because successive giraffes have reached
    for food on high trees. Darwin held that development has taken
    place not because of effort, but because of _environment_, which
    kills the unfit and permits the fit to survive,—the giraffe has a
    long neck because among the children of giraffes only the
    long-necked ones could reach the fruit, and of successive
    generations of giraffes only the long-necked ones lived to
    propagate. But Weismann now tells us that even then there would be
    no development unless there were a spontaneous _innate tendency_
    in giraffes to become long-necked,—nothing is of avail after the
    giraffe is born; all depends upon the germs in the parents. Darwin
    held to the transmission of acquired characters, so that
    individual men are _affluents_ of the stream of humanity; Weismann
    holds, on the contrary, that acquired characters are not
    transmitted, and that individual men are only _effluents_ of the
    stream of humanity: the stream gives its characteristics to the
    individuals, but the individuals do not give their characteristics
    to the stream: see Howard Ernest Cushman, in The Outlook, Jan. 10,
    1897.

    Weismann, Heredity, 2:14, 266-270, 482—“Characters only acquired
    by the operation of external circumstances, acting during the life
    of the individual, cannot be transmitted.... The loss of a finger
    is not inherited; increase of an organ by exercise is a purely
    personal acquirement and is not transmitted; no child of reading
    parents ever read without being taught; children do not even learn
    to speak untaught.” Horses with docked tails, Chinese women with
    cramped feet, do not transmit their peculiarities. The rupture of
    the hymen in women is not transmitted. Weismann cut off the tails
    of 66 white mice in five successive generations, but of 901
    offspring none were tailless. G. J. Romanes, Life and Letters,
    300—“Three additional cases of cats which have lost their tails
    having tailless kittens afterwards.” In his Weismannism, Romanes
    writes: “The truly scientific attitude of mind with regard to the
    problem of heredity is to say with Galton: ‘We might almost
    reserve our belief that the structural cells can react on the
    sexual elements at all, and we may be confident that at most they
    do so in a very faint degree; in other words, that acquired
    modifications are barely if at all _inherited_, in the correct
    sense of that word.’ ” This seems to class both Romanes and Galton
    on the side of Weismann in the controversy. Burbank, however, says
    that “acquired characters are transmitted, or I know nothing of
    plant life.”

    A. H. Bradford, Heredity, 19, 20, illustrates the opposing views:
    “Human life is not a clear stream flowing from the mountains,
    receiving in its varied course something from a thousand rills and
    rivulets on the surface and in the soil, so that it is no longer
    pure as at the first. To this view of Darwin and Spencer, Weismann
    and Haeckel oppose the view that human life is rather a stream
    flowing underground from the mountains to the sea, and rising now
    and then in fountains, some of which are saline, some sulphuric,
    and some tinctured with iron; and that the differences are due
    entirely to the soil passed through in breaking forth to the
    surface, the mother-stream down and beneath all the salt, sulphur
    and iron, flowing on toward the sea substantially unchanged. If
    Darwin is correct, then we must change individuals in order to
    change their posterity. If Weismann is correct, then we must
    change environment in order that better individuals may be born.
    That which is born of the Spirit is spirit; but that which is born
    of spirit tainted by corruptions of the flesh is still tainted.”

    The conclusion best warranted by science seems to be that of
    Wallace, in the Forum, August, 1890, namely, that there is always
    a _tendency_ to transmit acquired characters, but that only those
    which affect the blood and nervous system, like drunkenness and
    syphilis, overcome the fixed habit of the organism and make
    themselves permanent. Applying this principle now to the
    connection of Adam with the race, we regard the sin of Adam as a
    radical one, comparable only to the act of faith which merges the
    soul in Christ. It was a turning away of the whole being from the
    light and love of God, and a setting of the face toward darkness
    and death. Every subsequent act was an act in the same direction,
    but an act which manifested, not altered, the nature. This first
    act of sin deprived the nature of all moral sustenance and growth,
    except so far as the still immanent God counteracted the inherent
    tendencies to evil. Adam’s posterity inherited his corrupt nature,
    but they do not inherit any subsequently acquired characters,
    either those of their first father or of their immediate
    ancestors.

    Bascom, Comparative Psychology, chap. VII—“Modifications, however
    great, like artificial disablement, that do not work into
    physiological structure, do not transmit themselves. The more
    conscious and voluntary our acquisitions are, the less are they
    transmitted by inheritance.” Shaler, Interpretation of Nature,
    88—“Heredity and individual action may combine their forces and so
    intensify one or more of the inherited motives that the form is
    affected by it and the effect may be transmitted to the offspring.
    So conflict of inheritances may lead to the institution of
    variety. Accumulation of impulses may lead to sudden revolution,
    and the species may be changed, not by environment, but by contest
    between the host of inheritances.” Visiting the sins of the
    fathers upon the children was thought to be outrageous doctrine,
    so long as it was taught only in Scripture. It is now vigorously
    applauded, since it takes the name of heredity. _Dale, Ephesians,
    189_—“When we were young, we fought with certain sins and killed
    them; they trouble us no more; but their ghosts seem to rise from
    their graves in the distant years and to clothe themselves in the
    flesh and blood of our children.” See A. M. Marshall, Biological
    Lectures, 273; Mivart, in Harper’s Magazine, March, 1895:682;
    Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 176.


F. That, if all moral consequences are properly penalties, sin, considered
as a sinful nature, must be the punishment of sin, considered as the act
of our first parents.

But we reply that the impropriety of punishing sin with sin vanishes when
we consider that the sin which is punished is our own, equally with the
sin with which we are punished. The objection is valid as against the
Federal theory or the theory of Mediate Imputation, but not as against the
theory of Adam’s Natural Headship. To deny that God, through the operation
of second causes, may punish the act of transgression by the habit and
tendency which result from it, is to ignore the facts of every-day life,
as well as the statements of Scripture in which sin is represented as ever
reproducing itself, and with each reproduction increasing its guilt and
punishment (Rom. 6:19; James 1:15.)


    _Rom. 6:19_—“_as ye presented your members as servants to
    uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity, even so now present
    your members as servants to righteousness unto sanctification_”;
    _Eph. 4:22_—“_waxeth corrupt after the lusts of deceit_”; _James
    1:15_—“_Then the lust, when it hath conceived, beareth sin: and
    the sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth forth death_”; _2 Tim.
    3:13_—“_evil men and impostors shall wax worse and worse,
    deceiving and being deceived._” See Meyer on _Rom.
    1:24_—“_Wherefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts
    unto uncleanness._” All effects become in their turn causes.
    Schiller: “This is the very curse of evil deed, That of new evil
    it becomes the seed.” Tennyson, Vision of Sin: “Behold it was a
    crime Of sense, avenged by sense that wore with time. Another
    said: The crime of sense became The crime of malice, and is equal
    blame.” Whiton, Is Eternal Punishment Endless, 52—“The punishment
    of sin essentially consists in the wider spread and stronger hold
    of the malady of the soul. _Prov. 5:22_—‘_His own iniquities shall
    take the wicked._’ The habit of sinning holds the wicked ‘_with
    the cords of his sin_.’ Sin is self-perpetuating. The sinner
    gravitates from worse to worse, in an ever-deepening fall.” The
    least of our sins has in it a power of infinite expansion,—left to
    itself it would flood a world with misery and destruction.

    Wisdom, 11:16—“Wherewithal a man sinneth, by the same also he
    shall be punished.” Shakespeare, Richard II, 5:5—“I wasted time,
    and now doth time waste me”; Richard III, 4:2—“I am in so far in
    blood, that sin will pluck on sin”; Pericles, 1:1—“One sin I know
    another doth provoke; Murder’s as near to lust as flame to smoke;”
    King Lear, 5:3—“The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make
    instruments to scourge us.” “Marlowe’s Faustus typifies the
    continuous degradation of a soul that has renounced its ideal, and
    the drawing on of one vice by another, for they go hand in hand
    like the Hours” (James Russell Lowell). Mrs. Humphrey Ward, David
    Grieve, 410—“After all, there’s not much hope when the craving
    returns on a man of his age, especially after some years’
    interval.”


G. That the doctrine excludes all separate probation of individuals since
Adam, by making their moral life a mere manifestation of tendencies
received from him.

We reply that the objection takes into view only our connection with the
race, and ignores the complementary and equally important fact of each
man’s personal will. That personal will does more than simply express the
nature; it may to a certain extent curb the nature, or it may, on the
other hand, add a sinful character and influence of its own. There is, in
other words, a remainder of freedom, which leaves room for personal
probation, in addition to the race-probation in Adam.


    Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, objects to the Augustinian view that if
    personal sin proceeds from original, the only thing men are guilty
    for is Adam’s sin; all subsequent sin is a spontaneous
    development; the individual will can only manifest its inborn
    character. But we reply that this is a misrepresentation of
    Augustine. He does not thus lose sight of the remainders of
    freedom in man (see references on page 620, in the statement of
    Augustine’s view, and in the section following this, on Ability,
    640-644). He says that the corrupt tree may produce the wild fruit
    of morality, though not the divine fruit of grace. It is not true
    that the will is absolutely as the character. Though character is
    the surest index as to what the decisions of the will may be, it
    is not an infallible one. Adam’s first sin, and the sins of men
    after regeneration, prove this. Irregular, spontaneous,
    exceptional though these decisions are, they are still acts of the
    will, and they show that the agent is not _bound_ by motives nor
    by character.

    Here is our answer to the question whether it be not a sin to
    propagate the race and produce offspring. Each child has a
    personal will which may have a probation of its own and a chance
    for deliverance. Denney, Studies in Theology, 87-99—“What we
    inherit may be said to fix our trial, but not our fate. We belong
    to God as well as to the past.” “_All souls are mine_” (_Ez.
    18:4_); “_Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice_” (_John
    18:37_). Thomas Fuller: “1. Roboam begat Abia; that is, a bad
    father begat a bad son; 2. Abia begat Asa; that is, a bad father
    begat a good son; & Asa begat Josaphat; that is, a good father a
    good son; 4. Josaphat begat Joram; that is, a good father a bad
    son. I see, Lord, from hence, that my father’s piety cannot be
    entailed; that is bad news for me. But I see that actual impiety
    is not always hereditary; that is good news for my son.” Butcher,
    Aspects of Greek Genius, 121—Among the Greeks, “The popular view
    was that guilt is inherited; that is, that the children are
    punished for their fathers’ sins. The view of Æschylus, and of
    Sophocles also, was that a tendency towards guilt was inherited,
    but that this tendency does not annihilate man’s free will. If
    therefore the children are punished, they are punished for their
    own sins. But Sophocles saw the further truth that innocent
    children may suffer for their fathers’ sins.”

    Julius Müller, Doc. Sin, 2:316—“The merely organic theory of sin
    leads to naturalism, which endangers not only the doctrine of a
    final judgment, but that of personal immortality generally.” In
    preaching, therefore, we should begin with the known and
    acknowledged sins of men. We should lay the same stress upon our
    connection with Adam that the Scripture does, to explain the
    problem of universal and inveterate sinful tendencies, to enforce
    our need of salvation from this common ruin, and to illustrate our
    connection with Christ. Scripture does not, and we need not, make
    our responsibility for Adam’s sin the great theme of preaching.
    See A. H. Strong, on Christian Individualism, and on The New
    Theology, in Philosophy and Religion, 156-163, 164-179.


H. That the organic unity of the race in the transgression is a thing so
remote from common experience that the preaching of it neutralizes all
appeals to the conscience.

But whatever of truth there is in this objection is due to the
self-isolating nature of sin. Men feel the unity of the family, the
profession, the nation to which they belong, and, just in proportion to
the breadth of their sympathies and their experience of divine grace, do
they enter into Christ’s feeling of unity with the race (_cf._ Is. 6:5;
Lam. 3:39-45; Ezra 9:6; Neh. 1:6). The fact that the self-contained and
self-seeking recognize themselves as responsible only for their personal
acts should not prevent our pressing upon men’s attention the more
searching standards of the Scriptures. Only thus can the Christian find a
solution for the dark problem of a corruption which is inborn yet
condemnable; only thus can the unregenerate man be led to a full knowledge
of the depth of his ruin and of his absolute dependence upon God for
salvation.


    Identification of the individual with the nation or the race: _Is.
    6:5_—“_Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean
    lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips_”;
    _Lam. 3:42_—“_We have transgressed and have rebelled_”; _Ezra
    9:6_—“_I am ashamed and blush to lift up my face to thee, my God;
    for our iniquities are increased over our head_”; _Neh. 1:6_—“_I
    confess the sins of the children of Israel.... Yea, I and my
    father’s house have sinned._” So God punishes all Israel for
    David’s sin of pride; so the sins of Reuben, Canaan, Achan,
    Gehazi, are visited on their children or descendants.

    H. B. Smith, System, 296, 297—“Under the moral government of God
    one man may justly suffer on account of the sins of another. An
    organic relation of men is regarded in the great judgment of God
    in history.... There is evil which comes upon individuals, not as
    punishment for their personal sins, but still as suffering which
    comes under a moral government.... _Jer. 32:18_ reasserts the
    declaration of the second commandment, that God visits the
    iniquity of the fathers upon their children. It may be said that
    all these are merely ‘consequences’ of family or tribal or
    national or race relations,—‘Evil becomes cosmical by reason of
    fastening on relations which were originally adapted to making
    good cosmical:’ but then God’s _plan_ must be in the
    consequences—a plan administered by a moral being, over moral
    beings, according to moral considerations, and for moral ends;
    and, if that be fully taken into view, the dispute as to
    ’consequences’ or ’punishment’ becomes a merely verbal one.”

    There is a common conscience over and above the private
    conscience, and it controls individuals, as appears in great
    crises like those at which the fall of Fort Sumter summoned men to
    defend the Union and the Proclamation of Emancipation sounded the
    death-knell of slavery. Coleridge said that original sin is the
    one mystery that makes all things clear; see Fisher, Nature and
    Method of Revelation, 151-157. Bradford, Heredity, 34, quotes from
    Elam, A Physician’s Problems, 5—“An acquired and habitual vice
    will rarely fail to leave its trace upon one or more of the
    offspring, either in its original form, or one closely allied. The
    habit of the parent becomes the all but irresistible impulse of
    the child; ... the organic tendency is excited to the uttermost,
    and the power of will and of conscience is proportionally
    weakened.... So the sins of the parents are visited upon the
    children.”

    Pascal: “It is astonishing that the mystery which is furthest
    removed from our knowledge—I mean the transmission of original
    sin—should be that without which we have no true knowledge of
    ourselves. It is in this abyss that the clue to our condition
    takes its turnings and windings, insomuch that man is more
    incomprehensible without the mystery than this mystery is
    incomprehensible to man.” Yet Pascal’s perplexity was largely due
    to his holding the Augustinian position that inherited sin is
    damning and brings eternal death, while not holding to the
    coördinate Augustinian position of a primary existence and act of
    the species in Adam; see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:18. Atomism is
    egotistic. The purest and noblest feel most strongly that humanity
    is not like a heap of sand-grains or a row of bricks set on end,
    but that it is an organic unity. So the Christian feels for the
    family and for the church. So Christ, in Gethsemane, felt for the
    race. If it be said that the tendency of the Augustinian view is
    to diminish the sense of guilt for personal sins, we reply that
    only those who recognize _sins_ as rooted in _sin_ can properly
    recognize the evil of them. To such they are _symptoms_ of an
    apostasy from God so deep-seated and universal that nothing but
    infinite grace can deliver us from it.


I. That a constitution by which the sin of one individual involves in
guilt and condemnation the nature of all men who descend from him is
contrary to God’s justice.

We acknowledge that no human theory can fully solve the mystery of
imputation. But we prefer to attribute God’s dealings to justice rather
than to sovereignty. The following considerations, though partly
hypothetical, may throw light upon the subject: (_a_) A probation of our
common nature in Adam, sinless as he was and with full knowledge of God’s
law, is more consistent with divine justice than a separate probation of
each individual, with inexperience, inborn depravity, and evil example,
all favoring a decision against God. (_b_) A constitution which made a
common fall possible may have been indispensable to any provision of a
common salvation. (_c_) Our chance for salvation as sinners under grace
may be better than it would have been as sinless Adams under law. (_d_) A
constitution which permitted oneness with the first Adam in the
transgression cannot be unjust, since a like principle of oneness with
Christ, the second Adam, secures our salvation. (_e_) There is also a
_physical_ and _natural_ union with Christ which antedates the fall and
which is incident to man’s creation. The immanence of Christ in humanity
guarantees a continuous divine effort to remedy the disaster caused by
man’s free will, and to restore the _moral_ union with God which the race
has lost by the fall.

Thus our ruin and our redemption were alike wrought out without personal
act of ours. As all the natural life of humanity was in Adam, so all the
spiritual life of humanity was in Christ. As our old nature was corrupted
in Adam and propagated to us by physical generation, so our new nature was
restored in Christ and communicated to us by the regenerating work of the
Holy Spirit. If then we are justified upon the ground of our inbeing in
Christ, we may in like manner be condemned on the ground of our inbeing in
Adam.


    Stearns, in N. Eng., Jan. 1882:95—“The silence of Scripture
    respecting the precise connection between the first great sin and
    the sins of the millions of individuals who have lived since then
    is a silence that neither science nor philosophy has been, or is,
    able to break with a satisfactory explanation. Separate the
    twofold nature of man, corporate and individual. Recognize in the
    one the region of necessity; in the other the region of freedom.
    The scientific law of heredity has brought into new currency the
    doctrine which the old theologians sought to express under the
    name of original sin,—a term which had a meaning as it was at
    first used by Augustine, but which is an awkward misnomer if we
    accept any other theory but his.”

    Dr. Hovey claims that the Augustinian view breaks down when
    applied to the connection between the justification of believers
    and the righteousness of Christ; for believers were not in Christ,
    as to the substance of their souls, when he wrought out redemption
    for them. But we reply that the life of Christ which makes us
    Christians is the same life which made atonement upon the cross
    and which rose from the grave for our justification. The parallel
    between Adam and Christ is of the nature of analogy, not of
    identity. With Adam, we have a connection of physical life; with
    Christ, a connection of spiritual life.

    Stahl, Philosophie des Rechts, quoted in Olshausen’s Com. on _Rom.
    5:12-21_—“Adam is the original _matter_ of humanity; Christ is its
    original _idea_ in God; both personally living. Mankind is one in
    them. Therefore Adam’s sin became the sin of all; Christ’s
    sacrifice the atonement for all. Every leaf of a tree may be green
    or wither by itself; but each suffers by the disease of the root,
    and recovers only by its healing. The shallower the man, so much
    more isolated will everything appear to him; for upon the surface
    all lies apart. He will see in mankind, in the nation, nay, even
    in the family, mere individuals, where the act of the one has no
    connection with that of the other. The profounder the man, the
    more do these inward relations of unity, proceeding from the very
    centre, force themselves upon him. Yea, the love of our neighbor
    is itself nothing but the deep feeling of this unity; for we love
    him only, with whom we feel and acknowledge ourselves to be one.
    What the Christian love of our neighbor is for the heart, that
    unity of race is for the understanding. If sin through one, and
    redemption through one, is not possible, the command to love our
    neighbor is also unintelligible. Christian ethics and Christian
    faith are therefore in truth indissolubly united. Christianity
    effects in history an advance like that from the animal kingdom to
    man, by its revealing the essential unity of men, the
    consciousness of which in the ancient world had vanished when the
    nations were separated.”

    If the sins of the parents were not visited upon the children,
    neither could their virtues be; the possibility of the one
    involves the possibility of the other. If the guilt of our first
    father could not be transmitted to all who derive their life from
    him, then the justification of Christ could not be transmitted to
    all who derive their life from him. We do not, however, see any
    Scripture warrant for the theory that all men are justified from
    original sin by virtue of their natural connection with Christ. He
    who is the life of all men bestows manifold temporal blessings
    upon the ground of his atonement. But justification from sin is
    conditioned upon conscious surrender of the human will and trust
    in the divine mercy. The immanent Christ is ever urging man
    individually and collectively toward such decision. But the
    acceptance or rejection of the offered grace is left to man’s free
    will. This principle enables us properly to estimate the view of
    Dr. Henry E. Robins which follows.

    H. E. Robins, Harmony of Ethics with Theology, 51—“All men born of
    Adam stand in such a relation to Christ that salvation is their
    birthright under promise—a birthright which can only be forfeited
    by their intelligent, personal, moral action, as was Esau’s.” Dr.
    Robins holds to an inchoate justification of all—a justification
    which becomes actual and complete only when the soul closes with
    Christ’s offer to the sinner. We prefer to say that humanity in
    Christ is ideally justified because Christ himself is justified,
    but that individual men are justified only when they consciously
    appropriate his offered grace or surrender themselves to his
    renewing Spirit. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 312—“The grace of God is
    as organic in its relation to man as is the evil in his nature.
    Grace also reigns wherever justice reigns.” William Ashmore, on
    the New Trial of the Sinner, in Christian Review,
    26:245-264—“There is a gospel of nature commensurate with the law
    of nature; _Rom. 3:22_—‘_unto all, and upon all them that
    believe_’; the first ‘_all_’ is unlimited; the second ‘_all_’ is
    limited to those who believe.”

    R. W. Dale, Ephesians, 180—“Our fortunes were identified with the
    fortunes of Christ; in the divine thought and purpose we were
    inseparable from him. Had we been true and loyal to the divine
    idea, the energy of Christ’s righteousness would have drawn us
    upward to height after height of goodness and joy, until we
    ascended from this earthly life to the larger powers and loftier
    services and richer delights of other and diviner worlds; and
    still, through one golden age of intellectual and ethical and
    spiritual growth after another, we should have continued to rise
    towards Christ’s transcendent and infinite perfection. But we
    sinned; and as the union between Christ and us could not be broken
    without the final and irrevocable defeat of the divine purpose,
    Christ was drawn down from the serene heavens to the confused and
    troubled life of our race, to pain, to temptation, to anguish, to
    the cross and to the grave, and so the mystery of his atonement
    for our sin was consummated.”

    For replies to the foregoing and other objections, see Schaff, in
    Bib. Sac., 5:230; Shedd, Sermons to the Nat. Man, 266-284; Baird,
    Elohim Revealed, 507-509, 529-544; Birks, Difficulties of Belief,
    134-188; Edwards, Original Sin, in Works, 2:473-510; Atwater, on
    Calvinism in Doctrine and Life, in Princeton Review, 1875:73;
    Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 96-100. _Per contra_,
    see Moxom, in Bap. Rev., 1881:273-287; Park, Discourses, 210-233;
    Bradford, Heredity, 237.



Section VI.—Consequences Of Sin To Adam’s Posterity.


As the result of Adam’s transgression, all his posterity are born in the
same state into which he fell. But since law is the all-comprehending
demand of harmony with God, all moral consequences flowing from
transgression are to be regarded as sanctions of law, or expressions of
the divine displeasure through the constitution of things which he has
established. Certain of these consequences, however, are earlier
recognized than others and are of minor scope; it will therefore be useful
to consider them under the three aspects of depravity, guilt, and penalty.


I. Depravity.


By this we mean, on the one hand, the lack of original righteousness or of
holy affection toward God, and, on the other hand, the corruption of the
moral nature, or bias toward evil. That such depravity exists has been
abundantly shown, both from Scripture and from reason, in our
consideration of the universality of sin.


    Salvation is twofold: deliverance from the evil—the penalty and
    the power of sin; and accomplishment of the good—likeness to God
    and realization of the true idea of humanity. It includes all
    these for the race as well as for the individual: removal of the
    barriers that keep men from each other; and the perfecting of
    society in communion with God; or, in other words, the kingdom of
    God on earth. It was the nature of man, when he first came from
    the hand of God, to fear, love, and trust God above all things.
    This tendency toward God has been lost; sin has altered and
    corrupted man’s innermost nature. In place of this bent toward God
    there is a fearful bent toward evil. Depravity is both
    negative—absence of love and of moral likeness to God—and
    positive—presence of manifold tendencies to evil. Two questions
    only need detain us:


1. Depravity partial or total?


The Scriptures represent human nature as totally depraved. The phrase
“total depravity,” however, is liable to misinterpretation, and should not
be used without explanation. By the total depravity of universal humanity
we mean:

A. Negatively,—not that every sinner is: (_a_) Destitute of
conscience,—for the existence of strong impulses to right, and of remorse
for wrong-doing, show that conscience is often keen; (_b_) devoid of all
qualities pleasing to men, and useful when judged by a human standard,—for
the existence of such qualities is recognized by Christ; (_c_) prone to
every form of sin,—for certain forms of sin exclude certain others; (_d_)
intense as he can be in his selfishness and opposition to God,—for he
becomes worse every day.


    (_a_) _John 8:9_—“_And they, when they heard it, went out one by
    one, beginning from the eldest, even unto the last_” (_John
    7:53-8:11_, though not written by John, is a perfectly true
    narrative, descended from the apostolic age). The muscles of a
    dead frog’s leg will contract when a current of electricity is
    sent into them. So the dead soul will thrill at touch of the
    divine law. Natural conscience, combined with the principle of
    self-love, may even prompt choice of the good, though no love for
    God is in the choice. Bengel: “We have lost our likeness to God;
    but there remains notwithstanding an indelible nobility which we
    ought to revere both in ourselves and in others. We still have
    remained men, to be conformed to that likeness, through the divine
    blessing to which man’s will should subscribe. This they forget
    who speak evil of human nature. Absalom fell out of his father’s
    favor; but the people, for all that, recognized in him the son of
    the king.”

    (_b_) _Mark 10:21_—“_And Jesus looking upon him loved him._” These
    very qualities, however, may show that their possessors are
    sinning against great light and are the more guilty; _cf._ _Mal.
    1:6_—“_A son honoreth his father, and a servant his master: if
    then I am a father, where is mine honor? and if I am a master,
    where is my fear?_” John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity,
    2:75—“The assertor of the total depravity of human nature, of its
    absolute blindness and incapacity, presupposes in himself and in
    others the presence of a criterion or principle of good, in virtue
    of which he discerns himself to be wholly evil; yet the very
    proposition that human nature is wholly evil would be
    unintelligible unless it were false.... Consciousness of sin is a
    negative sign of the possibility of restoration. But it is not in
    itself proof that the possibility will become actuality.” A ruined
    temple may have beautiful fragments of fluted columns, but it is
    no proper habitation for the god for whose worship it was built.

    (_c_) _Mat. 23:23_—“_ye tithe mint and anise and cummin, and have
    left undone the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy,
    and faith: but these ye ought to have done, and not to have left
    the other undone_”; _Rom. 2:14_—“_when Gentiles that have not the
    law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law,
    are the law unto themselves; in that they show the work of the law
    written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness
    therewith._” The sin of miserliness may exclude the sin of luxury;
    the sin of pride may exclude the sin of sensuality. Shakespeare,
    Othello, 2:3—“It hath pleased the devil Drunkenness to give place
    to the devil Wrath.” Franklin Carter, Life of Mark Hopkins,
    321-323—Dr. Hopkins did not think that the sons of God should
    describe themselves as once worms or swine or vipers. Yet he held
    that man could sink to a degradation below the brute: “No brute is
    any more capable of rebelling against God than of serving him; is
    any more capable of sinking below the level of its own nature than
    of rising to the level of man. No brute can be either a fool or a
    fiend.... In the way that sin and corruption came into the
    spiritual realm we find one of those analogies to what takes place
    in the lower forms of being that show the unity of the system
    throughout. All disintegration and corruption of matter is from
    the domination of a lower over a higher law. The body begins to
    return to its original elements as the lower chemical and physical
    forces begin to gain ascendancy over the higher force of life. In
    the same way all sin and corruption in man is from his yielding to
    a lower law or principle of action in opposition to the demands of
    one that is higher.”

    (_d_) _Gen. 15:16_—“_the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet
    full_”; _2 Tim. 3:13_—“_evil men and impostors shall wax worse and
    worse._” Depravity is not simply being deprived of good.
    Depravation (_de_, and _pravus_, crooked, perverse) is more than
    deprivation. Left to himself man tends downward, and his sin
    increases day by day. But there is a divine influence within which
    quickens conscience and kindles aspiration for better things. The
    immanent Christ is “_the light which lighteth every man_” (_John
    1:9_). Prof. Wm. Adams Brown: “In so far as God’s Spirit is at
    work among men and they receive ‘_the Light which lighteth every
    man_,’ we must qualify our statement of total depravity. Depravity
    is not so much a state as a tendency. With growing complexity of
    life, sin becomes more complex. Adam’s sin was not the worst. ‘_It
    shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of
    judgment, than for thee_’ (_Mat. 11:24_).”

    Men are not yet in the condition of demons. Only here and there
    have they attained to “a disinterested love of evil.” Such men are
    few, and they were not born so. There are degrees in depravity. E.
    G. Robinson: “There is a good streak left in the devil yet.” Even
    Satan will become worse than he now is. The phrase “total
    depravity” has respect only to relations to God, and it means
    incapability of doing anything which in the sight of God is a good
    act. No act is perfectly good that does not proceed from a true
    heart and constitute an expression of that heart. Yet we have no
    right to say that every act of an unregenerate man is displeasing
    to God. Right acts from right motives are good, whether performed
    by a Christian or by one who is unrenewed in heart. Such acts,
    however, are always prompted by God, and thanks for them are due
    to God and not to him who performed them.


B. Positively,—that every sinner is: (_a_) totally destitute of that love
to God which constitutes the fundamental and all-inclusive demand of the
law; (_b_) chargeable with elevating some lower affection or desire above
regard for God and his law; (_c_) supremely determined, in his whole
inward and outward life, by a preference of self to God; (_d_) possessed
of an aversion to God which, though sometimes latent, becomes active
enmity, so soon as God’s will comes into manifest conflict with his own;
(_e_) disordered and corrupted in every faculty, through this substitution
of selfishness for supreme affection toward God; (_f_) credited with no
thought, emotion, or act of which divine holiness can fully approve; (_g_)
subject to a law of constant progress in depravity, which he has no
recuperative energy to enable him successfully to resist.


    (_a_) _John 5:42_—“_But I know you, that ye have not the love of
    God in yourselves._” (_b_) _2 Tim. 3:4_—“_lovers of pleasure
    rather than lovers of God_”; _cf._ _Mal 1:6_—“_A son honoreth his
    father, and a servant his master: if then I am a father, where is
    mine honor? and if I am a master, where is my fear?_” (_c_) _2
    Tim. 3:2_—“_lovers of self_”; (_d_) _Rom. 8:7_—“_the mind of the
    flesh is enmity against God._” (_e_) _Eph. 4:18_—“_darkened in
    their understanding.... hardening of their heart_”; _Tit.
    1:15_—“_both their mind and their conscience are defiled_”; _2
    Cor. 7:1_—“_defilement of flesh and spirit_”; _Heb. 3:12_—“_an
    evil heart of unbelief_”; (_f_) _Rom. 3:9_—“_they are all under
    sin_”; _7:18_—“_in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good
    thing._” (_g_) _Rom. 7:18_—“_to will is present with me, but to do
    that which is good is not_”; _23_—“_law in my members, warring
    against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under
    the law of sin which is in my members._”

    Every sinner would prefer a milder law and a different
    administration. But whoever does not love God’s law does not truly
    love God. The sinner seeks to secure his own interests rather than
    God’s. Even so-called religious acts he performs with preference
    of his own good to God’s glory. He disobeys, and always has
    disobeyed, the fundamental law of love. He is like a railway train
    on a down grade, and the brakes must be applied by God or
    destruction is sure. There are latent passions in every heart
    which if let loose would curse the world. Many a man who escaped
    from the burning Iroquois Theatre in Chicago, proved himself a
    brute and a demon, by trampling down fugitives who cried for
    mercy. Denney, Studies in Theology, 83—“The depravity which sin
    has produced in human nature extends to the whole of it. There is
    no part of man’s nature which is unaffected by it. Man’s nature is
    all of a piece, and what affects it at all affects it altogether.
    When the conscience is violated by disobedience to the will of
    God, the moral understanding is darkened, and the will is
    enfeebled. We are not constructed in water-tight compartments, one
    of which might be ruined while the others remained intact.” Yet
    over against total depravity, we must set total redemption; over
    against original sin, original grace. Christ is in every human
    heart mitigating the affects of sin, urging to repentance, and
    “_able to save to the uttermost them that draw near unto God
    through him_” (_Heb. 7:25_). Even the unregenerate heathen may
    “_put away ... the old man_” and “_put on the new man_” (_Eph.
    4:23, 24_), being delivered “_out of the body of this death ...
    through Jesus Christ our Lord_” (_Rom. 7:24, 25_).

    H. B. Smith, System, 277—“By total depravity is never meant that
    men are as bad as they can be; nor that they have not, in their
    natural condition, certain amiable qualities; nor that they may
    not have virtues in a limited sense (_justitia civilis_). But it
    is meant (1) that depravity, or the sinful condition of man,
    infects the whole man: intellect, feeling, heart and will; (2)
    that in each unrenewed person some lower affection is supreme; and
    (3) that each such is destitute of love to God. On these
    positions: as to (1) the power of depravity over the _whole_ man,
    we have given proof from Scripture; as to (2) the fact that in
    every unrenewed man some lower affection is supreme, experience
    may be always appealed to; men know that their supreme affection
    is fixed on some lower good—intellect, heart, and will going
    together in it; or that some form of selfishness is
    predominant—using selfish in a general sense—self seeks its
    happiness in some inferior object, giving to that its supreme
    affection; as to (3) that every unrenewed person is without
    supreme love to God, it is the point which is of greatest force,
    and is to be urged with the strongest effect, in setting forth the
    depth and ‘totality’ of man’s sinfulness: unrenewed men have not
    that supreme love of God which is the substance of the first and
    great command.” See also Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 248; Baird,
    Elohim Revealed, 510-522; Chalmers, Institutes, 1:519-542;
    Cunningham, Hist. Theology, 1:516-531; Princeton Review, 1877:470.


2. Ability or inability?


In opposition to the plenary ability taught by the Pelagians, the gracious
ability of the Arminians, and the natural ability of the New School
theologians, the Scriptures declare the total inability of the sinner to
turn himself to God or to do that which is truly good in God’s sight (see
Scripture proof below). A proper conception also of the law, as reflecting
the holiness of God and as expressing the ideal of human nature, leads us
to the conclusion that no man whose powers are weakened by either original
or actual sin can of himself come up to that perfect standard. Yet there
is a certain remnant of freedom left to man. The sinner _can_ (_a_) avoid
the sin against the Holy Ghost; (_b_) choose the less sin rather than the
greater; (_c_) refuse altogether to yield to certain temptations; (_d_) do
outwardly good acts, though with imperfect motives; (_e_) seek God from
motives of self-interest.

But on the other hand the sinner _cannot_ (_a_) by a single volition bring
his character and life into complete conformity to God’s law; (_b_) change
his fundamental preference for self and sin to supreme love for God; nor
(_c_) do any act, however insignificant, which shall meet with God’s
approval or answer fully to the demands of law.


    So long, then, as there are states of intellect, affection and
    will which man cannot, by any power of volition or of contrary
    choice remaining to him, bring into subjection to God, it cannot
    be said that he possesses any sufficient ability of himself to do
    God’s will; and if a basis for man’s responsibility and guilt be
    sought, it must be found, if at all, not in his plenary ability,
    his gracious ability, or his natural ability, but in his
    _original_ ability, when he came, in Adam, from the hands of his
    Maker.

    Man’s present inability is natural, in the sense of being
    inborn,—it is not acquired by our personal act, but is congenital.
    It is not natural, however, as resulting from the original
    limitations of human nature, or from the subsequent loss of any
    essential faculty of that nature. Human nature, at its first
    creation, was endowed with ability perfectly to keep the law of
    God. Man has not, even by his sin, lost his essential faculties of
    intellect, affection, or will. He has weakened those faculties,
    however, so that they are now unable to work up to the normal
    measure of their powers. But more especially has man given to
    every faculty a bent away from God which renders him morally
    unable to render spiritual obedience. The inability to good which
    now characterizes human nature is an inability that results from
    sin, and is itself sin.

    We hold, therefore, to an inability which is both natural and
    moral,—moral, as having its source in the self-corruption of man’s
    moral nature and the fundamental aversion of his will to
    God;—natural, as being inborn, and as affecting with partial
    paralysis all his natural powers of intellect, affection,
    conscience, and will. For his inability, in both these aspects of
    it, man is responsible.

    The sinner can do one very important thing, _viz._: give attention
    to divine truth. _Ps. 119:59_—“_I thought on my ways, And turned
    my feet unto thy testimonies._” G. W. Northrup: “The sinner can
    seek God from: (_a_) self-love, regard for his own interest; (_b_)
    feeling of duty, sense of obligation, awakened conscience; (_c_)
    gratitude for blessings already received; (_d_) aspiration after
    the infinite and satisfying.” Denney, Studies in Theology, 85—“A
    witty French moralist has said that God does not need to grudge to
    his enemies even what they call their virtues; and neither do
    God’s ministers.... But there is _one_ thing which man cannot do
    _alone_,—he cannot bring his state into harmony with his nature.
    When a man has been discovered who has been able, without Christ,
    to reconcile himself to God and to obtain dominion over the world
    and over sin, _then_ the doctrine of inability, or of the bondage
    due to sin, may be denied; _then_, but _not till then_.” The Free
    Church of Scotland, in the Declaratory Act of 1892, says “that, in
    holding and teaching, according to the Confession of Faith, the
    corruption of man’s whole nature as fallen, this church also
    maintains that there remain tokens of his greatness as created in
    the image of God; that he possesses a knowledge of God and of
    duty; that he is responsible for compliance with the moral law and
    with the gospel; and that, although unable without the aid of the
    Holy Spirit to return to God, he is yet capable of affections and
    actions which in themselves are virtuous and praiseworthy.”


To the use of the term “natural ability” to designate merely the sinner’s
possession of all the constituent faculties of human nature, we object
upon the following grounds:

A. Quantitative lack.—The phrase “natural ability” is misleading, since it
seems to imply that the existence of the mere powers of intellect,
affection, and will is a sufficient quantitative qualification for
obedience to God’s law, whereas these powers have been weakened by sin,
and are naturally unable, instead of naturally able, to render back to God
with interest the talent first bestowed. Even if the moral direction of
man’s faculties were a normal one, the effect of hereditary and of
personal sin would render naturally impossible that large likeness to God
which the law of absolute perfection demands. Man has not therefore the
natural ability perfectly to obey God. He had it once, but he lost it with
the first sin.


    When Jean Paul Richter says of himself: “I have made of myself all
    that could be made out of the stuff,” he evinces a
    self-complacency which is due to self-ignorance and lack of moral
    insight. When a man realizes the extent of the law’s demands, he
    sees that without divine help obedience is impossible. John B.
    Gough represented the confirmed drunkard’s efforts at reformation
    as a man’s walking up Mount Etna knee-deep in burning lava, or as
    one’s rowing against the rapids of Niagara.


B. Qualitative lack.—Since the law of God requires of men not so much
right single volitions as conformity to God in the whole inward state of
the affections and will, the power of contrary choice in single volitions
does not constitute a natural ability to obey God, unless man can by those
single volitions change the underlying state of the affections and will.
But this power man does not possess. Since God judges all moral action in
connection with the general state of the heart and life, natural ability
to good involves not only a full complement of faculties but also a bias
of the affections and will toward God. Without this bias there is no
possibility of right moral action, and where there is no such possibility,
there can be no ability either natural or moral.


    Wilkinson, Epic of Paul, 21—“Hatred is like love Herein, that it,
    by only being, grows. Until at last usurping quite the man, It
    overgrows him like a polypus.” John Caird, Fund. Ideas, 1:53—“The
    ideal is the revelation in me of a power that is mightier than my
    own. The supreme command ‘Thou oughtest’ is the utterance, only
    different in form, of the same voice in my spirit which says ‘Thou
    canst’; and my highest spiritual attainments are achieved, not by
    self-assertion, but by self-renunciation and self-surrender to the
    infinite life of truth and righteousness that is living and
    reigning within me.” This conscious inability in one’s self,
    together with reception of “_the strength which God supplieth_”
    (_1 Pet. 4:11_), is the secret of Paul’s courage; _2 Cor.
    12:10_—“_when I am weak, then am I strong_”; _Phil. 2:12,
    13_—“_work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it
    is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good
    pleasure._”


C. No such ability known.—In addition to the psychological argument just
mentioned, we may urge another from experience and observation. These
testify that man is cognizant of no such ability. Since no man has ever
yet, by the exercise of his natural powers, turned himself to God or done
an act truly good in God’s sight, the existence of a natural ability to do
good is a pure assumption. There is no scientific warrant for inferring
the existence of an ability which has never manifested itself in a single
instance since history began.


    “Solomon could not keep the Proverbs,—so he wrote them.” The book
    of Proverbs needs for its complement the New Testament explanation
    of helplessness and offer of help: _John 15:5_—“_apart from me ye
    can do nothing_”; _6:37_—“_him that cometh to me I will in no wise
    cast out._” The palsied man’s inability to walk is very different
    from his indisposition to accept a remedy. The paralytic cannot
    climb the cliff, but by a rope let down to him he may be lifted
    up, provided he will permit himself to be tied to it. Darling, in
    Presb. and Ref. Rev., July, 1901:505—“If bidden, we can stretch
    out a withered arm; but God does not require this of one born
    armless. We may ‘_hear the voice of the Son of God_’ and ‘_live_’
    (_John 5:25_), but we shall not bring out of the tomb faculties
    not possessed before death.”


D. Practical evil of the belief.—The practical evil attending the
preaching of natural ability furnishes a strong argument against it. The
Scriptures, in their declarations of the sinner’s inability and
helplessness, aim to shut him up to sole dependence upon God for
salvation. The doctrine of natural ability, assuring him that he is able
at once to repent and turn to God, encourages delay by putting salvation
at all times within his reach. If a single volition will secure it, he may
be saved as easily to-morrow as to-day. The doctrine of inability presses
men to immediate acceptance of God’s offers, lest the day of grace for
them pass by.


    Those who care most for self are those in whom self becomes
    thoroughly subjected and enslaved to external influences. _Mat.
    16:25_—“_whosoever would save his life shall lose it._” The
    selfish man is a straw on the surface of a rushing stream. He
    becomes more and more a victim of circumstance, until at last he
    has no more freedom than the brute. _Ps. 49:20_—“_Man that is in
    honor, and understandeth not, Is like the beasts that perish_;”
    see R. T. Smith, Man’s Knowledge of Man and of God, 121. Robert
    Browning, unpublished poem: “ ‘Would a man ’scape the rod?’ Rabbi
    Ben Karshook saith, ‘See that he turn to God The day before his
    death.’ ‘Aye, could a man inquire When it shall come?’ I say. The
    Rabbi’s eye shoots fire—‘Then let him turn to-day.’ ”


Let us repeat, however, that the denial to man of all ability, whether
natural or moral, to turn himself to God or to do that which is truly good
in God’s sight, does not imply a denial of man’s power to order his
external life in many particulars conformably to moral rules, or even to
attain the praise of men for virtue. Man has still a range of freedom in
acting out his nature, and he may to a certain limited extent act down
upon that nature, and modify it, by isolated volitions externally
conformed to God’s law. He may choose higher or lower forms of selfish
action, and may pursue these chosen courses with various degrees of
selfish energy. Freedom of choice, within this limit, is by no means
incompatible with complete bondage of the will in spiritual things.


    _John 1:13_—“_born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh,
    nor of the will of man, but of God_”; _3:5_—“_Except one be born
    of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of
    God_”; _6:44_—“_No man can come to me, except the Father that sent
    me draw him_”; _8:34_—“_Every one that committeth sin is the
    bondservant of sin_”; _15:4, 5_—“_the branch cannot bear fruit of
    itself ... apart from me ye can do nothing_”; _Rom. 7:18_—“_in me,
    that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing; for to will is
    present with me, but to do that which it good is not_”;
    _24_—“_Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the
    body of this death?_” _8:7, 8_—“_the mind of the flesh is enmity
    against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither
    indeed can it be: and they that are is the flesh cannot please
    God_”; _1 Cor. 2:14_—“_the natural man receiveth not the things of
    the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; __ and he
    cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged_”; _2 Cor.
    3:5_—“_not that we are sufficient of ourselves, to account
    anything as from ourselves_”; _Eph. 2:1_—“_dead through your
    trespasses and sins_”; _8-10_—“_by grace have ye been saved
    through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God;
    not of works, that no man should glory. For we are his
    workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works_”; _Heb.
    11:6_—“_without faith it is impossible to be well-pleasing unto
    him._”

    Kant’s “I ought, therefore I can” is the relic of man’s original
    consciousness of freedom—the freedom with which man was endowed at
    his creation—a freedom, now, alas! destroyed by sin. Or it may be
    the courage of the soul in which God is working anew by his
    Spirit. For Kant’s “Ich soll, also Ich kann,” Julius Müller would
    substitute: “Ich sollte freilich können, aber Ich kann nicht”—“I
    ought indeed to be able, but I am not able.” Man truly repents
    only when he learns that his sin has made him unable to repent
    without the renewing grace of God. Emerson, in his poem entitled
    “Voluntariness,” says: “So near is grandeur to our dust, So near
    is God to man, When duty whispers low, _Thou must_, The youth
    replies, _I can_.” But, apart from special grace, all the ability
    which man at present possesses comes far short of fulfilling the
    spiritual demands of God’s law. Parental and civil law implies a
    certain kind of power. Puritan theology called man “_free among
    the dead_” (_Ps. 88:5_, A. V.). There was a range of freedom
    inside of slavery,—the will was “a drop of water imprisoned in a
    solid crystal” (Oliver Wendell Holmes). The man who kills himself
    is as dead as if he had been killed by another (Shedd, Dogm.
    Theol., 2:106).

    Westminster Confession, 9:3—“Man by his fall into a state of sin
    hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good
    accompanying salvation; so, as a natural man, being altogether
    averse from that good and dead in sin, he is not able by his own
    strength to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto.”
    Hopkins, Works, 1:233-235—“So long as the sinner’s opposition of
    heart and will continues, he cannot come to Christ. It is
    impossible, and will continue so, until his unwillingness and
    opposition be removed by a change and renovation of his heart by
    divine grace, and he be made willing in the day of God’s power.”
    Hopkins speaks of “utter inability to obey the law of God, yea,
    utter impossibility.”

    Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:257-277—“Inability consists, not in the
    loss of any faculty of the soul, nor in the loss of free agency,
    for the sinner determines his own acts, nor in mere disinclination
    to what is good. It arises from want of spiritual discernment, and
    hence want of proper affections. Inability belongs only to the
    things of the Spirit. What man cannot do is to repent, believe,
    regenerate himself. He cannot put forth any act which merits the
    approbation of God. Sin cleaves to all he does, and from its
    dominion he cannot free himself. The distinction between natural
    and moral ability is of no value. Shall we say that the uneducated
    man can understand and appreciate the Iliad, because he has all
    the faculties that the scholar has? Shall we say that man can love
    God, if he will? This is false, if will means volition. It is a
    truism, if will means affection. The Scriptures never thus address
    men and tell them that they have power to do all that God
    requires. It is dangerous to teach a man this, for until a man
    feels that he can do nothing, God never saves him. Inability is
    involved in the doctrine of original sin; in the necessity of the
    Spirit’s influence in regeneration. Inability is consistent with
    obligation, when inability arises from sin and is removed by the
    removal of sin.”

    Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:213-257, and in South Church Sermons,
    33-59—“The origin of this helplessness lies, not in creation, but
    in sin. God can command the ten talents or the five which he
    originally committed to us, together with a diligent and faithful
    improvement of them. Because the servant has lost the talents, is
    he discharged from obligation to return them with interest? Sin
    contains in itself the element of servitude. In the very act of
    transgressing the law of God, there is a reflex action of the
    human will upon itself, whereby it becomes less able than before
    to keep that law. Sin is the suicidal action of the human will. To
    do wrong destroys the power to do right. Total depravity carries
    with it total impotence. The voluntary faculty may be ruined from
    within; may be made impotent to holiness, by its own action; may
    surrender itself to appetite and selfishness with such an
    intensity and earnestness, that it becomes unable to convert
    itself and overcome its wrong inclination.” See Stevenson, Dr.
    Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,—noticed in Andover Rev., June, 1886:664. We
    can merge ourselves in the life of another—either bad or good; can
    almost transform ourselves into Satan or into Christ, so as to say
    with Paul, in _Gal 2:20_—“_it is no longer I that live, but Christ
    liveth in me_”; or be minions of “_the spirit that now worketh in
    the sons of disobedience_” (_Eph. 2:2_). But if we yield ourselves
    to the influence of Satan, the recovery of our true personality
    becomes increasingly difficult, and at last impossible.

    There is nothing in literature sadder or more significant than the
    self-bewailing of Charles Lamb, the gentle Elia, who writes in his
    Last Essays, 214—“Could the youth to whom the flavor of the first
    wine is delicious as the opening scenes of life or the entering of
    some newly discovered paradise, look into my desolation, and be
    made to understand what a dreary thing it is when he shall feel
    himself going down a precipice with open eyes and a passive will;
    to see his destruction, and have no power to stop it; to see all
    goodness emptied out of him, and yet not be able to forget a time
    when it was otherwise; to bear about the piteous spectacle of his
    own ruin,—could he see my fevered eye, fevered with the last
    night’s drinking, and feverishly looking for to-night’s repetition
    of the folly; could he but feel the body of this death out of
    which I cry hourly, with feebler outcry, to be delivered, it were
    enough to make him dash the sparkling beverage to the earth, in
    all the pride of its mantling temptation.”

    For the Arminian “gracious ability,” see Raymond, Syst. Theol.,
    2:130; McClintock & Strong, Cyclopædia, 10:990. _Per contra_, see
    Calvin, Institutes, bk. 2, chap. 2 (1:282); Edwards, Works, 2:464
    (Orig. Sin, 3:1); Bennet Tyler, Works, 73; Baird, Elohim Revealed,
    523-528; Cunningham, Hist. Theology, 1:567-639; Turretin, 10:4:19;
    A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 260-269; Thornwell, Theology,
    1:394-399; Alexander, Moral Science, 89-208; Princeton Essays,
    1:224-239; Richards, Lectures on Theology. On real as
    distinguished from formal freedom, see Julius Müller, Doct. Sin,
    2:1-225. On Augustine’s _lineamenta extrema_ (of the divine image
    in man), see Wiggers, Augustinism and Pelagianism, 119, note. See
    also art. by A. H. Strong, on Modified Calvinism, or Remainders of
    Freedom in Man, in Bap. Rev., 1883:219-242; and reprinted in the
    author’s Philosophy and Religion, 114-128.


II. Guilt.


1. Nature of guilt.


By guilt we mean desert of punishment, or obligation to render
satisfaction to God’s justice for self-determined violation of law. There
is a reaction of holiness against sin, which the Scripture denominates
“the wrath of God” (Rom. 1:18). Sin is in us, either as act or state;
God’s punitive righteousness is over against the sinner, as something to
be feared; guilt is a relation of the sinner to that righteousness,
namely, the sinner’s desert of punishment.


    Guilt is related to sin as the burnt spot to the blaze. Schiller,
    Die Braut von Messina: “Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht;
    Der Uebel grösstes aber ist die Schuld”—“Life is not the highest
    of possessions; the greatest of ills, however, is guilt.”
    Delitzsch: “Die Schamröthe ist die Abendröthe der untergegangenen
    Sonne der ursprünglichen Gerechtigkeit”—“The blush of shame is the
    evening red after the sun of original righteousness has gone
    down.” E. G. Robinson: “Pangs of conscience do not arise from the
    fear of penalty,—they are the penalty itself.” See chapter on
    Fig-leaves, in McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture,
    142-154—“Spiritual shame for sin sought an outward symbol, and
    found it in the nakedness of the lower parts of the body.”


The following remarks may serve both for proof and for explanation:

A. Guilt is incurred only through self-determined transgression either on
the part of man’s nature or person. We are guilty only of that sin which
we have originated or have had part in originating. Guilt is not,
therefore, mere liability to punishment, without participation in the
transgression for which the punishment is inflicted,—in other words, there
is no such thing as constructive guilt under the divine government. We are
accounted guilty only for what we have done, either personally or in our
first parents, and for what we are, in consequence of such doing.


    _Ez. 18:20_—“_the son shall not bear the iniquity of the
    father_”—, as Calvin says (Com. _in loco_): “The son shall not
    bear the father’s iniquity, since he shall receive the reward due
    to himself, and shall bear his own burden.... All are guilty
    through their own fault.... Every one perishes through his own
    iniquity.” In other words, the whole race fell in Adam, and is
    punished for its own sin in him, not for the sins of immediate
    ancestors, nor for the sin of Adam as a person foreign to us.
    _John 9:3_—“_Neither did this man sin, nor his parents_” (that he
    should be born blind)—Do not attribute to any special later sin
    what is a consequence of the sin of the race—the first sin which
    “brought death into the world, and all our woe.” Shedd, Dogm.
    Theol., 2:195-213.


B. Guilt is an objective result of sin, and is not to be confounded with
subjective pollution, or depravity. Every sin, whether of nature or
person, is an offense against God (Ps. 51:4-6), an act or state of
opposition to his will, which has for its effect God’s personal wrath (Ps.
7:11; John 3:18, 36), and which must be expiated either by punishment or
by atonement (Heb. 9:22). Not only does sin, as unlikeness to the divine
purity, involve _pollution_,—it also, as antagonism to God’s holy will,
involves _guilt_. This guilt, or obligation to satisfy the outraged
holiness of God, is explained in the New Testament by the terms “debtor”
and “debt” (Mat. 6:12; Luke 13:4; Mat. 5:21; Rom. 3:19; 6:23; Eph. 2:3).
Since guilt, the objective result of sin, is entirely distinct from
depravity, the subjective result, human nature may, as in Christ, have the
guilt without the depravity (2 Cor. 5:21), or may, as in the Christian,
have the depravity without the guilt (1 John 1:7, 8).


    _Ps. 51:4-6_—“_Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done
    that which is evil in thy sight; That thou mayest be justified
    when thou speakest, And be clear when thou judgest_”; _7:11_—“_God
    is a righteous judge, Yea, a God that hath indignation every
    day_”; _John 3:18_—“_he that believeth not hath been judged
    already_”; _36_—“_he that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life,
    but the wrath of God abideth on him_”; _Heb. 9:22_—“_apart from
    shedding of blood there is no remission_”; _Mat. 6:12_—“_debts_”;
    _Luke 13:4_—“_offenders_” (marg. “_debtors_”); _Mat. 5:21_—“_shall
    be in danger of_ [exposed to] _the judgment_”; _Rom. 3:19_—“_that
    ... all the world may be brought under the judgment of God_”;
    _6:23_—“_the wages of sin is death_”—death is sin’s desert; _Eph.
    2:3_—“_by nature children of wrath_”; _2 Cor. 5:21_—“_Him who knew
    no sin he made to be sin on our behalf_”; _1 John 1:7, 8_—“_the
    blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin._ [Yet] _If we
    say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is
    not in us._”

    Sin brings in its train not only depravity but guilt, not only
    _macula_ but _reatus_. Scripture sets forth the _pollution_ of sin
    by its similies of “a cage of unclean birds” and of “wounds,
    bruises, and putrefying sores”; by leprosy and Levitical
    uncleanness, under the old dispensation; by death and the
    corruption of the grave, under both the old and the new. But
    Scripture sets forth the _guilt_ of sin, with equal vividness, in
    the fear of Cain and in the remorse of Judas. The revulsion of
    God’s holiness from sin, and its demand for satisfaction, are
    reflected in the shame and remorse of every awakened conscience.
    There is an instinctive feeling in the sinner’s heart that sin
    will be punished, and ought to be punished. But the Holy Spirit
    makes this need of reparation so deeply felt that the soul has no
    rest until its debt is paid. The offending church member who is
    truly penitent loves the law and the church which excludes him,
    and would not think it faithful if it did not. So Jesus, when
    laden with the guilt of the race, pressed forward to the cross,
    saying: “_I have a baptism to be baptised with; and how am I
    straitened till it be accomplished!_” (_Luke 12:50; Mark 10:32_).

    All sin involves guilt, and the sinful soul itself demands
    penalty, so that all will ultimately go where they most desire to
    be. All the great masters in literature have recognized this. The
    inextinguishable thirst for reparation constitutes the very
    essence of tragedy. The Greek tragedians are full of it, and
    Shakespeare is its most impressive teacher: Measure for Measure,
    5:1—“I am sorry that such sorrow I procure, And so deep sticks it
    in my penitent heart That I crave death more willingly than mercy;
    ’Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it”; Cymbeline, 5:4—“and so,
    great Powers, If you will take this audit, take this life, And
    cancel these cold bonds!... Desired, more than constrained, to
    satisfy, ... take No stricter render of me than my all”; that is,
    settle the account with me by taking my life, for nothing less
    than that will pay my debt. And later writers follow Shakespeare.
    Marguerite, in Goethe’s Faust, fainting in the great cathedral
    under the solemn reverberations of the Dies Iræ; Dimmesdale, in
    Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, putting himself side by side with
    Hester Prynne, his victim, in her place of obloquy; Bulwer’s
    Eugene Aram, coming forward, though unsuspected, to confess the
    murder he had committed, all these are illustrations of the inner
    impulse that moves even a sinful soul to satisfy the claims of
    justice upon it. See A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 215,
    216. On Hawthorne, see Hutton, Essays, 2:370-416—“In the Scarlet
    Letter, the minister gains fresh reverence and popularity as the
    very fruit of the passionate anguish with which his heart is
    consumed. Frantic with the stings of unacknowledged guilt, he is
    yet taught by these very stings to understand the hearts and stir
    the consciences of others.” See also Dinsmore, Atonement in
    Literature and Life.

    Nor are such scenes confined to the pages of romance. In a recent
    trial at Syracuse, Earl, the wife-murderer, thanked the jury that
    had convicted him; declared the verdict just; begged that no one
    would interfere to stay the course of justice; said that the
    greatest blessing that could be conferred on him would be to let
    him suffer the penalty of his crime. In Plattsburg, at the close
    of another trial in which the accused was a life-convict who had
    struck down a fellow-convict with an axe, the jury, after being
    out two hours, came in to ask the Judge to explain the difference
    between murder in the first and second degree. Suddenly the
    prisoner rose and said: “This was not a murder in the second
    degree. It was a deliberate and premeditated murder. I know that I
    have done wrong, that I ought to confess the truth, and that I
    ought to be hanged.” This left the jury nothing to do but render
    their verdict, and the Judge sentenced the murderer to be hanged,
    as he confessed he deserved to be. In 1891, Lars Ostendahl, the
    most famous preacher of Norway, startled his hearers by publicly
    confessing that he had been guilty of immorality, and that he
    could no longer retain his pastorate. He begged his people for the
    sake of Christ to forgive him and not to desert the poor in his
    asylums. He was not only preacher, but also head of a great
    philanthropic work.

    Such is the movement and demand of the enlightened conscience. The
    lack of conviction that crime ought to be punished is one of the
    most certain signs of moral decay in either the individual or the
    nation (_Ps. 97:10_—“_Ye that love the Lord, hate evil_”;
    _149:6_—“_Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, And a
    two-edged sword in their hand_”—to execute God’s judgment upon
    iniquity).

    This relation of sin to God shows us how Christ is “_made sin on
    our behalf_” (_2 Cor. 5:21_). Since Christ is the immanent God, he
    is also essential humanity, the universal man, the life of the
    race. All the nerves and sensibilities of humanity meet in him. He
    is the central brain to which and through which all ideas must
    pass. He is the central heart to which and through which all pains
    must be communicated. You cannot telephone to your friend across
    the town without first ringing up the central office. You cannot
    injure your neighbor without first injuring Christ. Each one of us
    can say of him: “_Against thee, thee only, have I sinned_” (_Ps.
    51:4_). Because of his central and all-inclusive humanity, Christ
    can feel all the pangs of shame and suffering which rightfully
    belong to sinners, but which they cannot feel, because their sin
    has stupefied and deadened them. The Messiah, if he be truly man,
    must be a suffering Messiah. For the very reason of his humanity
    he must bear in his own person all the guilt of humanity and must
    be “_the Lamb of God who_” takes, and so “_takes away the sin of
    the world_” (_John 1:29_).

    Guilt and depravity are not only distinguishable in thought,—they
    are also separable in fact. The convicted murderer might repent
    and become pure, yet he might still be under obligation to suffer
    the punishment of his crime. The Christian is freed from guilt
    (_Rom. 8:1_), but he is not yet freed from depravity (_Rom.
    7:23_). Christ, on the other hand, was under obligation to suffer
    (_Luke 24:26_; _Acts 3:18_; _26:23_), while yet he was without sin
    (_Heb. 7:26_). In the book entitled Modern Religious Thought,
    3-29, R. J. Campbell has an essay on The Atonement, with which,
    apart from its view as to the origin of moral evil in God, we are
    in substantial agreement. He holds that “to relieve men from their
    sense of guilt, objective atonement is necessary,”—we would say:
    to relieve men from guilt itself—the obligation to suffer. “If
    Christ be the eternal Son of God, that side of the divine nature
    which has gone forth in creation, if he contains humanity and is
    present in every article and act of human experience, then he is
    associated with the existence of the primordial evil.... He and
    only he can sever the entail between man and his responsibility
    for personal sin. Christ has not _sinned_ in man, but he takes
    responsibility for that experience of evil into which humanity is
    born, and the yielding to which constitutes sin. He goes forth to
    suffer, and actually does suffer, in man. The eternal Son in whom
    humanity is contained is therefore a sufferer since creation
    began. This mysterious passion of Deity must continue until
    redemption is consummated and humanity restored to God. Thus every
    consequence of human ill is felt in the experience of Christ. Thus
    Christ not only assumes the guilt but bears the punishment of
    every human soul.” We claim however that the necessity of this
    suffering lies, not in the needs of man, but in the holiness of
    God.


C. Guilt, moreover, as an objective result of sin, is not to be confounded
with the subjective consciousness of guilt (Lev. 5:17). In the
condemnation of conscience, God’s condemnation partially and prophetically
manifests itself (1 John 3:20). But guilt is primarily a relation to God,
and only secondarily a relation to conscience. Progress in sin is marked
by diminished sensitiveness of moral insight and feeling. As “the greatest
of sins is to be conscious of none,” so guilt may be great, just in
proportion to the absence of consciousness of it (Ps. 19:12; 51:6; Eph.
4:18, 19—ἀπηλγηκότες). There is no evidence, however, that the voice of
conscience can be completely or finally silenced. The time for repentance
may pass, but not the time for remorse. Progress in holiness, on the other
hand, is marked by increasing apprehension of the depth and extent of our
sinfulness, while with this apprehension is combined, in a normal
Christian experience, the assurance that the guilt of our sin has been
taken, and taken away, by Christ (John 1:29).


    _Lev. 5:17_—“_And if any one sin, and do any of the things which
    Jehovah hath commanded not to be done; though he knew it not, yet
    is he guilty, and shall bear his iniquity_”; _1 John
    3:20_—“_because if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our
    heart, and knoweth all things_”; _Ps. 19:12_—“_Who can discern his
    errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults_”; _51:6_—“_Behold, thou
    desirest truth in the inward parts; And in the hidden part thou
    wilt make me to know wisdom_”; _Eph. 4:18, 19_—“_darkened in their
    understanding ... being past feeling_”; _John 1:29_—“_Behold, the
    Lamb of God, that taketh away_ [marg. “_beareth_”] _the sin of the
    world._”

    Plato, Republic, 1:330—“When death approaches, cares and alarms
    awake, especially the fear of hell and its punishments.” Cicero,
    De Divin., 1:30—“Then comes remorse for evil deeds.” Persius,
    Satire 3—“His vice benumbs him; his fibre has become fat; he is
    conscious of no fault; he knows not the loss he suffers; he is so
    far sunk, that there is not even a bubble on the surface of the
    deep.” Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:1—“Thus conscience doth make cowards
    of us all”; 4:5—“To my sick soul, as sin’s true nature is, Each
    toy seems prologue to some great amiss; So full of artless
    jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt”;
    Richard III, 5:3—“O coward conscience, how thou dost afflict
    me!... My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every
    tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a
    villain”; Tempest, 3:3—“All three of them are desperate; their
    great guilt, Like poison given to work a great time after, Now
    ’gins to bite the spirits”; Ant. and Cleop., 3:9—“When we in our
    viciousness grow hard (O misery on’t!) the wise gods seel our
    eyes; In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us Adore our
    errors; laugh at us, while we strut To our confusion.”

    Dr. Shedd said once to a graduating class of young theologians:
    “Would that upon the naked, palpitating heart of each one of you
    might be laid one redhot coal of God Almighty’s wrath!” Yes, we
    add, if only that redhot coal might be quenched by one red drop of
    Christ’s atoning blood. Dr. H. E. Robins: “To the convicted sinner
    a merely external hell would be a cooling flame, compared with the
    agony of his remorse.” John Milton represents Satan as saying:
    “Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.” James Martineau, Life
    by Jackson, 190—“It is of the essence of guilty declension to
    administer its own anæsthetics.” But this deadening of conscience
    cannot last always. Conscience is a mirror of God’s holiness. We
    may cover the mirror with the veil of this world’s diversions and
    deceits. When the veil is removed, and conscience again reflects
    the sunlike purity of God’s demands, we are visited with
    self-loathing and self-contempt. John Caird, Fund. Ideas,
    2:25—“Though it may cast off every other vestige of its divine
    origin, our nature retains at least this one terrible prerogative
    of it, the capacity of preying on itself.” Lyttelton in Lux Mundi,
    277—“The common fallacy that a self-indulgent sinner is no one’s
    enemy but his own would, were it true, involve the further
    inference that such a sinner would not feel himself guilty.” If
    any dislike the doctrine of guilt, let them remember that without
    wrath there is no pardon, without guilt no forgiveness. See, on
    the nature of guilt, Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:193-267;
    Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 208-209; Thomasius, Christi Person
    und Werk, 1:346; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 461-473; Delitzsch, Bib.
    Psychologie, 121-148; Thornwell, Theology, 1:400-424.


2. Degrees of guilt.


The Scriptures recognize different degrees of guilt as attaching to
different kinds of sin. The variety of sacrifices under the Mosaic law,
and the variety of awards in the judgment, are to be explained upon this
principle.


    _Luke 12:47, 48_—“_shall be beaten with many stripes ... shall be
    beaten with few stripes_”; _Rom. 2:6_—“_who will render to every
    man according to his works._” See also _John 19:11_—“_he that
    delivered me unto thee hath greater sin_”; _Heb. 2:2, 3_—if
    “_every transgression ... received a just recompense of reward;
    how shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?_” _10:28,
    29_—“_A man that hath set at nought Moses’ law dieth without
    compassion on the word of two or three witnesses: of how much
    sorer punishment, think ye, shall he be judged worthy, who hath
    trodden under foot the Son of God?_”


Casuistry, however, has drawn many distinctions which lack Scriptural
foundation. Such is the distinction between venial sins and mortal sins in
the Roman Catholic Church,—every sin unpardoned being mortal, and all sins
being venial, since Christ has died for all. Nor is the common distinction
between sins of omission and sins of commission more valid, since the very
omission is an act of commission.


    _Mat. 25:45_—“_Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these
    least_”; _James 4:17_—“_To him therefore that knoweth to do good,
    and doeth it not, to him it is sin._” John Ruskin: “The
    condemnation given from the Judgment Throne—most solemnly
    described—is for all the ‘undones’ and not the ‘dones.’ People are
    perpetually afraid of doing wrong; but unless they are doing its
    reverse energetically, they _do it all day long_, and the degree
    does not matter.” The Roman Catholic Church proceeds upon the
    supposition that she can determine the precise malignity of every
    offence, and assign its proper penance at the confessional.
    Thornwell, Theology, 1:424-441, says that “all sins are venial but
    one—for there is a sin against the Holy Ghost,” yet “not one is
    venial in itself—for the least proceeds from an apostate state and
    nature.” We shall see, however, that the hindrance to pardon, in
    the case of the sin against the Holy Spirit, is subjective rather
    than objective.

    J. Spencer Kennard: “Roman Catholicism in Italy presents the
    spectacle of the authoritative representatives and teachers of
    morals and religion themselves living in all forms of deceit,
    corruption, and tyranny; and, on the other hand, discriminating
    between venial and mortal sin, classing as venial sins lying,
    fraud, fornication, marital infidelity, and even murder, all of
    which may be atoned for and forgiven or even permitted by the mere
    payment of money; and at the same time classing as mortal sins
    disrespect and disobedience to the church.”


The following distinctions are indicated in Scripture as involving
different degrees of guilt:

A. Sin of nature, and personal transgression.

Sin of nature involves guilt, yet there is greater guilt when this sin of
nature reasserts itself in personal transgression; for, while this latter
includes in itself the former, it also adds to the former a new element,
namely, the conscious exercise of the individual and personal will, by
virtue of which a new decision is made against God, special evil habit is
induced, and the total condition of the soul is made more depraved.
Although we have emphasized the guilt of inborn sin, because this truth is
most contested, it is to be remembered that men reach a conviction of
their native depravity only through a conviction of their personal
transgressions. For this reason, by far the larger part of our preaching
upon sin should consist in applications of the law of God to the acts and
dispositions of men’s lives.


    _Mat. 19:14_—“_to such belongeth the kingdom of heaven_”—relative
    innocence of childhood; _23:32_—“_Fill ye up then the measure of
    your fathers_”—personal transgression added to inherited
    depravity. In preaching, we should first treat individual
    transgressions, and thence proceed to heart-sin, and race-sin. Man
    is not wholly a spontaneous development of inborn tendencies, a
    manifestation of original sin. Motives do not _determine_ but they
    _persuade_ the will, and every man is guilty of conscious personal
    transgressions which may, with the help of the Holy Spirit, be
    brought under the condemning judgment of conscience. Birks,
    Difficulties of Belief, 169-174—“Original sin does not do away
    with the significance of personal transgression. Adam was
    pardoned: but some of his descendants are unpardonable. The second
    death is referred, in Scripture, to our own personal guilt.”

    This is not to say that original sin does not involve as great sin
    as that of Adam in the first transgression, for original sin _is_
    the sin of the first transgression; it is only to say that
    personal transgression is original sin _plus_ the conscious
    ratification of Adam’s act by the individual. “We are guilty for
    what we _are_, as much as for what we _do_. Our _sin_ is not
    simply the sum total of all our _sins_. There is a _sinfulness_
    which is the common denominator of all our sins.” It is customary
    to speak lightly of original sin, as if personal sins were all for
    which man is accountable. But it is only in the light of original
    sin that personal sins can be explained. _Prov. 14:9,
    marg._—“_Fools make a mock at sin._” Simon, Reconciliation,
    122—“The sinfulness of individual men varies; the sinfulness of
    humanity is a constant quantity.” Robert Browning, Ferishtah’s
    Fancies: “Man lumps his kind i’ the mass. God singles thence unit
    by unit. Thou and God exist—So think! for certain: Think the
    mass—mankind—Disparts, disperses, leaves thyself alone! Ask thy
    lone soul what laws are plain to thee,—Thou and no other, stand or
    fall by them! That is the part for thee.”


B. Sins of ignorance, and sins of knowledge.

Here guilt is measured by the degree of light possessed, or in other
words, by the opportunities of knowledge men have enjoyed, and the powers
with which they have been naturally endowed. Genius and privilege increase
responsibility. The heathen are guilty, but those to whom the oracles of
God have been committed are more guilty than they.


    _Mat 10:15_—“_more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in
    the day of judgment, than for that city_”; _Luke 12:47, 48_—“_that
    servant, who knew his Lord’s will ... shall be beaten with many
    stripes; but he that knew not ... shall be beaten with few
    stripes_”; _23:34_—“_Father, forgive them; for they know not what
    they do_”—complete knowledge would put them beyond the reach of
    forgiveness. _John 19:11_—“_he that delivered me unto thee hath
    greater sin_”; _Acts 17:30_—“_The times of ignorance therefore God
    overlooked_”; _Rom. 1:32_—“_who, knowing the ordinance of God,
    that they that practise such things are worthy of death, not only
    do the same, but also consent with them that practise them_”;
    _2:12_—“_For as many as have sinned without the law shall also
    perish without the law: and as many as have sinned under the law
    shall be judged by the law_”; _1 Tim. 1:13, 15, 16_—“_I obtained
    mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief._”

    _Is. 42:19_—“_Who is blind ... as Jehovah’s servant?_” It was the
    Pharisees whom Jesus warned of the sin against the Holy Spirit.
    The guilt of the crucifixion rested on Jews rather than on
    Gentiles. Apostate Israel was more guilty than the pagans. The
    greatest sinners of the present day may be in Christendom, not in
    heathendom. Satan was an archangel; Judas was an apostle;
    Alexander Borgia was a pope. Jackson, James Martineau,
    362—“Corruptio optimi pessima est, as seen in a drunken Webster, a
    treacherous Bacon, a licentious Goethe.” Sir Roger de Coverley
    observed that none but men of fine parts deserve to be hanged.
    Kaftan, Dogmatik, 317—“The greater sin often involves the lesser
    guilt; the lesser sin the greater guilt.” Robert Browning, The
    Ring and the Book, 227 (Pope, 1975)—“There’s a new tribunal now
    Higher than God’s,—the educated man’s! Nice sense of honor in the
    human breast Supersedes here the old coarse oracle!” Dr. H. E.
    Robins holds that “palliation of guilt according to light is not
    possible under a system of pure law, and is possible only because
    the probation of the sinner is a probation of grace.”


C. Sins of infirmity, and sins of presumption.

Here the guilt is measured by the energy of the evil will. Sin may be
known to be sin, yet may be committed in haste or weakness. Though haste
and weakness constitute a palliation of the offence which springs
therefrom, yet they are themselves sins, as revealing an unbelieving and
disordered heart. But of far greater guilt are those presumptuous choices
of evil in which not weakness, but strength of will, is manifest.


    _Ps. 19:12, 13_—“_Clear thou me from hidden faults. Keep back thy
    servant also from presumptuous sins_”; _Is. 5:18_—“_Woe unto them
    that draw iniquity with cords of falsehood, and sin as it were
    with a cart-rope_”—not led away insensibly by sin, but earnestly,
    perseveringly, and wilfully working away at it; _Gal.
    6:1_—“_overtaken in any trespass_”; _1 Tim. 5:24_—“_Some men’s
    sins are evident, going before unto judgment; and some men also
    they follow after_”—some men’s sins are so open, that they act as
    officers to bring to justice those who commit them; whilst others
    require after-proof (An. Par. Bible). Luther represents one of the
    former class as saying to himself: “Esto peccator, et pecca
    fortiter.” On sins of passion and of reflection, see Bittinger, in
    Princeton Rev., 1873:219.

    _Micah 7:3_, marg.—“_Both hands are put forth for evil, to do it
    diligently._” So we ought to do good. “My art is my life,” said
    Grisi, the prima donna of the opera, “I save myself all day for
    that one bound upon the stage.” H. Bonar: “Sin worketh,—Let me
    work too. Busy as sin, my work I ply, Till I rest in the rest of
    eternity.” German criminal law distinguishes between intentional
    homicide without deliberation, and intentional homicide with
    deliberation. There are three grades of sin: 1. Sins of ignorance,
    like Paul’s persecuting; 2. sins of infirmity, like Peter’s
    denial; 3. sins of presumption, like David’s murder of Uriah. Sins
    of presumption were unpardonable under the Jewish law; they are
    not unpardonable under Christ.


D. Sin of incomplete, and sin of final, obduracy.

Here the guilt is measured, not by the objective sufficiency or
insufficiency of divine grace, but by the degree of unreceptiveness into
which sin has brought the soul. As the only sin unto death which is
described in Scripture is the sin against the Holy Spirit, we here
consider the nature of that sin.


    _Mat 12:31_—“_Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men;
    but the blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven_”;
    _32_—“_And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it
    shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy
    Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor
    in that which is to come_”; _Mark 3:29_—“_whosoever shall
    blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is
    guilty of an eternal sin_”; _1 John 5:16, 17_—“_If any man see his
    brother sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and God will
    give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin
    into death: not concerning this do I say that he should make
    request. All unrighteousness is sin: and there is a sin not unto
    death_”; _Heb. 10:26_—“_if we sin wilfully after that we have
    received the knowledge of the truth, then remaineth no more a
    sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment,
    and a fierceness of fire which shall devour the adversaries._”

    Ritschl holds all sin that comes short of definitive rejection of
    Christ to be ignorance rather than sin, and to be the object of no
    condemning sentence. This is to make the sin against the Holy
    Spirit the only real sin. Conscience and Scripture alike
    contradict this view. There is much incipient hardening of the
    heart that precedes the sin of final obduracy. See Denney, Studies
    in Theology, 80. The composure of the criminal is not always a
    sign of innocence. S. S. Times, April 12, 1902:200—“Sensitiveness
    of conscience and of feeling, and responsiveness of countenance
    and bearing, are to be retained by purity of life and freedom from
    transgression. On the other hand composure of countenance and
    calmness under suspicion and accusation are likely to be a result
    of continuance in wrong doing, with consequent hardening of the
    whole moral nature.”

    Weismann, Heredity, 2:8—“As soon as any organ falls into disuse,
    it degenerates, and finally is lost altogether.... In parasites
    the organs of sense degenerate.” Marconi’s wireless telegraphy
    requires an attuned “receiver.” The “transmitter” sends out
    countless rays into space: only one capable of corresponding
    vibrations can understand them. The sinner may so destroy his
    receptivity, that the whole universe may be uttering God’s truth,
    yet he be unable to hear a word of it. The Outlook: “If a man
    should put out his eyes, he could not see—nothing could make him
    see. So if a man should by obstinate wickedness destroy his power
    to believe in God’s forgiveness, he would be in a hopeless state.
    Though God would still be gracious, the man could not see it, and
    so could not take God’s forgiveness to himself.”


The sin against the Holy Spirit is not to be regarded simply as an
isolated act, but also as the external symptom of a heart so radically and
finally set against God that no power which God can consistently use will
ever save it. This sin, therefore, can be only the culmination of a long
course of self-hardening and self-depraving. He who has committed it must
be either profoundly indifferent to his own condition, or actively and
bitterly hostile to God; so that anxiety or fear on account of one’s
condition is evidence that it has not been committed. The sin against the
Holy Spirit cannot be forgiven, simply because the soul that has committed
it has ceased to be receptive of divine influences, even when those
influences are exerted in the utmost strength which God has seen fit to
employ in his spiritual administration.


    The commission of this sin is marked by a loss of spiritual sight;
    the blind fish of the Mammoth Cave left light for darkness, and so
    in time lost their eyes. It is marked by a loss of religious
    sensibility; the sensitive-plant loses Its sensitiveness, in
    proportion to the frequency with which it is touched. It is marked
    by a loss of power to will the good; “the lava hardens after it
    has broken from the crater, and in that state cannot return to its
    source” (Van Oosterzee). The same writer also remarks (Dogmatics,
    2:438): “Herod Antipas, after earlier doubt and slavishness,
    reached such deadness as to be able to mock the Savior, at the
    mention of whose name he had not long before trembled.” Julius
    Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:425—“It is not that divine grace is
    absolutely refused to any one who in true penitence asks
    forgiveness of this sin; but he who commits it never fulfills the
    subjective conditions upon which forgiveness is possible, because
    the aggravation of sin to this ultimatum destroys in him all
    susceptibility of repentance. The way of return to God is closed
    against no one who does not close it against himself.” Drummond,
    Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 97-120, illustrates the
    downward progress of the sinner by the law of degeneration in the
    vegetable and animal world: pigeons, roses, strawberries, all tend
    to revert to the primitive and wild type. “_How shall we escape,
    if we neglect so great a salvation?_” (_Heb.2:3_).

    Shakespeare, Macbeth, 3:5—“You all know security Is mortals’
    chiefest enemy.” Moulton, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist,
    90-124—“Richard III is the ideal villain. Villainy has become an
    end in itself. Richard is an artist in villainy. He lacks the
    emotions naturally attending crime. He regards villainy with the
    intellectual enthusiasm of the artist. His villainy is ideal in
    its success. There is a fascination of irresistibility in him. He
    is imperturbable in his crime. There is no effort, but rather
    humor, in it; a recklessness which suggests boundless resources;
    an inspiration which excludes calculation. Shakespeare relieves
    the representation from the charge of monstrosity by turning all
    this villainous history into the unconscious development of
    Nemesis.” See also A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 188-193. Robert
    Browning’s Guido, in The Ring and the Book, is an example of pure
    hatred of the good. Guido hates Pompilia for her goodness, and
    declares that, if he catches her in the next world, he will murder
    her there, as he murdered her here.

    Alexander VI, the father of Cæsar and Lucrezia Borgia, the pope of
    cruelty and lust, wore yet to the day of his death the look of
    unfailing joyousness and geniality, yes, of even retiring
    sensitiveness and modesty. No fear or reproach of conscience
    seemed to throw gloom over his life, as in the cases of Tiberius
    and Louis XI. He believed himself under the special protection of
    the Virgin, although he had her painted with the features of his
    paramour, Julia Farnese. He never scrupled at false witness,
    adultery, or murder. See Gregorovius, Lucrezia Borgia, 294, 295.
    Jeremy Taylor thus describes the progress of sin in the sinner:
    “First it startles him, then it becomes pleasing, then delightful,
    then frequent, then habitual, then confirmed; then the man is
    impenitent, then obstinate, then resolved never to repent, then
    damned.”

    There is a state of utter insensibility to emotions of love or
    fear, and man by his sin may reach that state. The act of
    blasphemy is only the expression of a hardened or a hateful heart.
    B. H. Payne: “The calcium flame will char the steel wire so that
    it is no longer affected by the magnet.... As the blazing cinders
    and black curling smoke which the volcano spews from its rumbling
    throat are the accumulation of months and years, so the sin
    against the Holy Spirit is not a thoughtless expression in a
    moment of passion or rage, but the giving vent to a state of heart
    and mind abounding in the accumulations of weeks and months of
    opposition to the gospel.”

    Dr. J. P. Thompson: “The unpardonable sin is the knowing, wilful,
    persistent, contemptuous, malignant spurning of divine truth and
    grace, as manifested to the soul by the convincing and
    illuminating power of the Holy Ghost.” Dorner says that “therefore
    this sin does not belong to Old Testament times, or to the mere
    revelation of law. It implies the full revelation of the grace in
    Christ, and the conscious rejection of it by a soul to which the
    Spirit has made it manifest (_Acts 17:30_—‘_The times of
    ignorance, therefore, God overlooked_’; _Rom. 3:25_—‘_the passing
    over of the sins done aforetime_’).” But was it not under the Old
    Testament that God said: “_My Spirit shall not strive with man
    forever_” (_Gen. 6:3_), and “_Ephraim is joined to idols; let him
    alone_” (_Hosea 4:17_)? The sin against the Holy Ghost is a sin
    against grace, but it does not appear to be limited to New
    Testament times.

    It is still true that the unpardonable sin is a sin committed
    against the Holy Spirit rather than against Christ: _Mat.
    12:32_—“_whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it
    shall be forgiven him; but whosoever shall speak against the Holy
    Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor
    in that which is to come._” Jesus warns the Jews against it,—he
    does not say they had already committed it. They would seem to
    have committed it when, after Pentecost, they added to their
    rejection of Christ the rejection of the Holy Spirit’s witness to
    Christ’s resurrection. See Schaff, Sin against the Holy Ghost;
    Lemme, Sünde wider den Heiligen Geist; Davis, in Bap. Rev.,
    1862:317-326; Nitzsch, Christian Doctrine, 283-289. On the general
    subject of kinds of sin and degrees of guilt, see Kahnis,
    Dogmatik, 3:284, 298.


III. Penalty.


1. Idea of penalty.


By penalty, we mean that pain or loss which is directly or indirectly
inflicted by the Lawgiver, in vindication of his justice outraged by the
violation of law.


    Turretin, 1:213—“Justice necessarily demands that all sin be
    punished, but it does not equally demand that it be punished in
    the very person that sinned, or in just such time and degree.” So
    far as this statement of the great Federal theologian is intended
    to explain our guilt in Adam and our justification in Christ, we
    can assent to his words; but we must add that the reason, in each
    case, why we suffer the penalty of Adam’s sin, and Christ suffers
    the penalty of our sins, is not to be found in any
    covenant-relation, but rather in the fact that the sinner is one
    with Adam, and Christ is one with the believer,—in other words,
    not covenant-unity, but life-unity. The word “penalty,” like
    “pain,” is derived from pœna, ποινή, and it implies the
    correlative notion of desert. As under the divine government there
    can be no constructive _guilt_, so there can be no _penalty_
    inflicted by legal fiction. Christ’s sufferings were penalty, not
    arbitrarily inflicted, nor yet borne to expiate personal guilt,
    but as the just due of the human nature with which he had united
    himself, and a part of which he was. Prof. Wm. Adams Brown: “Loss,
    not suffering, is the supreme penalty for Christians. The real
    penalty is separation from God. If such separation involves
    suffering, that is a sign of God’s mercy, for where there is life,
    there is hope. Suffering is always to be interpreted as an appeal
    from God to man.”


In this definition it is implied that:

A. The natural consequences of transgression, although they constitute a
part of the penalty of sin, do not exhaust that penalty. In all penalty
there is a personal element—the holy wrath of the Lawgiver,—which natural
consequences but partially express.


    We do not deny, but rather assert, that the natural consequences
    of transgression are a part of the penalty of sin. Sensual sins
    are punished, in the deterioration and corruption of the body;
    mental and spiritual sins, in the deterioration and corruption of
    the soul. _Prov. 5:22_—“_His own iniquities shall take the wicked,
    And he shall be holden with the cords of his sin_”—as the hunter
    is caught in the toils which he has devised for the wild beast.
    Sin is self-detecting and self-tormenting. But this is only half
    the truth. Those who would confine all penalty to the reaction of
    natural laws are in danger of forgetting that God is not simply
    immanent in the universe, but is also transcendent, and that “_to
    fall into the hands of the living God_” (_Heb. 10:31_) is to fall
    into the hands, not simply of the law, but also of the Lawgiver.
    Natural law is only the regular expression of God’s mind and will.
    We abhor a person who is foul in body and in speech. There is no
    penalty of sin more dreadful than its being an object of
    abhorrence to God. _Jer. 44:4_—“_Oh, do not this abominable thing
    that I hate!_” Add to this the law of continuity which makes sin
    reproduce itself, and the law of conscience which makes sin its
    own detecter, judge, and tormentor, and we have sufficient
    evidence of God’s wrath against it, apart from any external
    inflictions. The divine feeling toward sin is seen in Jesus’
    scourging the traffickers in the temple, his denunciation of the
    Pharisees, his weeping over Jerusalem, his agony in Gethsemane.
    Imagine the feeling of a father toward his daughter’s betrayer,
    and God’s feeling toward sin may be faintly understood.

    The deed returns to the doer, and character determines
    destiny—this law is a revelation of the righteousness of God.
    Penalty will vindicate the divine character in the long run,
    though not always in time. This is recognized in all religions.
    Buddhist priest in Japan: “The evil doer weaves a web around
    himself, as the silkworm weaves its cocoon.” Socrates made Circe’s
    turning of men into swine a mere parable of the self-brutalizing
    influence of sin. In Dante’s Inferno, the punishments are all of
    them the sins themselves; hence men are in hell before they die.
    Hegel: “Penalty is the other half of crime.” R. W. Emerson:
    “Punishment not follows, but accompanies, crime.” Sagebeer, The
    Bible in Court, 59—“Corruption is destruction, and the sinner is a
    suicide; penalty corresponds with transgression and is the outcome
    of it; sin is death in the making; death is sin in the final
    infliction.” J. B. Thomas, Baptist Congress, 1901:110—“What
    matters it whether I wait by night for the poacher and
    deliberately shoot him, or whether I set the pistol so that he
    shall be shot by it when he commits the depredation?” Tennyson,
    Sea Dreams: “His gain is loss; for he that wrongs his friend
    Wrongs himself more, and ever bears about A silent court of
    justice in his breast, Himself the judge and jury, and himself The
    prisoner at the bar, ever condemn’d: And that drags down his life:
    then comes what comes Hereafter.”


B. The object of penalty is not the reformation of the offender or the
ensuring of social or governmental safety. These ends may be incidentally
secured through its infliction, but the great end of penalty is the
vindication of the character of the Lawgiver. Penalty is essentially a
necessary reaction of the divine holiness against sin. Inasmuch, however,
as wrong views of the object of penalty have so important a bearing upon
our future studies of doctrine, we make fuller mention of the two
erroneous theories which have greatest currency.

(_a_) Penalty is not essentially reformatory.—By this we mean that the
reformation of the offender is not its primary design,—as penalty, it is
not intended to reform. Penalty, in itself, proceeds not from the love and
mercy of the Lawgiver, but from his justice. Whatever reforming influences
may in any given instance be connected with it are not parts of the
penalty, but are mitigations of it, and they are added not in justice but
in grace. If reformation follows the infliction of penalty, it is not the
effect of the penalty, but the effect of certain benevolent agencies which
have been provided to turn into a means of good what naturally would be to
the offender only a source of harm.

That the object of penalty is not reformation appears from Scripture,
where punishment is often referred to God’s justice, but never to God’s
love; from the intrinsic ill-desert of sin, to which penalty is
correlative; from the fact that punishment must be vindicative, in order
to be disciplinary, and just, in order to be reformatory; from the fact
that upon this theory punishment would not be just when the sinner was
already reformed or could not be reformed, so that the greater the sin the
less the punishment must be.


    Punishment is essentially different from chastisement. The latter
    proceeds from love (_Jer. 10:24_—“_correct me, but in measure; not
    in thine anger_”; _Heb. 12:6_—“_Whom the Lord loveth he
    chasteneth_”). Punishment proceeds not from love but from
    justice—see _Ez. 28:22_—“_I shall have executed judgments in her,
    and shall be sanctified in her_”; _36:21, 22_—in judgment, “_I do
    not this for your sake, but for my holy name_”; _Heb. 12:29_—“_our
    God is a consuming fire_”; _Rev. 15:1, 4_—“_wrath of God ... thou
    only art holy ... thy righteous acts have been made manifest_”;
    _16:5_—“_Righteous art thou, ... thou Holy One, because thou didst
    thus judge_”; _19:2_—“_true and righteous are his judgments; for
    he hath judged the great harlot._” So untrue is the saying of Sir
    Thomas More’s Utopia: “The end of all punishment is the
    destruction of vice, and the saving of men.” Luther: “God has two
    rods: one of mercy and goodness; another of anger and fury.”
    Chastisement is the former; penalty the latter.

    If the reform-theory of penalty is correct, then to punish crime,
    without asking about reformation, makes the state the
    transgressor; its punishments should be proportioned, not to the
    greatness of the crime, but to the sinner’s state; the
    death-penalty should be abolished, upon the ground that it will
    preclude all hope of reformation. But the same theory would
    abolish any final judgment, or eternal punishment; for, when the
    soul becomes so wicked that there is no more hope of reform, there
    is no longer any justice in punishing it. The greater the sin, the
    less the punishment; and Satan, the greatest sinner, should have
    no punishment at all.

    Modern denunciations of capital punishment are often based upon
    wrong conceptions of the object of penalty. Opposition to the
    doctrine of future punishment would give way, if the opposers
    realized what penalty is ordained to secure. Harris, God the
    Creator, 2:447, 451—“Punishment is not primarily reformatory; it
    educates conscience and vindicates the authority of law.” R. W.
    Dale: “It is not necessary to prove that hanging is beneficial to
    the person hanged. The theory that society has no right to send a
    man to jail, to feed him on bread and water, to make him pick hemp
    or work a treadmill, except to reform him, is utterly rotten. He
    must deserve to be punished, or else the law has no right to
    punish him.” A House of Refuge or a State Industrial School is
    primarily a penal institution, for it deprives persons of their
    liberty and compels them against their will to labor. This loss
    and deprivation on their part cannot be justified except upon the
    ground that it is the desert of their wrong doing. Whatever
    gracious and philanthropic influences may accompany this
    confinement and compulsion, they cannot of themselves explain the
    penal element in the institution. If they could, a _habeas corpus_
    decree could be sought, and obtained, from any competent court.

    God’s treatment of men in this world also combines the elements of
    penalty and of chastisement. Suffering is first of all deserved,
    and this justifies its infliction. But it is at the beginning
    accompanied with all manner of alleviating influences which tend
    to draw men back to God. As these gracious influences are
    resisted, the punitive element becomes preponderating, and penalty
    reflects God’s holiness rather than his love. Moberly, Atonement
    and Personality, 1-25—“Pain is not the immediate object of
    punishment. It must be a means to an end, a moral end, namely,
    penitence. But where the depraved man becomes a human tiger, there
    punishment must reach its culmination. There is a punishment which
    is not restorative. According to the spirit in which punishment is
    received, it may be internal or external. All punishment begins as
    discipline. It tends to repentance. Its triumph would be the
    triumph within. It becomes retributive only as the sinner refuses
    to repent. Punishment is only the development of sin. The ideal
    penitent condemns himself, identifies himself with righteousness
    by accepting penalty. In proportion as penalty fails in its
    purpose to produce penitence, it acquires more and more a
    retributive character, whose climax is not Calvary but Hell.”

    Alexander, Moral Order and Progress, 327-333 (quoted in Ritchie,
    Darwin, and Hegel, 67)—“Punishment has three characters: It is
    retributive, in so far as it falls under the general law that
    resistance to the dominant type recoils on the guilty or resistant
    creature; it is preventive, in so far as, being a statutory
    enactment, it aims at securing the maintenance of the law
    irrespective of the individual’s character. But this latter
    characteristic is secondary, and the former is comprehended in the
    third idea, that of reformation, which is the superior form in
    which retribution appears when the type is a mental ideal and is
    affected by conscious persons.” Hyslop on Freedom, Responsibility,
    and Punishment, in Mind, April, 1894:167-189—“In the Elmira
    Reformatory, out of 2295 persons paroled between 1876 and 1889,
    1907 or 83 per cent. represent a probably complete reformation.
    Determinists say that this class of persons cannot do otherwise.
    Something is wrong with their theory. We conclude that 1. Causal
    responsibility justifies preventive punishment; 2. Potential moral
    responsibility justifies corrective punishment; 3. Actual moral
    responsibility justifies retributive punishment.” Here we need
    only to point out the incorrect use of the word “punishment,”
    which belongs only to the last class. In the two former cases the
    word “chastisement” should have been used. See Julius Müller,
    Lehre von der Sünde, 1:334; Thornton, Old Fashioned Ethics, 70-73;
    Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:238, 239 (Syst. Doct., 3:134,135);
    Robertson’s Sermons, 4th Series, no. 18 (Harper’s ed., 752); see
    also this Compendium, references on Holiness, A. (_d_), page 273.


(_b_) Penalty is not essentially deterrent and preventive.—By this we mean
that its primary design is not to protect society, by deterring men from
the commission of like offences. We grant that this end is often secured
in connection with punishment, both in family and civil government and
under the government of God. But we claim that this is a merely incidental
result, which God’s wisdom and goodness have connected with the infliction
of penalty,—it cannot be the reason and ground for penalty itself. Some of
the objections to the preceding theory apply also to this. But in addition
to what has been said, we urge:

Penalty cannot be primarily designed to secure social and governmental
safety, for the reason that it is never right to punish the individual
simply for the good of society. No punishment, moreover, will or can do
good to others that is not just and right in itself. Punishment does good,
only when the person punished deserves punishment; and that _desert_ of
punishment, and not the good effects that will follow it, must be the
ground and reason why it is inflicted. The contrary theory would imply
that the criminal might go free but for the effect of his punishment on
others, and that man might rightly commit crime if only he were willing to
bear the penalty.


    Kant, Praktische Vernunft, 151 (ed. Rosenkranz)—“The notion of
    ill-desert and punishableness is necessarily implied in the idea
    of voluntary transgression; and the idea of punishment excludes
    that of happiness in all its forms. For though he who inflicts
    punishment may, it is true, also have a benevolent purpose to
    produce by the punishment some good effect upon the criminal, yet
    the punishment must be justified first of all as pure and simple
    requital and retribution.... In every punishment as such, justice
    is the very first thing and constitutes the essence of it. A
    benevolent purpose, it is true, may be conjoined with punishment;
    but the criminal cannot claim this as his due, and he has no right
    to reckon on it.” These utterances of Kant apply to the deterrent
    theory as well as to the reformatory theory of penalty. The
    element of desert or retribution is the basis of the other
    elements in punishment. See James Seth, Ethical Principles,
    333-338; Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:717; Hodge, Essays, 133.

    A certain English judge, in sentencing a criminal, said that he
    punished him, not for stealing sheep, but that sheep might not be
    stolen. But it is the greatest injustice to punish a man for the
    mere sake of example. Society cannot be benefited by such
    injustice. The theory can give no reason why one should be
    punished rather than another, nor why a second offence should be
    punished more heavily than the first. On this theory, moreover, if
    there were but one creature in the universe, and none existed
    beside himself to be affected by his suffering, he could not
    justly be punished, however great might be his sin. The only
    principle that can explain punishment is the principle of
    _desert_. See Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 2:348.

    “Crime is most prevented by the conviction that crime deserves
    punishment; the greatest deterrent agency is conscience.” So in
    the government of God “there is no hint that future punishment
    works good to the lost or to the universe. The integrity of the
    redeemed is not to be maintained by subjecting the lost to a
    punishment they do not deserve. The wrong merits punishment, and
    God is bound to punish it, whether good comes of it or not. Sin is
    intrinsically ill-deserving. Impurity must be banished from God.
    God must vindicate himself, or cease to be holy” (see art. on the
    Philosophy of Punishment, by F. L. Patton, in Brit. and For.
    Evang. Rev., Jan. 1878:126-139).

    Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 186, 274—Those who maintain
    punishment to be essentially deterrent and preventive “ignore the
    metaphysics of responsibility and treat the problem ‘positively
    and objectively’ on the basis of physiology, sociology, etc., and
    in the interests of public safety. The question of guilt or
    innocence is as irrelevant as the question concerning the guilt or
    innocence of wasps and hornets. An ancient holder of this view set
    forth the opinion that ‘_it was expedient that one man should die
    for the people_’ (_John 18:14_), and so Jesus was put to death....
    A mob in eastern Europe might be persuaded that a Jew had
    slaughtered a Christian child as a sacrifice. The authorities
    might be perfectly sure of the man’s innocence, and yet proceed to
    punish him because of the mob’s clamor, and the danger of an
    outbreak.” Men high up in the French government thought it was
    better that Dreyfus should suffer for the sake of France, than
    that a scandal affecting the honor of the French army should be
    made public. In perfect consistency with this principle, McKim,
    Heredity and Human Progress, 192, advocates infliction of painless
    death upon idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, habitual drunkards,
    insane criminals, murderers, nocturnal house breakers, and all
    dangerous and incorrigible persons. He would change the place of
    slaughter from our streets and homes to our penal institutions; in
    other words, he would abandon punishment, but protect society.

    Failure to recognize holiness as the fundamental attribute of God,
    and the affirmation of that holiness as conditioning the exercise
    of love, vitiates the discussion of penalty by A. H. Bradford, Age
    of Faith, 243-250—“What is penal suffering designed to accomplish?
    Is it to manifest the holiness of God? Is it to express the
    sanctity of the moral law? Is it simply a natural consequence?
    Does it manifest the divine Fatherhood? God does not inflict
    penalty simply to satisfy himself or to manifest his holiness, any
    more than an earthly father inflicts suffering on his child to
    show his wrath against the wrongdoer or to manifest his own
    goodness. The idea of punishment is essentially barbaric and
    foreign to all that is known of the Deity. Penalty that is not
    reformatory or protective is barbarism. In the home, punishment is
    always discipline. Its object is the welfare of the child and the
    family. Punishment as an expression of wrath or enmity, with no
    remedial purpose beyond, is a relic of barbarism. It carries with
    it the content of vengeance. It is the expression of anger, of
    passion, or at best of cold justice. Penal suffering is
    undoubtedly the divine holiness expressing its hatred of sin. But,
    if it stops with such expression, it is not holiness, but
    selfishness. If on the other hand that expression of holiness is
    used or permitted in order that the sinner may be made to hate his
    sin, then it is no more punishment, but chastisement. On any other
    hypothesis, penal suffering has no justification except the
    arbitrary will of the Almighty, and such a hypothesis is an
    impeachment both of his justice and his love.” This view seems to
    us to ignore the necessary reaction of divine holiness against
    sin; to make holiness a mere form of love; a means to an end and
    that end utilitarian; and so to deny to holiness any independent,
    or even real, existence in the divine nature.

    The wrath of God is calm and judicial, devoid of all passion or
    caprice, but it is the expression of eternal and unchangeable
    righteousness. It is vindicative but not vindictive. Without it
    there could be no government, and God would not be God. F. W.
    Robertson: “Does not the element of vengeance exist in all
    punishment, and does not the feeling exist, not as a sinful, but
    as an essential, part of human nature? If so, there must be wrath
    in God.” Lord Bacon: “Revenge is a wild sort of justice.” Stephen:
    “Criminal law provides legitimate satisfaction of the passions of
    revenge.” Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:287. _Per contra_, see Bib.
    Sac., Apr. 1881:286-302; H. B. Smith, System of Theology, 46, 47;
    Chitty’s ed. of Blackstone’s Commentaries, 4:7; Wharton, Criminal
    Law, vol. 1, bk. 1, chap. 1.


2. The actual penalty of sin.


The one word in Scripture which designates the total penalty of sin is
“death.” Death, however, is twofold:

A. Physical death,—or the separation of the soul from the body, including
all those temporal evils and sufferings which result from disturbance of
the original harmony between body and soul, and which are the working of
death in us. That physical death is a part of the penalty of sin, appears:

(_a_) From Scripture.

This is the most obvious import of the threatening in Gen. 2:17—“thou
shalt surely die”; _cf._ 3:19—“unto dust shalt thou return.” Allusions to
this threat in the O. T. confirm this interpretation: Num. 16:29—“visited
after the visitation of all men,” where פקד = judicial visitation, or
punishment; 27:3 (LXX.—δι᾽ ἁμαρτίαν αὐτοῦ). The prayer of Moses in Ps. 90:
7-9, 11, and the prayer of Hezekiah in Is. 38:17, 18, recognize plainly
the penal nature of death. The same doctrine is taught in the N. T., as
for example, John 8:44; Rom. 5:12, 14, 16, 17, where the judicial
phraseology is to be noted (_cf._ 1:32); see 6:23 also. In 1 Pet. 4:6,
physical death is spoken of as God’s judgment against sin. In 1 Cor.
15:21, 22, the bodily resurrection of all believers, in Christ, is
contrasted with the bodily death of all men, in Adam. Rom. 4:24, 25; 6:9,
10; 8:3, 10, 11; Gal. 3:13, show that Christ submitted to physical death
as the penalty of sin, and by his resurrection from the grave gave proof
that the penalty of sin was exhausted and that humanity in him was
justified. “As the resurrection of the body is a part of the redemption,
so the death of the body is a part of the penalty.”


    _Ps. 90:7, 9_—“_we are consumed in thine anger ... all our days
    are passed away in thy wrath_”; _Is. 38:17, 18_—“_thou hast in
    love to my soul delivered it from the pit ... thou hast cast all
    my sins behind thy back. For Sheol cannot praise thee_”; _John
    8:44_—“_He_ [Satan] _was a murderer from the beginning_”;
    _11:33_—Jesus “_groaned in the spirit_” = was moved with
    indignation at what sin had wrought; _Rom. 5:12, 14, 16,
    17_—“_death through sin ... death passed unto all men, for that
    all sinned ... death reigned ... even over them that had not
    sinned after the likeness of Adam’s transgression ... the judgment
    came of one_ [trespass] _unto condemnation ... by the trespass of
    the one, death reigned through the one_”; _cf._ the legal
    phraseology in _1:32_—“_who, knowing the ordinance of God, that
    they that practise such things are worthy of death._” _Rom.
    6:23_—“_the wages of sin is death_” = death is sin’s just due. _1
    Pet. 4:6_—“_that they might be judged indeed according to men in
    the flesh_” = that they might suffer physical death, which to men
    in general is the penalty of sin. _1 Cor. 15:21, 22_—“_as in Adam
    all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive_”; _Rom. 4:24,
    25_—“_raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered up
    for our trespasses, and was raised for our justification_”; _6:9,
    10_—“_Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death no
    more hath dominion over him. For the death that he died, he died
    unto sin once: but the life that he liveth, he liveth unto God_”;
    _8:3, 10, 11_—“_God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful
    flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh ... the body is dead
    because of sin_” (= a corpse, on account of sin—Meyer; so Julius
    Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:291) ... “_he that raised up Christ Jesus
    from the dead shall give life also to your mortal bodies_”; _Gal.
    3:13_—“_Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having
    become a curse for us; for it is written, Cursed is every one that
    hangeth on a tree._”

    On the relation between death and sin, see Griffith-Jones, Ascent
    through Christ, 169-185—“They are not antagonistic, but
    complementary to each other—the one spiritual and the other
    biological. The natural fact is fitted to a moral use.” Savage,
    Life after Death, 33—“Men did not at first believe in natural
    death. If a man died, it was because some one had killed him. No
    ethical reason was desired or needed. At last however they sought
    some moral explanation, and came to look upon death as a
    punishment for human sin.” If this has been the course of human
    evolution, we should conclude that the later belief represents the
    truth rather than the earlier. Scripture certainly affirms the
    doctrine that death itself, and not the mere accompaniments of
    death, is the consequence and penalty of sin. For this reason we
    cannot accept the very attractive and plausible theory which we
    have now to mention:

    Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, holds that as the bow
    in the cloud was appointed for a moral use, so death, which before
    had been simply the natural law of the creation, was on occasion
    of man’s sin appointed for a moral use. It is this _acquired_
    moral character of death with which Biblical Genesis has to do.
    Death becomes a curse, by being a fear and a torment. Animals have
    not this fear. But in man death stirs up conscience. Redemption
    takes away the fear, and death drops back into its natural aspect,
    or even becomes a gateway to life. Death is a curse to no animal
    but man. The retributive element to death is the effect of sin.
    When man has become perfected, death will cease to be of use, and
    will, as the last enemy, be destroyed. Death here is Nature’s
    method of securing always fresh, young, thrifty life, and the
    greatest possible exuberance and joy of it. It is God’s way of
    securing the greatest possible number and variety of immortal
    beings. There are many schoolrooms for eternity in God’s universe,
    and a ceaseless succession of scholars through them. There are
    many folds, but one flock. The reaper Death keeps making room.
    Four or five generations are as many as we can individually love,
    and get moral stimulus from.

    Methuselahs too many would hold back the new generations. Bagehot
    says that civilization needs first to form a cake of custom, and
    secondly to break it up. Death, says Martineau, Study, 1:372-374,
    is the provision for taking us abroad, before we have stayed too
    long at home to lose our receptivity. Death is the liberator of
    souls. The death of successive generations gives variety to
    heaven. Death perfects love, reveals it to itself, unites as life
    could not. As for Christ, so for us, it is expedient that we
    should go away.

    While we welcome this reasoning as showing how God has overruled
    evil for good, we regard the explanation as unscriptural and
    unsatisfactory, for the reason that it takes no account of the
    ethics of natural law. The law of death is an expression of the
    nature of God, and specially of his holy wrath against sin. Other
    methods of propagating the race and reinforcing its life could
    have been adopted than that which involves pain and suffering and
    death. These do not exist in the future life,—they would not exist
    here, if it were not for the fact of sin. Dr. Smyth shows how the
    evil of death has been overruled,—he has not shown the reason for
    the original existence of the evil. The Scriptures explain this as
    the penalty and stigma which God has attached to sin: _Psalm 90:7,
    8_ makes this plain: “_For we are consumed in thine anger, And in
    thy wrath are we troubled. Thou hast set our iniquities before
    thee, Our secret sins in the light of thy countenance._” The whole
    psalm has for its theme: Death as the wages of sin. And this is
    the teaching of Paul, in _Rom. 5:12_—“_through one man sin entered
    into the world, and death through sin._”


(_b_) From reason.

The universal prevalence of suffering and death among rational creatures
cannot be reconciled with the divine justice, except upon the supposition
that it is a judicial infliction on account of a common sinfulness of
nature belonging even to those who have not reached moral consciousness.

The objection that death existed in the animal creation before the Fall
may be answered by saying that, but for the fact of man’s sin, it would
not have existed. We may believe that God arranged even the geologic
history to correspond with the foreseen fact of human apostasy (_cf._ Rom.
8:20-23—where the creation is said to have been made subject to vanity by
reason of man’s sin).


    On _Rom. 8:20-23_—“_the creation was subjected to vanity, not of
    its own will_”—see Meyer’s Com., and Bap. Quar., 1:143; also _Gen.
    3:17-19_—“_cursed is the ground for thy sake._” See also note on
    the Relation of Creation to the Holiness and Benevolence of God,
    and references, pages 402, 403. As the vertebral structure of the
    first fish was an “anticipative consequence” of man, so the
    suffering and death of fish pursued and devoured by other fish
    were an “anticipative consequence” of man’s foreseen war with God
    and with himself.


The translation of Enoch and Elijah, and of the saints that remain at
Christ’s second coming, seems intended to teach us that death is not a
necessary law of organized being, and to show what would have happened to
Adam if he had been obedient. He was created a “natural,” “earthly” body,
but might have attained a higher being, the “spiritual,” “heavenly” body,
without the intervention of death. Sin, however, has turned the normal
condition of things into the rare exception (_cf._ 1 Cor. 15:42-50). Since
Christ endured death as the penalty of sin, death to the Christian becomes
the gateway through which he enters into full communion with his Lord (see
references below).


    Through physical death all Christians will pass, except those few
    who like Enoch and Elijah were translated, and those many who
    shall be alive at Christ’s second coming. Enoch and Elijah were
    possible types of those surviving saints. On _1 Cor. 15:51_—“_We
    shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,_” see Edward
    Irving, Works, 5:135. The apocryphal Assumption of Moses, verse 9,
    tells us that Joshua, being carried in vision to the spot at the
    moment of Moses’ decease, beheld a double Moses, one dropped into
    the grave as belonging to the earth, the other mingling with the
    angels. The belief in Moses’ immortality was not conditioned upon
    any resuscitation of the earthly corpse; see Martineau, Seat of
    Authority, 364. When Paul was caught up to the third heaven, it
    may have been a temporary translation of the disembodied spirit.
    Set free for a brief space from the prison house which confined
    it, it may have passed within the veil and have seen and heard
    what mortal tongue could not describe; see Luckock, Intermediate
    State, 4. So Lazarus probably could not tell what he saw: “He told
    it not; or something sealed The lips of that Evangelist”; see
    Tennyson, In Memoriam, xxxi.

    Nicoll, Life of Christ: “We have every one of us to face the last
    enemy, death. Ever since the world began, all who have entered it
    sooner or later have had this struggle, and the battle has always
    ended in one way. Two indeed escaped, but they did not escape by
    meeting and mastering their foe; they escaped by being taken away
    from the battle.” But this physical death, for the Christian, has
    been turned by Christ into a blessing. A pardoned prisoner may be
    still kept in prison, as the best possible benefit to an exhausted
    body; so the external fact of physical death may remain, although
    it has ceased to be penalty. Macaulay: “The aged prisoner’s chains
    are needed to support him; the darkness that has weakened his
    sight is necessary to preserve it.” So spiritual death is not
    wholly removed from the Christian; a part of it, namely,
    depravity, still remains; yet it has ceased to be punishment,—it
    is only chastisement. When the finger unties the ligature that
    bound it, the body which previously had only chastised begins to
    cure the trouble. There is still pain, but the pain is no longer
    punitive,—it is now remedial. In the midst of the whipping, when
    the boy repents, his punishment is changed to chastisement.

    _John 14:3_—“_And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come
    again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye
    may be also_”; _1 Cor. 15:54-57_—“_Death is swallowed up in
    victory ... O death, where is thy sting? The sting of death is
    sin; and the power of sin is the law_”—_i. e._, the law’s
    condemnation, its penal infliction; _2 Cor. 5:1-9_—“_For we know
    that if the earthly house of our tabernacle be dissolved we have a
    building from God ... we are of good courage, I say, and are
    willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with
    the Lord_”; _Phil. 1:21, 23_—“_to die is gain ... having the
    desire to depart and be with Christ; for it is very far better._”
    In Christ and his bearing the penalty of sin, the Christian has
    broken through the circle of natural race-connection, and is saved
    from corporate evil so far as it is punishment. The Christian may
    be chastised, but he is never punished: _Rom. 8:1_—“_There is
    therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus._”
    At the house of Jairus Jesus said: “_Why make ye a tumult, and
    weep?_” and having reproved the doleful clamorists, “_he put them
    all forth_” (_Mark 5:39, 40_). The wakes and requiems and masses
    and vigils of the churches of Rome and of Russia are all heathen
    relics, entirely foreign to Christianity.

    Palmer, Theological Definition, 57—“Death feared and fought
    against is terrible; but a welcome to death is the death of death
    and the way to life.” The idea that punishment yet remains for the
    Christian is “the bridge to the papal doctrine of purgatorial
    fires.” Browning’s words, in The Ring and the Book, 2:60—“In His
    face is light, but in his shadow healing too,” are applicable to
    God’s fatherly chastenings, but not to his penal retributions. On
    _Acts 7:60_—“_he fell asleep_”—Arnot remarks: “When death becomes
    the property of the believer, it receives a new name, and is
    called sleep.” Another has said: “Christ did not send, but came
    himself to save; The ransom-price he did not lend, but gave;
    Christ _died_, the shepherd for the sheep; We only _fall asleep_.”
    _Per contra_, see Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 375, and
    Hengstenberg, Ev. K.-Z., 1864:1065—“All suffering is punishment.”


B. Spiritual death,—or the separation of the soul from God, including all
that pain of conscience, loss of peace, and sorrow of spirit, which result
from disturbance of the normal relation between the soul and God.

(_a_) Although physical death is a part of the penalty of sin, it is by no
means the chief part. The term “death” is frequently used in Scripture in
a moral and spiritual sense, as denoting the absence of that which
constitutes the true life of the soul, namely, the presence and favor of
God.


    _Mat. 8:22_—“_Follow me; and leave the_ [spiritually] _dead to
    bury their own_ [physically] _dead_”; _Luke 15:32_—“_this thy
    brother was dead, and is alive again_”; _John 5:24_—“_He that
    heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal
    life, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death
    into life_”; _8:51_—“_If a man keep my word, he shall never see
    death_”; _Rom. 8:13_—“_if ye live after the flesh, ye must die;
    but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye
    shall live_”; _Eph. 2:1_—“_when ye were dead through your
    trespasses and sins_”; _5:14_—“_Awake, thou that sleepest, and
    arise from the dead_”; _1 Tim. 5:6_—“_she that giveth herself to
    pleasure is dead while __ she liveth_”; _James 5:20_—“_he who
    converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul
    from death_”; _1 John 3:14_—“_He that loveth not abideth in
    death_”; _Rev. 3:1_—“_thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou
    art dead._”


(_b_) It cannot be doubted that the penalty denounced in the garden and
fallen upon the race is primarily and mainly that death of the soul which
consists in its separation from God. In this sense only, death was fully
visited upon Adam in the day on which he ate the forbidden fruit (Gen.
2:17). In this sense only, death is escaped by the Christian (John 11:26).
For this reason, in the parallel between Adam and Christ (Rom. 5:12-21),
the apostle passes from the thought of mere physical death in the early
part of the passage to that of both physical and spiritual death at its
close (verse 21—“as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign
through righteousness unto eternal life through Jesus Christ our
Lord”—where “eternal life” is more than endless physical existence, and
“death” is more than death of the body).


    _Gen. 2:17_—“_in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt
    surely die_”; _John 11:26_—“_whosoever liveth and believeth on me
    shall never die_”; _Rom. 5:14, 18, 21_—“_justification of life ...
    eternal life_”; contrast these with “_death reigned ... sin
    reigned in death._”


(_c_) Eternal death may be regarded as the culmination and completion of
spiritual death, and as essentially consisting in the correspondence of
the outward condition with the inward state of the evil soul (Acts 1:25).
It would seem to be inaugurated by some peculiar repellent energy of the
divine holiness (Mat. 25:41; 2 Thess. 1:9), and to involve positive
retribution visited by a personal God upon both the body and the soul of
the evil-doer (Mat. 10:28; Heb. 10:31; Rev. 14:11).


    _Acts 1:25_—“_Judas fell away, that he might go to his own
    place_”; _Mat. 25:41_—“_Depart from me, ye cursed, into the
    eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels_”; _2
    Thess. 1:9_—“_who shall suffer punishment, even eternal
    destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his
    might_”; _Mat. 10:28_—“_fear him who is able to destroy both soul
    and body in hell_”; _Heb. 10:31_—“_It is a fearful thing to fall
    into the hands of the living God_”; _Rev. 14:11_—“_the smoke of
    their torment goeth up for ever and ever._”

    Kurtz, Religionslehre, 67—“So long as God is holy, he must
    maintain the order of the world, and where this is destroyed,
    restore it. This however can happen in no other way than this: the
    injury by which the sinner has destroyed the order of the world
    falls back upon himself,—and this is penalty. Sin is the negation
    of the law. Penalty is the negation of that negation, that is, the
    reëstablishment of the law. Sin is a thrust of the sinner against
    the law. Penalty is the adverse thrust of the elastic because
    living law, which encounters the sinner.”

    Plato, Gorgias, 472 E; 509 B; 511 A; 515 B—“Impunity is a more
    dreadful curse than any punishment, and nothing so good can befall
    the criminal as his retribution, the failure of which would make a
    double disorder in the universe. The offender himself may spend
    his arts in devices of escape and think himself happy if he is not
    found out. But all this plotting is but part of the delusion of
    his sin; and when he comes to himself and sees his transgression
    as it really is, he will yield himself up the prisoner of eternal
    justice and know that it is good for him to be afflicted, and so
    for the first time to be set at one with truth.”

    On the general subject of the penalty of sin, see Julius Müller,
    Doct. Sin, 1:245 _sq._; 2:286-397; Baird, Elohim Revealed,
    263-279; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 194-219; Krabbe,
    Lehre von der Sünde und vom Tode; Weisse, in Studien und Kritiken,
    1836:371; S. R. Mason, Truth Unfolded, 369-384; Bartlett, in New
    Englander, Oct. 1871:677, 678.



Section VII.—The Salvation Of Infants.


The views which have been presented with regard to inborn depravity and
the reaction of divine holiness against it suggest the question whether
infants dying before arriving at moral consciousness are saved, and if so,
in what way. To this question we reply as follows:

(_a_) Infants are in a state of sin, need to be regenerated, and can be
saved only through Christ.


    _Job 14:4_—“_Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not
    one_”; _Ps. 51:5_—“_Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And
    in sin did my mother conceive me_”; _John 3:6_—“_That which is
    born of the flesh is flesh_”; _Rom. 5:14_—“_Nevertheless death
    reigned from Adam until Moses, even over them that had not sinned
    after the likeness of Adam’s transgression_”; _Eph. 2:3_—“_by
    nature children of wrath_”; _1 Cor. 7:14_—“_else were your
    children unclean_”—clearly intimate the naturally impure state of
    infants; and _Mat. 19:14_—“_Suffer the little children, and forbid
    them not, to come unto me_”—is not only consistent with this
    doctrine, but strongly confirms it; for the meaning is: “_forbid
    them not to come unto me_”—whom they need as a Savior. “Coming to
    Christ” is always the coming of a sinner, to him who is the
    sacrifice for sin; _cf._ _Mat. 11:28_—“_Come unto me, all ye that
    labor._”


(_b_) Yet as compared with those who have personally transgressed, they
are recognized as possessed of a relative innocence, and of a
submissiveness and trustfulness, which may serve to illustrate the graces
of Christian character.


    _Deut 1:39_—“_your little ones ... and your children, that this
    day have no knowledge of good or evil_”; _Jonah 4:11_—“_sixscore
    thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and
    their left hand_”; _Rom. 9:11_—“_for the children being not yet
    born, neither having done anything good or bad_”; _Mat. 18:3,
    4_—“_Except ye turn, and become as little children, ye shall in no
    wise enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall
    humble himself as this little child, the same is the greatest in
    the kingdom of heaven._” See Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:265.
    Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:50—“Unpretentious receptivity, ... not
    the reception of the kingdom of God at a childlike _age_, but in a
    childlike _character_ ... is the condition of entering; ... not
    blamelessness, but receptivity itself, on the part of those who do
    not regard themselves as too good or too bad for the offered gift,
    but receive it with hearty desire. Children have this
    unpretentious receptivity for the kingdom of God which is
    characteristic of them generally, since they have not yet other
    possessions on which they pride themselves.”


(_c_) For this reason, they are the objects of special divine compassion
and care, and through the grace of Christ are certain of salvation.


    _Mat. 18:5, 6, 10, 14_—“_whoso shall receive one such little child
    in my name receiveth me: but whoso shall cause one of these little
    ones that believe on me to stumble, it is profitable for him that
    a great millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he
    should be sunk in the depth of the sea.... See that ye despise not
    one of these little ones: for I say unto you, that in heaven their
    angels do always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven....
    Even so it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven, that
    one of these little ones should perish_”; _19:14_—“_Suffer the
    little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for to such
    belongeth the kingdom of heaven_”—not God’s kingdom of nature, but
    his kingdom of grace, the kingdom of saved sinners. “Such” means,
    not children as children, but childlike believers. Meyer, on _Mat.
    19:14_, refers the passage to spiritual infants only: “Not little
    children,” he says, “but men of a childlike disposition.” Geikie:
    “Let the little children come unto me, and do not forbid them, for
    the kingdom of heaven is given only to such as have a childlike
    spirit and nature like theirs.” The Savior’s words do not intimate
    that little children are either (1) sinless creatures, or (2)
    subjects for baptism; but only that their (1) humble
    teachableness, (2) intense eagerness, and (3) artless trust,
    illustrate the traits necessary for admission into the divine
    kingdom. On the passages in Matthew, see Commentaries of Bengel,
    De Wette, Lange; also Neander, Planting and Training (ed.
    Robinson), 407.

    We therefore substantially agree with Dr. A. C. Kendrick, in his
    article in the Sunday School Times: “To infants and children, as
    such, the language cannot apply. It must be taken figuratively,
    and must refer to those qualities in childhood, its dependence,
    its trustfulness, its tender affection, its loving obedience,
    which are typical of the essential Christian graces.... If asked
    after the _logic_ of our Savior’s words—how he could assign, as a
    reason for allowing _literal_ little children to be brought to
    him, that _spiritual_ little children have a claim to the kingdom
    of heaven—I reply: the persons that thus, as a class, typify the
    subjects of God’s spiritual kingdom cannot be in themselves
    objects of indifference to him, or be regarded otherwise than with
    intense interest.... The class that in its very nature thus
    shadows forth the brightest features of Christian excellence must
    be subjects of God’s special concern and care.”

    To these remarks of Dr. Kendrick we would add, that Jesus’ words
    seem to us to intimate more than special concern and care. While
    these words seem intended to exclude all idea that infants are
    saved by their natural holiness, or without application to them of
    the blessings of his atonement, they also seem to us to include
    infants among the number of those who have the right to these
    blessings; in other words, Christ’s concern and care go so far as
    to choose infants to eternal life, and to make them subjects of
    the kingdom of heaven. _Cf._ _Mat. 18:14_—“_it is not the will of
    your Father who is in heaven, that one of those little ones should
    perish_”—those whom Christ has received here, he will not reject
    hereafter. Of course this to said to infants, as infants. To
    those, therefore, who die before coming to moral consciousness,
    Christ’s words assure salvation. Personal transgression, however,
    involves the necessity, before death, of a personal repentance and
    faith, in order to achieve salvation.


(_d_) The descriptions of God’s merciful provision as coëxtensive with the
ruin of the Fall also lead us to believe that those who die in infancy
receive salvation through Christ as certainly as they inherit sin from
Adam.


    _John 3:16_—“_For God so loved the world_”—includes infants. _Rom.
    5:14_—“_death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over them that
    had not sinned after the likeness of Adam’s transgression, who is
    a figure of him that was to come_”—there is an application to
    infants of the life in Christ, as there was an application to them
    of the death in Adam; _19-21_—“_For as through the one man’s
    disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the
    obedience of the one shall the many be made righteous. And the law
    came in besides, that the trespass might abound; but when sin
    abounded, grace did abound more exceedingly: that, as sin reigned
    in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto
    eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord_”—as without personal
    act of theirs infants inherited corruption from Adam, so without
    personal act of theirs salvation is provided for them in Christ.

    Hovey, Bib. Eschatology, 170, 171—“Though the sacred writers say
    nothing in respect to the future condition of those who die in
    infancy, one can scarcely err in deriving from this silence a
    favorable conclusion. That no prophet or apostle, that no devout
    father or mother, should have expressed any solicitude as to those
    who die before they are able to discern good from evil is
    surprising, unless such solicitude was prevented by the Spirit of
    God. There are no instances of prayer for children taken away in
    infancy. The Savior nowhere teaches that they are in danger of
    being lost. We therefore heartily and confidently believe that
    they are redeemed by the blood of Christ and sanctified by his
    Spirit, so that when they enter the unseen world they will be
    found with the saints.” David ceased to fast and weep when his
    child died, for he said: “_I shall go to him, but he will not
    return to me_” (_2 Sam. 12:23_).


(_e_) The condition of salvation for adults is personal faith. Infants are
incapable of fulfilling this condition. Since Christ has died for all, we
have reason to believe that provision is made for their reception of
Christ in some other way.


    _2 Cor. 5:15_—“_he died for all_”; _Mark 16:16_—“_He that
    believeth and is baptised shall be saved; but he that disbelieveth
    shall be condemned_” (_verses 9-20_ are of canonical authority,
    though probably not written by Mark). Dr. G. W. Northrop held
    that, as death to the Christian has ceased to be penalty, so death
    to all infants is no longer penalty, Christ having atoned for and
    removed the guilt of original sin for all men, infants included.
    But we reply that there is no evidence that there is any guilt
    taken away except for those who come into vital union with Christ.
    E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 166—“The curse falls alike on
    every one by birth, but may be alleviated or intensified by every
    one who comes to years of responsibility, according as his nature
    which brings the curse rules, or is ruled by, his reason and
    conscience. So the blessings of salvation are procured for all
    alike, but may be lost or secured according to the attitude of
    everyone toward Christ who alone procures them. To infants, as the
    curse comes without their election, so in like manner comes its
    removal.”


(_f_) At the final judgment, personal conduct is made the test of
character. But infants are incapable of personal transgression. We have
reason, therefore, to believe that they will be among the saved, since
this rule of decision will not apply to them.


    _Mat. 25:45, 46_—“_Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these
    least, ye did it not unto me. And these shall go away into eternal
    punishment_”; _Rom. 2:5, 6_—“_the day of wrath and revelation of
    the righteous judgment of God; who __ will render to every man
    according to his works._” Norman Fox, The Unfolding of Baptist
    Doctrine, 24—“Not only the Roman Catholics believed in the
    damnation of infants. The Lutherans, in the Augsburg Confession,
    condemn the Baptists for affirming that children are saved without
    baptism—‘damnant Anabaptistas qui ... affirmant pueros sine
    baptismo salvos fieri’—and the favorite poet of Presbyterian
    Scotland, in his Tam O’Shanter, names among objects from hell ‘Twa
    span-lang, wee, unchristened bairns.’ The Westminster Confession,
    in declaring that ‘elect infants dying in infancy’ are saved,
    implies that non-elect infants dying in infancy are lost. This was
    certainly taught by some of the framers of that creed.”

    Yet John Calvin did not believe in the damnation of infants, as he
    has been charged with believing. In the Amsterdam edition of his
    works, 8:522, we read: “I do not doubt that the infants whom the
    Lord gathers together from this life are regenerated by a secret
    operation of the Holy Spirit.” In his Institutes, book 4, chap.
    16, p. 335, he speaks of the exemption of infants from the grace
    of salvation “as an idea not free from execrable blasphemy.” The
    Presb. and Ref. Rev., Oct. 1890:634-651, quotes Calvin as follows:
    “I everywhere teach that no one can be justly condemned and perish
    except on account of actual sin; and to say that the countless
    mortals taken from life while yet infants are precipitated from
    their mothers’ arms into eternal death is a blasphemy to be
    universally detested.” So also John Owen, Works, 8:522—“There are
    two ways by which God saveth infants. First, by interesting them
    in the covenant, if their immediate or remote parents have been
    believers; ... Secondly, by his grace of election, which is most
    free and not tied to any conditions; by which I make no doubt but
    God taketh unto him in Christ many whose parents never knew, or
    were despisers of, the gospel.”


(_g_) Since there is no evidence that children dying in infancy are
regenerated prior to death, either with or without the use of external
means, it seems most probable that the work of regeneration may be
performed by the Spirit in connection with the infant soul’s first view of
Christ in the other world. As the remains of natural depravity in the
Christian are eradicated, not by death, but at death, through the sight of
Christ and union with him, so the first moment of consciousness for the
infant may be coincident with a view of Christ the Savior which
accomplishes the entire sanctification of its nature.


    _2 Cor. 3:18_—“_But we all, beholding as in a mirror the glory of
    the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory,
    even as from the Lord the Spirit_”; _1 John 3:2_—“_We know that,
    if he shall be manifested, we shall be like him; for we shall see
    him as he is._” If asked why more is not said upon the subject in
    Scripture, we reply: It is according to the analogy of God’s
    general method to hide things that are not of immediate practical
    value. In some past ages, moreover, knowledge of the fact that all
    children dying in infancy are saved might have seemed to make
    infanticide a virtue.

    While we agree with the following writers as to the salvation of
    all infants who die before the age of conscious and wilful
    transgression, we dissent from the seemingly Arminian tendency of
    the explanation which they suggest. H. E. Robins, Harmony of
    Ethics with Theology: “The judicial declaration of acquittal on
    the ground of the death of Christ which comes upon all men, into
    the benefits of which they are introduced by natural birth, is
    inchoate justification, and will become perfected justification
    through the new birth of the Holy Spirit, unless the working of
    this divine agent is resisted by the personal moral action of
    those who are lost.” So William Ashmore, in Christian Review,
    26:245-264. F. O. Dickey: “As infants are members of the race, and
    as they are justified from the penalty against inherited sin by
    the mediatorial work of Christ, so the race itself is justified
    from the same penalty and to the same extent as are they, and were
    the race to die in infancy it would be saved.” The truth in the
    above utterances seems to us to be that Christ’s union with the
    race secures the objective reconciliation of the race to God. But
    subjective and personal reconciliation depends upon a moral union
    with Christ which can be accomplished for the infant only by his
    own appropriation of Christ at death.


While, in the nature of things and by the express declarations of
Scripture, we are precluded from extending this doctrine of regeneration
at death to any who have committed personal sins, we are nevertheless
warranted in the conclusion that, certain and great as is the guilt of
original sin, no human soul is eternally condemned solely for this sin of
nature, but that, on the other hand, all who have not consciously and
wilfully transgressed are made partakers of Christ’s salvation.


    The advocates of a second probation, on the other hand, should
    logically hold that infants in the next world are in a state of
    sin, and that at death they only enter upon a period of probation
    in which they may, or may not, accept Christ,—a doctrine much less
    comforting than that propounded above. See Prentiss, in Presb.
    Rev., July, 1883: 548-580—“Lyman Beecher and Charles Hodge first
    made current in this country the doctrine of the salvation of all
    who die in infancy. If this doctrine be accepted, then it follows:
    (1) that these partakers of original sin must be saved wholly
    through divine grace and power; (2) that in the child unborn there
    is the promise and potency of complete spiritual manhood; (3) that
    salvation is possible entirely apart from the visible church and
    the means of grace; (4) that to a full half of the race this life
    is not in any way a period of probation; (5) that heathen may be
    saved who have never even heard of the gospel; (6) that the
    providence of God includes in its scope both infants and heathen.”

    “Children exert a redeeming and reclaiming influence upon us,
    their casual acts and words and simple trust recalling our
    world-hardened and wayward hearts again to the feet of God. Silas
    Marner, the old weaver of Raveloe, so pathetically and vividly
    described in George Eliot’s novel, was a hard, desolate, godless
    old miser, but after little Eppie strayed into his miserable
    cottage that memorable winter night, he began again to believe. ‘I
    think now,’ he said at last, ‘I can trusten God until I die.’ An
    incident in a Southern hospital illustrates the power of children
    to call men to repentance. A little girl was to undergo a
    dangerous operation. When she mounted the table, and the doctor
    was about to etherize her, he said: ‘Before we can make you well,
    we must put you to sleep.’ ‘Oh then, if you are going to put me to
    sleep,’ she sweetly said, ‘I must say my prayers first.’ Then,
    getting down on her knees, and folding her hands, she repeated
    that lovely prayer learned at every true mother’s feet: ‘Now I lay
    me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.’ Just for a
    moment there were moist eyes in that group, for deep chords were
    touched, and the surgeon afterwards said: ‘I prayed that night for
    the first time in thirty years.’ ” The child that is old enough to
    sin against God is old enough to trust in Christ as the Savior of
    sinners. See Van Dyke, Christ and Little Children; Whitsitt and
    Warfield, Infant Baptism and Infant Salvation; Hodge, Syst.
    Theol., 1:26, 27; Ridgeley, Body of Div., 1:422-425; Calvin,
    Institutes, II, i, 8; Westminster Larger Catechism, x, 3; Krauth,
    Infant Salvation in the Calvinistic System; Candlish on Atonement,
    part ii, chap. 1; Geo. P. Fisher, in New Englander, Apr. 1868:338;
    J. F. Clarke, Truths and Errors of Orthodoxy, 360.





PART VI. SOTERIOLOGY, OR THE DOCTRINE OF SALVATION THROUGH THE WORK OF
CHRIST AND OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.




Chapter I. Christology, Or The Redemption Wrought By Christ.



Section I.—Historical Preparation For Redemption.


Since God had from eternity determined to redeem mankind, the history of
the race from the time of the Fall to the coming of Christ was
providentially arranged to prepare the way for this redemption. The
preparation was two-fold:


I. Negative Preparation,—in the history of the heathen world.


This showed (1) the true nature of sin, and the depth of spiritual
ignorance and of moral depravity to which the race, left to itself, must
fall; and (2) the powerlessness of human nature to preserve or regain an
adequate knowledge of God, or to deliver itself from sin by philosophy or
art.


    Why could not Eve have been the mother of the chosen seed, as she
    doubtless at the first supposed that she was? (_Gen. 4:1_—“_and
    she conceived, and bare Cain_ [_i. e._, “gotten”, or “acquired”],
    _and said, I have gotten a man, even Jehovah_”). Why was not the
    cross set up at the gates of Eden? Scripture intimates that a
    preparation was needful (_Gal 4:4_—“_but when the fulness of the
    time came, God hath sent forth his Son_”). Of the two agencies
    made use of, we have called heathenism the negative preparation.
    But it was not wholly negative; it was partly positive also.
    Justin Martyr spoke of a Λόγος σπερματικός among the heathen.
    Clement of Alexandria called Plato a Μωσῆς ἀττικίζων—a
    Greek-speaking Moses. Notice the priestly attitude of Pythagoras,
    Socrates, Plato, Pindar, Sophocles. The Bible recognizes Job,
    Balaam, Melchisedek, as instances of priesthood, or divine
    communication, outside the bounds of the chosen people. Heathen
    religions either were not religions, or God had a part in them.
    Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, were at least reformers, raised up
    in God’s providence. _Gal 4:3_ classes Judaism with the
    “_rudiments of the world_,” and _Rom. 5:20_ tells us that “_the
    law came in beside_,” as a force coöperating with other human
    factors, primitive revelation, sin, _etc._

    The positive preparation in heathenism receives greater attention
    when we conceive of Christ as the immanent God, revealing himself
    in conscience and in history. This was the real meaning of Justin
    Martyr, Apol. 1:46; 2:10, 13—“The whole race of men partook of the
    Logos, and those who lived according to reason (λόγου), were
    Christians, even though they were accounted atheists. Such among
    the Greeks were Socrates and Heracleitus, and those who resembled
    them.... Christ was known in part even to Socrates.... The
    teachings of Plato are not alien to those of Christ, though not in
    all respects similar. For all the writers of antiquity were able
    to have a dim vision of realities by means of the indwelling seed
    of the implanted Word (λόγου).” Justin Martyr claimed inspiration
    for Socrates. Tertullian spoke of Socrates as “pæne
    noster”—“almost one of us.” Paul speaks of the Cretans as having:
    “_a prophet of their own_” (_Tit. 1:12_)—probably Epimenides (596
    B. C.) whom Plato calls a θεῖος ἀνήρ—“a man of God,” and whom
    Cicero couples with Bacis and the Erythræan Sibyl. Clement of
    Alexandria, Stromata, 1:19; 6:5—“The same God who furnished both
    the covenants was the giver of the Greek philosophy to the Greeks,
    by which the Almighty is glorified among the Greeks.” Augustine:
    “Plato made me know the true God; Jesus Christ showed me the way
    to him.”

    Bruce, Apologetics, 207—“God gave to the Gentiles at least the
    starlight of religious knowledge. The Jews were elected for the
    sake of the Gentiles. There was some light even for pagans, though
    heathenism on the whole was a failure. But its very failure was a
    preparation for receiving the true religion.” Hatch, Hibbert
    Lectures, 133, 238—“Neo-Platonism, that splendid vision of
    incomparable and irrecoverable cloudland in which the sun of Greek
    philosophy set.... On its ethical side Christianity had large
    elements in common with reformed Stoicism; on its theological side
    it moved in harmony with the new movements of Platonism.” E. G.
    Robinson: “The idea that all religions but the Christian are the
    direct work of the devil is a Jewish idea, and is now abandoned.
    On the contrary, God has revealed himself to the race just so far
    as they have been capable of knowing him.... Any religion is
    better than none, for all religion implies restraint.”

    _John 1:9_—“_There was the true light, even the light which
    lighteth every man, coming into the world_”—has its Old Testament
    equivalent in _Ps. 94:10_—“_He that chastiseth the nations, shall
    not he correct, Even he that teacheth man knowledge?_” Christ is
    the great educator of the race. The preincarnate Word exerted an
    influence upon the consciences of the heathen. He alone makes it
    true that “anima naturaliter Christiana est.” Sabatier, Philos.
    Religion, 138-140—“Religion is union between God and the soul.
    That experience was first perfectly realized in Christ. Here are
    the ideal fact and the historical fact united and blended.
    Origen’s and Tertullian’s rationalism and orthodoxy each has its
    truth. The religious consciousness of Christ is the fountain head
    from which Christianity has flowed. He was a beginning of life to
    men. He had the spirit of sonship—God in man, and man in God.
    ‘Quid interius Deo?’ He showed us insistence on the moral ideal,
    yet the preaching of mercy to the sinner. The gospel was the
    acorn, and Christianity is the oak that has sprung from it. In the
    acorn, as in the tree, are some Hebraic elements that are
    temporary. Paganism is the materializing of religion; Judaism is
    the legalizing of religion. ‘In me,’ says Charles Secretan, ‘lives
    some one greater than I.’ ”

    But the positive element in heathenism was slight. Her altars and
    sacrifices, her philosophy and art, roused cravings which she was
    powerless to satisfy. Her religious systems became sources of
    deeper corruption. There was no hope, and no progress. “The
    Sphynx’s moveless calm symbolizes the monotony of Egyptian
    civilization.” Classical nations became more despairing, as they
    became more cultivated. To the best minds, truth seemed impossible
    of attainment, and all hope of general well-being seemed a dream.
    The Jews were the only forward-looking people; and all our modern
    confidence in destiny and development comes from them. They, in
    their turn, drew their hopefulness solely from prophecy. Not their
    “genius for religion,” but special revelation from God, made them
    what they were.

    Although God was in heathen history, yet so exceptional were the
    advantages of the Jews, that we can almost assent to the doctrine
    of the New Englander, Sept. 1883:576—“The Bible does not recognize
    other revelations. It speaks of the ‘_face of the covering that
    covereth all peoples, and the veil that is spread over all
    nations_’ (_Is. 25:7_); _Acts 14:16, 17_—‘_who in the generations
    gone by suffered all the nations to walk in their own ways. And
    yet he left not himself without witness_’ = not an internal
    revelation in the hearts of sages, but an external revelation in
    nature, ‘_in that he did good and gave you from heaven rains and
    fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness._’
    The convictions of heathen reformers with regard to divine
    inspiration were dim and intangible, compared with the
    consciousness of prophets and apostles that God was speaking
    through them to his people.”

    On heathenism as a preparation for Christ, see Tholuck, Nature and
    Moral Influence of Heathenism, in Bib. Repos., 1832:80, 246, 441;
    Döllinger, Gentile and Jew; Pressensé, Religions before Christ;
    Max Müller, Science of Religion, 1-128; Cocker, Christianity and
    Greek Philosophy; Ackerman, Christian Element in Plato; Farrar,
    Seekers after God; Renan, on Rome and Christianity, in Hibbert
    Lectures for 1880.


II. Positive Preparation,—in the history of Israel.


A single people was separated from all others, from the time of Abraham,
and was educated in three great truths: (1) the majesty of God, in his
unity, omnipotence, and holiness; (2) the sinfulness of man, and his moral
helplessness; (3) the certainty of a coming salvation. This education from
the time of Moses was conducted by the use of three principal agencies:

A. Law.—The Mosaic legislation, (_a_) by its theophanies and miracles,
cultivated faith in a personal and almighty God and Judge; (_b_) by its
commands and threatenings, wakened the sense of sin; (_c_) by its priestly
and sacrificial system, inspired hope of some way of pardon and access to
God.


    The education of the Jews was first of all an education by Law. In
    the history of the world, as in the history of the individual, law
    must precede gospel, John the Baptist must go before Christ,
    knowledge of sin must prepare a welcome entrance for knowledge of
    a Savior. While the heathen were studying God’s works, the chosen
    people were studying God. Men teach by words as well as by
    works,—so does God. And words reveal heart to heart, as works
    never can. “The Jews were made to know, on behalf of all mankind,
    the guilt and shame of sin. Yet just when the disease was at its
    height, the physicians were beneath contempt.” Wrightnour: “As if
    to teach all subsequent ages that no outward cleansing would
    furnish a remedy, the great deluge, which washed away the whole
    sinful antediluvian world with the exception of one comparatively
    pure family, had not cleansed the world from sin.”

    With this gradual growth in the sense of sin there was also a
    widening and deepening faith. Kuyper, Work of the Holy Spirit,
    67—“Abel, Abraham, Moses = the individual, the family, the nation.
    By faith Abel obtained witness; by faith Abraham received the son
    of the promise; and by faith Moses led Israel through the Red
    Sea.” Kurtz, Religionslehre, speaks of the relation between law
    and gospel as “Ein fliessender Gegensatz”—“a flowing
    antithesis”—like that between flower and fruit. A. B. Davidson,
    Expositor, 6:163—“The course of revelation is like a river, which
    cannot be cut up into sections.” E. G. Robinson: “The two
    fundamental ideas of Judaism were: 1. theological—the unity of
    God; 2. philosophical—the distinctness of God from the material
    world. Judaism went to seed. Jesus, with the sledge-hammer of
    truth, broke up the dead forms, and the Jews thought he was
    destroying the Law.” On methods pursued with humanity by God, see
    Simon, Reconciliation, 232-251.


B. Prophecy.—This was of two kinds: (_a_) verbal,—beginning with the
protevangelium in the garden, and extending to within four hundred years
of the coming of Christ; (_b_) typical,—in persons, as Adam, Melchisedek,
Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon, Jonah; and in acts, as Isaac’s
sacrifice, and Moses’ lifting up the serpent in the wilderness.


    The relation of law to gospel was like that of a sketch to the
    finished picture, or of David’s plan for the temple to Solomon’s
    execution of it. When all other nations were sunk in pessimism and
    despair, the light of hope burned brightly among the Hebrews. The
    nation was forward-bound. Faith was its very life. The O. T.
    saints saw all the troubles of the present “sub specie
    eternitatis,” and believed that “_Light is sown for the righteous,
    And gladness for the upright in heart_” (_Ps. 97:11_). The hope of
    Job was the hope of the chosen people: “_I know that my Redeemer
    liveth, And at last he will stand up upon the earth_” (_Job
    19:25_). Hutton, Essays, 2:237—“Hebrew supernaturalism has
    transmuted forever the pure naturalism of Greek poetry. And now no
    modern poet can ever become really great who does not feel and
    reproduce in his writings the difference between the natural and
    the supernatural.”

    Christ was the reality, to which the types and ceremonies of
    Judaism pointed; and these latter disappeared when Christ had
    come, just as the petals of the blossom drop away when the fruit
    appears. Many promises to the O. T. saints which seemed to them
    promises of temporal blessing, were fulfilled in a better, because
    a more spiritual, way than they expected. Thus God cultivated in
    them a boundless trust—a trust which was essentially the same
    thing with the faith of the new dispensation, because it was the
    absolute reliance of a consciously helpless sinner upon God’s
    method of salvation, and so was implicitly, though not explicitly,
    a faith in Christ.

    The protevangelium (_Gen. 3:15_) said “_it_ [this promised seed]
    _shall bruise thy head_.” The “_it_” was rendered in some Latin
    manuscripts “_ipsa_.” Hence Roman Catholic divines attributed the
    victory to the Virgin. Notice that Satan was cursed, but not Adam
    and Eve; for they were candidates for restoration. The promise of
    the Messiah narrowed itself down as the race grew older, from
    Abraham to Judah, David, Bethlehem, and the Virgin. Prophecy spoke
    of “_the sceptre_” and of “_the seventy weeks_.” Haggai and
    Malachi foretold that the Lord should suddenly come to the second
    temple. Christ was to be true man and true God; prophet, priest,
    and king; humbled and exalted. When prophecy had become complete,
    a brief interval elapsed, and then he, of whom Moses in the law,
    and the prophets, did write, actually came.

    All these preparations for Christ’s coming, however, through the
    perversity of man became most formidable obstacles to the progress
    of the gospel. The Roman Empire put Christ to death. Philosophy
    rejected Christ as foolishness. Jewish ritualism, the mere shadow,
    usurped the place of worship and faith, the substance of religion.
    God’s last method of preparation in the case of Israel was that of


C. Judgment—Repeated divine chastisements for idolatry culminated in the
overthrow of the kingdom, and the captivity of the Jews. The exile had two
principal effects: (_a_) religious,—in giving monotheism firm root in the
heart of the people, and in leading to the establishment of the
synagogue-system, by which monotheism was thereafter preserved and
propagated; (_b_) civil,—in converting the Jews from an agricultural to a
trading people, scattering them among all nations, and finally imbuing
them with the spirit of Roman law and organization.

Thus a people was made ready to receive the gospel and to propagate it
throughout the world, at the very time when the world had become conscious
of its needs, and, through its greatest philosophers and poets, was
expressing its longings for deliverance.


    At the junction of Europe, Asia, and Africa, there lay a little
    land through which passed all the caravan-routes from the East to
    the West. Palestine was “the eye of the world.” The Hebrews
    throughout the Roman world were “the greater Palestine of the
    Dispersion.” The scattering of the Jews through all lands had
    prepared a monotheistic starting point for the gospel in every
    heathen city. Jewish synagogues had prepared places of assembly
    for the hearing of the gospel. The Greek language—the universal
    literary language of the world—had prepared a medium in which that
    gospel could be spoken. “Cæsar had unified the Latin West, as
    Alexander the Greek East”; and universal peace, together with
    Roman roads and Roman law, made it possible for that gospel, when
    once it had got a foothold, to spread itself to the ends of the
    earth. The first dawn of missionary enterprise appears among the
    proselyting Jews before Christ’s time. Christianity laid hold of
    this proselyting spirit, and sanctified it, to conquer the world
    to the faith of Christ.

    Beyschlag, N. T. Theology, 2:9, 10—“In his great expedition across
    the Hellespont, Paul reversed the course which Alexander took, and
    carried the gospel into Europe to the centres of the old Greek
    culture.” In all these preparations we see many lines converging
    to one result, in a manner inexplicable, unless we take them as
    proofs of the wisdom and power of God preparing the way for the
    kingdom of his Son; and all this in spite of the fact that “_a
    hardening in part hath befallen Israel, until the fulness of the
    Gentiles be come in_” (_Rom. 11:25_). James Robertson, Early
    Religion of Israel, 15—“Israel now instructs the world in the
    Worship of Mammon, after having once taught it the knowledge of
    God.”

    On Judaism, as a preparation for Christ, see Döllinger, Gentile
    and Jew, 2:291-419; Martensen, Dogmatics, 224-236; Hengstenberg,
    Christology of the O. T.; Smith, Prophecy a Preparation for
    Christ; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 458-485; Fairbairn, Typology;
    MacWhorter, Jahveh Christ; Kurtz, Christliche Religionslehre, 114;
    Edwards’ History of Redemption, in Works, 1:297-395; Walker,
    Philosophy of the Plan of Salvation; Conybeare and Howson, Life
    and Epistles of St. Paul, 1:1-37; Luthardt, Fundamental Truths,
    257-281; Schaff, Hist. Christian Ch., 1:32-49; Butler’s Analogy,
    Bohn’s ed., 228-238; Bushnell, Vicarious Sac., 63-66; Max Müller,
    Science of Language, 2:443; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk,
    1:463-485; Fisher, Beginnings of Christianity, 47-73.



Section II.—The Person Of Christ.


The redemption of mankind from sin was to be effected through a Mediator
who should unite in himself both the human nature and the divine, in order
that he might reconcile God to man and man to God. To facilitate an
understanding of the Scriptural doctrine under consideration, it will be
desirable at the outset to present a brief historical survey of views
respecting the Person of Christ.


    In the history of doctrine, as we have seen, beliefs held in
    solution at the beginning are only gradually precipitated and
    crystallized into definite formulas. The first question which
    Christians naturally asked themselves was “_What think ye of the
    Christ_” (_Mat 22:42_); then his relation to the Father; then, in
    due succession, the nature of sin, of atonement, of justification,
    of regeneration. Connecting these questions with the names of the
    great leaders who sought respectively to answer them, we have: 1.
    the Person of Christ, treated by Gregory Nazianzen (328); 2. the
    Trinity, by Athanasius (325-373); 3. Sin, by Augustine (353-430);
    4. Atonement, by Anselm (1033-1109); 5. Justification by faith, by
    Luther (1485-1560); 6. Regeneration, by John Wesley
    (1703-1791);—six weekdays of theology, leaving only a seventh, for
    the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, which may be the work of our age.
    _John 10:36_—“_him whom the Father sanctified and sent into the
    world_”—hints at some mysterious process by which the Son was
    prepared for his mission. Athanasius: “If the Word of God is in
    the _world_, as in a body, what is there strange in affirming that
    he has also entered into _humanity_?” This is the natural end of
    evolution from lower to higher. See Medd, Bampton Lectures for
    1882, on The One Mediator: The Operation of the Son of God in
    Nature and in Grace; Orr, God’s Image in Man.


I. Historical Survey of Views Respecting the Person of Christ.


1. _The Ebionites_ (אביון = “poor”; A. D. 107?) denied the reality of
Christ’s divine nature, and held him to be merely man, whether naturally
or supernaturally conceived. This man, however, held a peculiar relation
to God, in that, from the time of his baptism, an unmeasured fulness of
the divine Spirit rested upon him. Ebionism was simply Judaism within the
pale of the Christian church, and its denial of Christ’s godhood was
occasioned by the apparent incompatibility of this doctrine with
monotheism.


    Fürst (Heb. Lexicon) derives the name “Ebionite” from the word
    signifying “poor”; see _Is. 25:4_—“_thou hast been a stronghold to
    the poor_”; _Mat 5:3_—“_Blessed are the poor in spirit._” It means
    “oppressed, pious souls.” Epiphanius traces them back to the
    Christians who took refuge, A. D. 66, at Pella, just before the
    destruction of Jerusalem. They lasted down to the fourth century.
    Dorner can assign no age for the formation of the sect, nor any
    historically ascertained person as its head. It was not Judaic
    Christianity, but only a fraction of this. There were two
    divisions of the Ebionites:

    (_a_) The Nazarenes, who held to the supernatural birth of Christ,
    while they would not go to the length of admitting the preëxisting
    hypostasis of the Son. They are said to have had the gospel of
    Matthew, in Hebrew.

    (_b_) The Cerinthian Ebionites, who put the baptism of Christ in
    place of his supernatural birth, and made the ethical sonship the
    cause of the physical. It seemed to them a heathenish fable that
    the Son of God should be born of the Virgin. There was no personal
    union between the divine and human in Christ. Christ, as distinct
    from Jesus, was not a merely impersonal power descending upon
    Jesus, but a preëxisting hypostasis above the world-creating
    powers. The Cerinthian Ebionites, who on the whole best represent
    the spirit of Ebionism, approximated to Pharisaic Judaism, and
    were hostile to the writings of Paul. The Epistle to the Hebrews,
    in fact, is intended to counteract an Ebionitic tendency to
    overstrain law and to underrate Christ. In a complete view,
    however, should also be mentioned:

    (_c_) The Gnostic Ebionism of the pseudo-Clementines, which in
    order to destroy the deity of Christ and save the pure monotheism,
    so-called, of primitive religion, gave up even the best part of
    the Old Testament. In all its forms, Ebionism conceives of God and
    man as external to each other. God could not become man. Christ
    was no more than a prophet or teacher, who, as the reward of his
    virtue, was from the time of his baptism specially endowed with
    the Spirit. After his death he was exalted to kingship. But that
    would not justify the worship which the church paid him. A merely
    creaturely mediator would separate us from God, instead of uniting
    us to him. See Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:305-307 (Syst. Doct.,
    3:201-204), and Hist. Doct. Person Christ, A.1:187-217; Reuss,
    Hist. Christ. Theol., 1:100-107; Schaff, Ch. Hist., 1:213-215.


2. _The Docetæ_ (δοκέω—“to seem,” “to appear”; A. D. 70-170), like most of
the Gnostics in the second century and the Manichees in the third, denied
the reality of Christ’s human body. This view was the logical sequence of
their assumption of the inherent evil of matter. If matter is evil and
Christ was pure, then Christ’s human body must have been merely
phantasmal. Docetism was simply pagan philosophy introduced into the
church.


    The Gnostic Basilides held to a real human Christ, with whom the
    divine νοῦς became united at the baptism; but the followers of
    Basilides became Docetæ. To them, the body of Christ was merely a
    seeming one. There was no real life or death. Valentinus made the
    Æon, Christ, with a body purely pneumatic and worthy of himself,
    pass through the body of the Virgin, as water through a reed,
    taking up into himself nothing of the human nature through which
    he passed; or as a ray of light through colored glass which only
    imparts to the light a portion of its own darkness. Christ’s life
    was simply a theophany. The Patripassians and Sabellians, who are
    only sects of the Docetæ, denied all real humanity to Christ.
    Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 141—“He treads the thorns of death and
    shame ‘like a triumphal path,’ of which he never felt the
    sharpness. There was development only externally and in
    appearance. No ignorance can be ascribed to him amidst the
    omniscience of the Godhead.” Shelley: “A mortal shape to him Was
    as the vapor dim Which the orient planet animates with light.” The
    strong argument against Docetism was found in _Heb. 2:14_—“_Since
    then the children are sharers in flesh and blood, he also himself
    in like manner partook of the same._”

    That Docetism appeared so early, shows that the impression Christ
    made was that of a superhuman being. Among many of the Gnostics,
    the philosophy which lay at the basis of their Docetism was a
    pantheistic apotheosis of the world. God did not need to become
    man, for man was essentially divine. This view, and the opposite
    error of Judaism, already mentioned, both showed their
    insufficiency by attempts to combine with each other, as in the
    Alexandrian philosophy. See Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person Christ,
    A.1:218-253, and Glaubenslehre, 2:307-310 (Syst. Doct.,
    3:204-206); Neander, Ch. Hist, 1:387.


3. _The Arians_ (Arius, condemned at Nice, 325) denied the integrity of
the divine nature in Christ. They regarded the Logos who united himself to
humanity in Jesus Christ, not as possessed of absolute godhood, but as the
first and highest of created beings. This view originated in a
misinterpretation of the Scriptural accounts of Christ’s state of
humiliation, and in mistaking temporary subordination for original and
permanent inequality.


    Arianism is called by Dorner a reaction from Sabellianism.
    Sabellius had reduced the incarnation of Christ to a temporary
    phenomenon. Arius thought to lay stress on the hypostasis of the
    Son, and to give it fixity and substance. But, to his mind, the
    reality of Sonship seemed to require subordination to the Father.
    Origen had taught the subordination of the Son to the Father, in
    connection with his doctrine of eternal generation. Arius held to
    the subordination, and also to the generation, but this last, he
    declared, could not be eternal, but must be in time. See Dorner,
    Person Christ, A.2:227-244, and Glaubenslehre, 2:307, 312, 313
    (Syst. Doct., 3:203, 207-210); Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.:
    Arianismus. See also this Compendium, Vol. I:328-330.


4. _The Apollinarians_ (Apollinaris, condemned at Constantinople, 381)
denied the integrity of Christ’s human nature. According to this view,
Christ had no human νοῦς or πνεῦμα, other than that which was furnished by
the divine nature. Christ had only the human σῶμα and ψυχή; the place of
the human νοῦς or πνεῦμα was filled by the divine Logos. Apollinarism is
an attempt to construe the doctrine of Christ’s person in the forms of the
Platonic trichotomy.


    Lest divinity should seem a foreign element, when added to this
    curtailed manhood, Apollinaris said that there was an eternal
    tendency to the human in the Logos himself; that in God was the
    true manhood; that the Logos is the eternal, archetypal man. But
    here is no _becoming_ man—only a manifestation in flesh of what
    the Logos already _was_. So we have a Christ of great head and
    dwarfed body. Justin Martyr preceded Apollinaris in this view. In
    opposing it, the church Fathers said that “what the Son of God has
    not taken to himself, he has not sanctified”—τὸ ἀπρόσληπτον καὶ
    ἀθεράπευτον. See Dorner, Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 1:397-408—“The
    impossibility, on the Arian theory, of making two finite souls
    into one, finally led to the [Apollinarian] denial of any human
    soul in Christ”; see also, Dorner, Person Christ, A.2:352-399, and
    Glaubenslehre, 2:310 (Syst. Doct., 3:206, 207); Shedd, Hist.
    Doctrine, 1:394.

    Apollinaris taught that the eternal Word took into union with
    himself, not a complete human nature, but an irrational human
    animal. Simon, Reconciliation, 329, comes near to being an
    Apollinarian, when he maintains that the incarnate Logos was
    human, but was not a man. He is the constituter of man,
    self-limited, in order that he may save that to which he has given
    life. Gore, Incarnation, 93—“Apollinaris suggested that the
    archetype of manhood exists in God, who made man in his own image,
    so that man’s nature in some sense preëxisted in God. The Son of
    God was eternally human, and he could fill the place of the human
    mind in Christ without his ceasing to be in some sense divine....
    This the church negatived,—man is not God, nor God man. The first
    principle of theism is that manhood at the bottom is not the same
    thing as Godhead. This is a principle intimately bound up with
    man’s responsibility and the reality of sin. The interests of
    theism were at stake.”


5. _The Nestorians_ (Nestorius, removed from the Patriarchate of
Constantinople, 431) denied the real union between the divine and the
human natures in Christ, making it rather a moral than an organic one.
They refused therefore to attribute to the resultant unity the attributes
of each nature, and regarded Christ as a man in very near relation to God.
Thus they virtually held to two natures and two persons, instead of two
natures in one person.


    Nestorius disliked the phrase: “Mary, mother of God.” The
    Chalcedon statement asserted its truth, with the significant
    addition: “as to his humanity.” Nestorius made Christ a peculiar
    temple of God. He believed in συνάφεια, not ἕνωσις,—junction and
    indwelling, but not absolute union. He made too much of the
    analogy of the union of the believer with Christ, and separated as
    much as possible the divine and the human. The two natures were,
    in his view, ἄλλος καὶ ἄλλος, instead of being ἄλλο καὶ ἄλλο,
    which together constitute εἶς—one personality. The union which he
    accepted was a moral union, which makes Christ simply God and man,
    instead of the God-man.

    John of Damascus compared the passion of Christ to the felling of
    a tree on which the sun shines. The axe fells the tree, but does
    no harm to the sunbeams. So the blows which struck Christ’s
    humanity caused no harm to his deity; while the flesh suffered,
    the deity remained impassible. This leaves, however, no divine
    efficacy of the human sufferings, and no personal union of the
    human with the divine. The error of Nestorius arose from a
    philosophic nominalism, which refused to conceive of nature
    without personality. He believed in nothing more than a local or
    moral union, like the marriage union, in which two become one; or
    like the state, which is sometimes called a moral person, because
    having a unity composed of many persons. See Dorner, Person
    Christ, B.1:53-79, and Glaubenslehre, 2:315, 316 (Syst. Doct.,
    3:211-213); Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:210; Wilberforce,
    Incarnation, 152-154.

    “There was no need here of the virgin-birth,—to secure a sinless
    father as well as mother would have been enough. Nestorianism
    holds to no real incarnation—only to an alliance between God and
    man. After the fashion of the Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, man
    and God are joined together. But the incarnation is not merely a
    higher degree of the mystical union.” Gore, Incarnation,
    94—“Nestorius adopted and popularized the doctrine of the famous
    commentator, Theodore of Mopsuestia. But the Christ of Nestorius
    was simply a deified man, not God incarnate,—he was from below,
    not from above. If he was exalted to union with the divine
    essence, his exaltation was only that of one individual man.”


6. _The Eutychians_ (condemned at Chalcedon, 451) denied the distinction
and coëxistence of the two natures, and held to a mingling of both into
one, which constituted a _tertium quid_, or third nature. Since in this
case the divine must overpower the human, it follows that the human was
really absorbed into or transmuted into the divine, although the divine
was not in all respects the same, after the union, that it was before.
Hence the Eutychians were often called Monophysites, because they
virtually reduced the two natures to one.


    They were an Alexandrian school, which included monks of
    Constantinople and Egypt. They used the words σύγχυσις,
    μεταβολή—confounding, transformation—to describe the union of the
    two natures in Christ. Humanity joined to deity was as a drop of
    honey mingled with the ocean. There was a change in either
    element, but as when a stone attracts the earth, or a meteorite
    the sun, or when a small boat pulls a ship, all the movement was
    virtually on the part of the smaller object. Humanity was so
    absorbed in deity, as to be altogether lost. The union was
    illustrated by electron, a metal compounded of silver and gold. A
    more modern illustration would be that of the chemical union of an
    acid and an alkali, to form a salt unlike either of the
    constituents.

    In effect this theory denied the human element, and, with this,
    the possibility of atonement, on the part of human nature, as well
    as of real union of man with God. Such a magical union of the two
    natures as Eutyches described is inconsistent with any real
    _becoming man_ on the part of the Logos,—the manhood is well-nigh
    as illusory as upon the theory of the Docetæ. Mason, Faith of the
    Gospel, 140—“This turns not the Godhead only but the manhood also
    into something foreign—into some nameless nature, betwixt and
    between—the fabulous nature of a semi-human demigod,” like the
    Centaur.

    The author of “The German Theology” says that “Christ’s human
    nature was utterly bereft of self, and was nothing else but a
    house and habitation of God.” The Mystics would have human
    personality so completely the organ of the divine that “we may be
    to God what man’s hand is to a man,” and that “I” and “mine” may
    cease to have any meaning. Both these views savor of Eutychianism.
    On the other hand, the Unitarian says that Christ was “a mere
    man.” But there cannot be such a thing as a mere man, exclusive of
    aught above and beyond him, self-centered and self-moved. The
    Trinitarian sometimes declares himself as believing that Christ is
    God and man, thus implying the existence of two substances. Better
    say that Christ is the God-man, who manifests all the divine
    powers and qualities of which all men and all nature are partial
    embodiments. See Dorner, Person of Christ, B.1:83-93, and
    Glaubenslehre, 2:318, 319 (Syst. Doct., 3:214-216); Guericke, Ch.
    History, 1:356-360.


The foregoing survey would seem to show that history had exhausted the
possibilities of heresy, and that the future denials of the doctrine of
Christ’s person must be, in essence, forms of the views already mentioned.
All controversies with regard to the person of Christ must, of necessity,
hinge upon one of three points: first, the reality of the two natures;
secondly, the integrity of the two natures; thirdly, the union of the two
natures in one person. Of these points, Ebionism and Docetism deny the
reality of the natures; Arianism and Apollinarianism deny their integrity;
while Nestorianism and Eutychianism deny their proper union. In opposition
to all these errors, the orthodox doctrine held its ground and maintains
it to this day.


    We may apply to this subject what Dr. A. P. Peabody said in a
    different connection: “The canon of infidelity was closed almost
    as soon as that of the Scriptures”—modern unbelievers having, for
    the most part, repeated the objections of their ancient
    predecessors. Brooks, Foundations of Zoölogy, 126—“As a shell
    which has failed to burst is picked up on some old battle-field,
    by some one on whom experience is thrown away, and is exploded by
    him in the bosom of his approving family, with disastrous results,
    so one of these abandoned beliefs may be dug up by the head of
    some intellectual family, to the confusion of those who follow him
    as their leader.”


7. _The Orthodox doctrine_ (promulgated at Chalcedon, 451) holds that in
the one person Jesus Christ there are two natures, a human nature and a
divine nature, each in its completeness and integrity, and that these two
natures are organically and indissolubly united, yet so that no third
nature is formed thereby. In brief, to use the antiquated dictum, orthodox
doctrine forbids us either to divide the person or to confound the
natures.

That this doctrine is Scriptural and rational, we have yet to show. We may
most easily arrange our proofs by reducing the three points mentioned to
two, namely: first, the reality and integrity of the two natures;
secondly, the union of the two natures in one person.


    The formula of Chalcedon is negative, with the exception of its
    assertion of a ἕνωσις ὑποστατική. It proceeds from the natures,
    and regards the result of the union to be the person. Each of the
    two natures is regarded as in movement toward the other. The
    symbol says nothing of an ἀνυποστασία of the human nature, nor
    does it say that the Logos furnishes the ego in the personality.
    John of Damascus, however, pushed forward to these conclusions,
    and his work, translated into Latin, was used by Peter Lombard,
    and determined the views of the Western church of the Middle Ages.
    Dorner regards this as having given rise to the Mariolatry,
    saint-invocation, and transubstantiation of the Roman Catholic
    Church. See Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:189 _sq._; Dorner, Person
    Christ, B.1:93-119, and Glaubenslehre, 2:320-328 (Syst. Doct.,
    3:216-223), in which last passage may be found valuable matter
    with regard to the changing uses of the words πρόσωπον, ὑπόστασις,
    οὐσία, _etc._

    Gore, Incarnation, 96, 101—“These decisions simply express in a
    new form, without substantial addition, the apostolic teaching as
    it is represented in the New Testament. They express it in a new
    form for protective purposes, as a legal enactment protects a
    moral principle. They are developments only in the sense that they
    represent the apostolic teaching worked out into formulas by the
    aid of a terminology which was supplied by Greek dialectics....
    What the church borrowed from Greek thought was her terminology,
    not the substance of her creed. Even in regard to her terminology
    we must make one important reservation; for Christianity laid all
    stress on the personality of God and man, of which Hellenism had
    thought but little.”


II. The two Natures of Christ,—their Reality and Integrity.


1. The Humanity of Christ.


A. Its Reality.—This may be shown as follows:

(_a_) He expressly called himself, and was called, “man.”


    _John 8:40_—“_ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the
    truth_”; _Acts 2:22_—“_Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God
    unto you_”; _Rom. 5:15_—“_the one man, Jesus Christ_”; _1 Cor.
    15:21_—“_by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of
    the dead_”; _1 Tim. 2:5_—“_one mediator also between God and man,
    himself man, Christ Jesus._” Compare the genealogies in _Mat.
    1:1-17_ and _Luke 3:23-38_, the former of which proves Jesus to be
    in the royal line, and the latter of which proves him to be in the
    natural line, of succession from David; the former tracing back
    his lineage to Abraham, and the latter to Adam. Christ is
    therefore the son of David, and of the stock of Israel. Compare
    also the phrase “_Son of man_,” _e. g._, in _Mat. 20:28_, which,
    however much it may mean in addition, certainly indicates the
    veritable humanity of Jesus. Compare, finally, the term “_flesh_”
    (= human nature), applied to him in _John 1:14_—“_And the Word
    became flesh_” and in _1 John 4:2_—“_every spirit that confesseth
    that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God._”

    “Jesus is the true Son of man whom he proclaimed himself to be.
    This implies that he is the representative of all humanity.
    Consider for a moment what is implied in your being a man. How
    many parents had you? You answer, Two. How many grandparents? You
    answer, Four. How many great-grandparents? Eight. How many
    great-great-grandparents? Sixteen. So the number of your ancestors
    increases as you go further back, and if you take in only twenty
    generations, you will have to reckon yourself as the outcome of
    more than a million progenitors. The name Smith, or Jones, which
    you bear, represents only one strain of all those million; you
    might almost as well bear any other name; your existence is more
    an expression of the race at large than of any particular family
    or line. What is true of you, was true, on the human side, of the
    Lord Jesus. In him all the lines of our common humanity converged.
    He was the Son of man, far more than he was Son of Mary”; see A.
    H. Strong, Sermon before the London Baptist Congress.


(_b_) He possessed the essential elements of human nature as at present
constituted—a material body and a rational soul.


    _Mat. 26:38_—“_My soul is exceeding sorrowful_”; _John 11:33_—“_he
    groaned in the spirit_”; _Mat. 26:26_—“_this is my body_”;
    _28_—“_this is my blood_”; _Luke 24:39_—“_a spirit hath not flesh
    and bones, as ye behold me having_”; _Heb. 2:14_—“_Since then the
    children are sharers in flesh and blood, he also himself in like
    manner partook of the same_”; _1 John 1:1_—“_that which we have
    heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we
    beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life_”;
    _4:2_—“_every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in
    the flesh is of God._”

    Yet Christ was not all men in one, and he did not illustrate the
    development of all human powers. Laughter, painting, literature,
    marriage—these provinces he did not invade. Yet we do not regard
    these as absent from the ideal man. The perfection of Jesus was
    the perfection of self-limiting love. For our sakes he sanctified
    himself (_John 17:19_), or separated himself from much that in an
    ordinary man would have been excellence and delight. He became an
    example to us, by doing God’s will and reflecting God’s character
    in his particular environment and in his particular mission—that
    of the world’s Redeemer; see H. E. Robins, Ethics of the Christian
    Life, 259-303.

    Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 86-105—“Christ was not a man
    only amongst men. His relation to the human race is not that he
    was another specimen, differing, by being another, from every one
    but himself. His relation to the race was not a differentiating
    but a consummating relation. He was not generically but
    inclusively man.... The only relation that can at all directly
    compare with it is that of Adam, who in a real sense was
    humanity.... That complete indwelling and possessing of even one
    other, which the yearnings of man toward man imperfectly approach,
    is only possible, in any fulness of the words, to that spirit of
    man which is the Spirit of God: to the Spirit of God become,
    through incarnation, the spirit of man.... If Christ’s humanity
    were not the humanity of Deity, it could not stand in the wide,
    inclusive, consummating relation, in which it stands, in fact, to
    the humanity of all other men.... Yet the centre of Christ’s being
    as man was not in himself but in God. He was the expression, by
    willing reflection, of Another.”


(_c_) He was moved by the instinctive principles, and he exercised the
active powers, which belong to a normal and developed humanity (hunger,
thirst, weariness, sleep, love, compassion, anger, anxiety, fear,
groaning, weeping, prayer).


    _Mat 4:2_—“_he afterward hungered_”; _John 19:28_—“_I thirst_”;
    _4:6_—“_Jesus therefore, being wearied with his journey, sat thus
    by the well_”; _Mat 8:24_—“_the boat was covered with the waves:
    but he was asleep_”; _Mark 10:21_—“_Jesus looking upon him loved
    him_”; _Mat. 9:36_—“_when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with
    compassion for them_”; _Mark 3:5_—“_looked round about on them
    with anger, being grieved at the hardening of their heart_”; _Heb.
    5:7_—“_supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that
    was able to save him from death_”; _John 12:27_—“_Now is my soul
    troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour_”;
    _11:33_—“_he groaned in the spirit_”; _35_—“_Jesus wept_”; _Mat
    14:23_—“_he went up into the mountain apart to pray._” _Heb.
    2:16_—“_For it is not doubtless angels whom he rescueth, but he
    rescueth the seed of Abraham_” (Kendrick).

    Prof. J. P. Silvernail, on The Elocution of Jesus, finds the
    following intimations as to his delivery. It was characterized by
    1. Naturalness (sitting, as at Capernaum); 2. Deliberation
    (cultivates responsiveness in his hearers); 3. Circumspection (he
    looked at Peter); 4. Dramatic action (woman taken in adultery); 5.
    Self-control (authority, poise, no vociferation, denunciation of
    Scribes and Pharisees). All these are manifestations of truly
    human qualities and virtues. The epistle of James, the brother of
    our Lord, with its exaltation of a meek, quiet and holy life, may
    be an unconscious reflection of the character of Jesus, as it had
    appeared to James during the early days at Nazareth. So John the
    Baptist’s exclamation, “_I have need to be baptized of thee_”
    (_Mat 3:14_), may be an inference from his intercourse with Jesus
    in childhood and youth.


(_d_) He was subject to the ordinary laws of human development, both in
body and soul (grew and waxed strong in spirit; asked questions; grew in
wisdom and stature; learned obedience; suffered being tempted; was made
perfect through sufferings).


    _Luke 2:40_—“_the child grew, and waxed strong, filled with
    wisdom_”; _46_—“_sitting in the midst of the teachers, both
    hearing them, and asking them questions_” (here, at his twelfth
    year, he appears first to become fully conscious that he is the
    Sent of God, the Son of God); _49_—“_know ye not that I must be in
    my Father’s house?_” (lit. “in the things of my Father”);
    _52_—“_advanced in wisdom and stature_”; _Heb. 5:8_—“_learned
    obedience by the things which he suffered_”; _2:18_—“_in that he
    himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them
    that are tempted_”; _10_—“_it became him ... to make the author of
    their salvation perfect through sufferings._”

    Keble: “Was not our Lord a little child, Taught by degrees to
    pray; By father dear and mother mild Instructed day by day?”
    Adamson, The Mind in Christ: “To Henry Drummond Christianity was
    the crown of the evolution of the whole universe. Jesus’ growth in
    stature and in favor with God and men is a picture in miniature of
    the age-long evolutionary process.” Forrest, Christ of History and
    of Experience, 185—“The incarnation of the Son was not his one
    revelation of God, but the interpretation to sinful humanity of
    all his other revelations of God in nature and history and moral
    experience, which had been darkened by sin.... The Logos,
    incarnate or not, is the τέλος as well as the ἀρχή of creation.”

    Andrew Murray, Spirit of Christ, 26, 27—“Though now baptized
    himself, he cannot yet baptize others. He must first, in the power
    of his baptism, meet temptation and overcome it; must learn
    obedience and suffer; yea, through the eternal Spirit, offer
    himself a sacrifice to God and his Will; then only could he afresh
    receive the Holy Spirit as the reward of obedience, with the power
    to baptize all who belong to him”; see _Acts 2:33_—“_Being
    therefore by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of
    the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he hath poured forth
    this, which ye see and hear._”


(_e_) He suffered and died (bloody sweat; gave up his spirit; his side
pierced, and straightway there came out blood and water).


    _Luke 22:44_—“_being in an agony he prayed more earnestly; and his
    sweat became as it were great drops of blood falling down upon the
    ground_”; _John 19:30_—“_he bowed his head, and gave up his
    spirit_”; _34_—“_one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his
    side, and straightway there came out blood and water_”—held by
    Stroud, Physical Cause of our Lord’s Death, to be proof that Jesus
    died of a broken heart.

    Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, 1:9-19—“The Lord is said to have grown in
    wisdom and favor with God, not because it was so, but because he
    acted as if it were so. So he was exalted after death, as if this
    exaltation were on account of death.” But we may reply: Resolve
    all signs of humanity into mere appearance, and you lose the
    divine nature as well as the human; for God is truth and cannot
    act a lie. The babe, the child, even the man, in certain respects,
    was ignorant. Jesus, the boy, was not making crosses, as in
    Overbeck’s picture, but rather yokes and plows, as Justin Martyr
    relates—serving a real apprenticeship in Joseph’s workshop: _Mark
    6:3_—“_Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?_”

    See Holman Hunt’s picture, “The Shadow of the Cross”—in which not
    Jesus, but only Mary, sees the shadow of the cross upon the wall.
    He lived a life of faith, as well as of prayer (_Heb.
    12:2_—“_Jesus the author_ [captain, prince] _and perfecter of our
    faith_”), dependent upon Scripture, which was much of it, as _Ps.
    16_ and _118_, and _Is. 49, 50, 61,_ written for him, as well as
    about him. See Park, Discourses, 297-327; Deutsch, Remains,
    131—“The boldest transcendental flight of the Talmud is its
    saying: ‘God prays.’ ” In Christ’s humanity, united as it is to
    deity, we have the fact answering to this piece of Talmudic
    poetry.


B. Its Integrity. We here use the term “integrity” to signify, not merely
completeness, but perfection. That which is perfect is, _a fortiori_,
complete in all its parts. Christ’s human nature was:

(_a_) Supernaturally conceived; since the denial of his supernatural
conception involves either a denial of the purity of Mary, his mother, or
a denial of the truthfulness of Matthew’s and Luke’s narratives.


    _Luke 1:34, 35_—“_And Mary said unto the angel, How shall this be,
    seeing I know not a man? And the angel answered and said unto her,
    The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most
    High shall overshadow thee._” The “_seed of the woman_” (_Gen.
    3:15_) was one who had no earthly father. “_Eve_” = life, not only
    as being the source of physical life to the race, but also as
    bringing into the world him who was to be its spiritual life.
    Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 29—Jesus Christ “had no earthly
    father; his birth was a creative act of God, breaking through the
    chain of human generation.” Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:447 (Syst.
    Doct., 3:345)—“The new science recognizes manifold methods of
    propagation, and that too even in one and the same species.”

    Professor Loeb has found that the unfertilized egg of the
    sea-urchin may be made by chemical treatment to produce thrifty
    young, and he thinks it probable that the same effect may be
    produced among the mammalia. Thus parthenogenesis in the highest
    order of life is placed among the scientific possibilities.
    Romanes, even while he was an agnostic, affirmed that a
    virgin-birth even in the human race would be by no means out of
    the range of possibility; see his Darwin and After Darwin, 119,
    footnote—“Even if a virgin has ever conceived and borne a son, and
    even if such a fact in the human species has been unique, it would
    not betoken any breach of physiological continuity.” Only a new
    impulse from the Creator could save the Redeemer from the long
    accruing fatalities of human generation. But the new creation of
    humanity in Christ is scientifically quite as possible as its
    first creation in Adam; and in both cases there may have been no
    violation of natural law, but only a unique revelation of its
    possibilities. “Birth from a virgin made it clear that a new thing
    was taking place in the earth, and that One was coming into the
    world who was not simply man.” A. B. Bruce: “Thoroughgoing
    naturalism excludes the virgin life as well as the virgin birth.”
    See Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 254-270; A. H. Strong,
    Christ in Creation, 176.

    Paul Lobstein, Incarnation of our Lord, 217—“That which is unknown
    to the teachings of St. Peter and St. Paul, St. John and St.
    James, and our Lord himself, and is absent from the earliest and
    the latest gospels, cannot be so essential as many people have
    supposed.” This argument from silence is sufficiently met by the
    considerations that Mark passes over thirty years of our Lord’s
    life in silence; that John presupposes the narratives of Matthew
    and of Luke; that Paul does not deal with the story of Jesus’
    life. The facts were known at first only to Mary and to Joseph;
    their very nature involved reticence until Jesus was demonstrated
    to be “_the Son of God with power ... by the resurrection from the
    dead_” (_Rom. 1:4_); meantime the natural development of Jesus and
    his refusal to set up an earthly kingdom may have made the
    miraculous events of thirty years ago seem to Mary like a
    wonderful dream; so only gradually the marvellous tale of the
    mother of the Lord found its way into the gospel tradition and
    creeds of the church, and into the inmost hearts of Christians of
    all countries; see F. L. Anderson, in Baptist Review and
    Expositor, 1904:25-44, and Machen, on the N. T. Account of the
    Birth of Jesus, in Princeton Theol. Rev., Oct. 1905, and Jan.
    1906.

    Cooke, on The Virgin Birth of our Lord, in Methodist Rev., Nov.
    1904:849-857—“If there is a moral taint in the human race, if in
    the very blood and constitution of humanity there is an
    ineradicable tendency to sin, then it is utterly inconceivable
    that any one born in the race by natural means should escape the
    taint of that race. And, finally, if the virgin birth is not
    historical, then a difficulty greater than any that destructive
    criticism has yet evolved from documents, interpolations,
    psychological improbabilities and unconscious contradictions
    confronts the reason and upsets all the long results of scientific
    observation,—that a sinful and deliberately sinning and unmarried
    pair should have given life to the purest human being that ever
    lived or of whom the human race has ever dreamed, and that he,
    knowing and forgiving the sins of others, never knew the shame of
    his own origin.” See also Gore, Dissertations, 1-68, on the Virgin
    Birth of our Lord, J. Armitage Robinson, Some Thoughts on the
    Incarnation, 42, both of whom show that without assuming the
    reality of the virgin birth we cannot account for the origin of
    the narratives of Matthew and of Luke, nor for the acceptance of
    the virgin birth by the early Christians. _Per contra_, see Hoben,
    in Am. Jour. Theol., 1902:478-506, 709-752. For both sides of the
    controversy, see Symposium by Bacon, Zenos, Rhees and Warfield, in
    Am. Jour. Theol., Jan. 1906:1-30; and especially Orr, Virgin Birth
    of Christ.


(_b_) Free, both from hereditary depravity, and from actual sin; as is
shown by his never offering sacrifice, never praying for forgiveness,
teaching that all but he needed the new birth, challenging all to convict
him of a single sin.


    Jesus frequently went up to the temple, but he never offered
    sacrifice. He prayed: “_Father, forgive them_” (_Luke 23:34_); but
    he never prayed: “Father, forgive _me_.” He said: “_Ye must be
    born anew_” (_John 3:7_); but the words indicated that _he_ had no
    such need. “At no moment in all that life could a single detail
    have been altered, except for the worse.” He not only _yielded_ to
    God’s will when made known to him, but he _sought_ it: “_I seek
    not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me_” (_John
    5:30_). The anger which he showed was no passionate or selfish or
    vindictive anger, but the indignation of righteousness against
    hypocrisy and cruelty—an indignation accompanied with grief:
    “_looked round about on them with anger, being grieved at the
    hardening of their heart_” (_Mark 3:5_). F. W. H. Myers, St. Paul,
    19, 53—“Thou with strong prayer and very much entreating Willest
    be asked, and thou wilt answer then, Show the hid heart beneath
    creation beating, Smile with kind eyes and be a man with men....
    Yea, through life, death, through sorrow and through sinning, He
    shall suffice me, for he hath sufficed: Christ is the end, for
    Christ was the beginning, Christ the beginning, for the end is
    Christ.” Not personal experience of sin, but resistance to it,
    fitted him to deliver us from it.

    _Luke 1:35_—“_wherefore also the holy thing which is begotten
    shall be called the Son of God_”; _John 8:46_—“_Which of you
    convicteth me of sin?_” _14:30_—“_the prince of the world cometh:
    and he hath nothing in me_” = not the slightest evil inclination
    upon which his temptations can lay hold; _Rom. 8:3_—“_in the
    likeness of sinful flesh_” = in flesh, but without the sin which
    in other men clings to the flesh; _2 Cor. 5:21_—“_Him who knew no
    sin_”; _Heb. 4:15_—“_in all points tempted like as we are, yet
    without sin_”; _7:26_—“_holy, guileless, undefiled, separated from
    sinners_”—by the fact of his immaculate conception;
    _9:14_—“_through the eternal Spirit offered himself without
    blemish unto God_”; _1 Pet. 1:19_—“_precious blood, as of a lamb
    without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ_”;
    _2:22_—“_who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth_”;
    _1 John 3:5, 7_—“_in him is no sin ... he is righteous._”

    Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 29—“Had Christ been only human nature,
    he could not have been without sin. But _life_ can draw out of the
    putrescent clod materials for its own living. Divine life
    appropriates the human.” Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:446 (Syst.
    Doct., 3:344)—“What with us is regeneration, is with him the
    incarnation of God.” In this origin of Jesus’ sinlessness from his
    union with God, we see the absurdity, both doctrinally and
    practically, of speaking of an immaculate conception of the
    Virgin, and of making her sinlessness precede that of her Son. On
    the Roman Catholic doctrine of the immaculate conception of the
    Virgin, see H. B. Smith, System, 389-392; Mason, Faith of the
    Gospel, 129-131—“It makes the regeneration of humanity begin, not
    with Christ, but with the Virgin. It breaks his connection with
    the race. Instead of springing sinless from the sinful race, he
    derives his humanity from something not like the rest of us.”
    Thomas Aquinas and Liguori both call Mary the Queen of Mercy, as
    Jesus her Son is King of Justice; see Thomas, Præf. in Sept. Cath.
    Ep., Comment on Esther, 5:3, and Liguori, Glories of Mary, 1:80
    (Dublin version of 1866). Bradford, Heredity, 289—“The Roman
    church has almost apotheosized Mary; but it must not be forgotten
    that the process began with Jesus. From what he was, an inference
    was drawn concerning what his mother must have been.”

    “Christ took human nature in such a way that this nature, without
    sin, bore the consequences of sin.” That portion of human nature
    which the Logos took into union with himself was, in the very
    instant and by the fact of his taking it, purged from all its
    inherent depravity. But if in Christ there was no sin, or tendency
    to sin, how could he be tempted? In the same way, we reply, that
    Adam was tempted. Christ was not omniscient: _Mark 13:32_—“_of
    that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in
    heaven, neither the Son, but the Father._” Only at the close of
    the first temptation does Jesus recognize Satan as the adversary
    of souls: _Mat. 4:10_—“_Get thee hence, Satan._” Jesus could be
    tempted, not only because he was not omniscient, but also because
    he had the keenest susceptibility to all the forms of innocent
    desire. To these desires temptation may appeal. Sin consists, not
    in these desires, but in the gratification of them out of God’s
    order, and contrary to God’s will. Meyer: “Lust is appetite run
    wild. There is no harm in any natural appetite, considered in
    itself. But appetite has been spoiled by the Fall.” So Satan
    appealed (_Mat. 4:1-11_) to our Lord’s desire for food, for
    applause, for power; to “Ueberglaube, Aberglaude, Unglaube”
    (Kurtz); _cf._ _Mat. 26:39; 27:42; 26:53_. All temptation must be
    addressed either to desire or fear; so Christ “_was in all points
    tempted like as we are_” (_Heb. 4:15_). The first temptation, in
    the wilderness, was addressed to desire; the second, in the
    garden, was addressed to fear. Satan, after the first, “_departed
    from him for a season_” (_Luke 4:13_); but he returned, in
    Gethsemane—“_the prince of the world cometh: and he hath nothing
    in me_” (_John 14:30_)—If possible, to deter Jesus from his work,
    by rousing within him vast and agonizing fears of the suffering
    and death that lay before him. Yet, in spite of both the desire
    and the fear with which his holy soul was moved, he was “_without
    sin_” (_Heb. 4:15_). The tree on the edge of the precipice is
    fiercely blown by the winds: the strain upon the roots is
    tremendous, but the roots hold. Even in Gethsemane and on Calvary,
    Christ never prays for forgiveness, he only imparts it to others.
    See Ullman, Sinlessness of Jesus; Thomasius, Christi Person und
    Werk, 2:7-17, 126-136, esp. 135, 136; Schaff, Person of Christ,
    51-72; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 3:330-349.


(_c_) Ideal human nature,—furnishing the moral pattern which man is
progressively to realize, although within limitations of knowledge and of
activity required by his vocation as the world’s Redeemer.


    _Psalm 8:4-8_—“_thou hast made him but little lower than God, And
    crownest him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have
    dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things
    under his feet_”—a description of the ideal man, which finds its
    realization only in Christ. _Heb. 2:6-10_—“_But now we see not yet
    all things subjected to him. But we behold him who hath been made
    a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the
    suffering of death crowned with glory and honor._” _1 Cor.
    15:45_—“_The first ... Adam ... The last Adam_”—implies that the
    second Adam realized the full concept of humanity, which failed to
    be realized in the first Adam; so _verse 49_—“_as we have borne
    the image of the earthly_ [man], _we shall also bear the image of
    the heavenly_” [man]. _2 Cor. 3:18_—“_the glory of the Lord_” is
    the pattern, into whose likeness we are to be changed. _Phil
    3:21_—“_who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that
    it may be conformed to the body of his glory_”; _Col. 1:18_—“_that
    in all things he might have the pre-eminence_”; _1 Pet.
    2:21_—“_suffered for you, leaving you an example, that ye should
    follow his steps_”; _1 John 3:3_—“_every one that hath this hope
    set on him purifieth himself, even as he is pure._”

    The phrase “_Son of man_” (_John 5:27_; _cf._ _Dan. 7:13_, Com. of
    Pusey, _in loco_, and Westcott, in Bible Com. on John, 32-35)
    seems to intimate that Christ answers to the perfect idea of
    humanity, as it at first existed in the mind of God. Not that he
    was surpassingly beautiful in physical form; for the only way to
    reconcile the seemingly conflicting intimations is to suppose that
    in all outward respects he took our average humanity—at one time
    appearing without form or comeliness (_Is. 52:2_), and aged before
    his time (_John 8:57_—“_Thou art not yet fifty years old_”), at
    another time revealing so much of his inward grace and glory that
    men were attracted and awed (_Ps. 45:2_—“_Thou art fairer than the
    children of men_”; _Luke 4:22_—“_the words of grace which
    proceeded out of his mouth_”; _Mark 10:32_—“_Jesus was going
    before them: and they were amazed; and they that followed were
    afraid_”; _Mat. 17:1-8_—the account of the transfiguration).
    Compare the Byzantine pictures of Christ with those of the Italian
    painters,—the former ascetic and emaciated, the latter types of
    physical well-being. Modern pictures make Jesus too exclusively a
    Jew. Yet there is a certain truth in the words of Mozoomdar:
    “Jesus was an Oriental, and we Orientals understand him. He spoke
    in figure. We understand him. He was a mystic. You take him
    literally: you make an Englishman of him.” So Japanese Christians
    will not swallow the Western system of theology, because they say
    that this would be depriving the world of the Japanese view of
    Christ.

    But in all spiritual respects Christ was perfect. In him are
    united all the excellences of both the sexes, of all temperaments
    and nationalities and characters. He possesses, not simply passive
    innocence, but positive and absolute holiness, triumphant through
    temptation. He includes in himself all objects and reasons for
    affection and worship; so that, in loving him, “love can never
    love too much.” Christ’s human nature, therefore, and not human
    nature as it is in us, is the true basis of ethics and of
    theology. This absence of narrow individuality, this ideal,
    universal manhood, could not have been secured by merely natural
    laws of propagation,—it was secured by Christ’s miraculous
    conception; see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:446 (Syst. Doct., 3:344).
    John G. Whittier, on the Birmingham philanthropist, Joseph Sturge:
    “Tender as woman, manliness and meekness In him were so allied,
    That they who judged him by his strength or weakness Saw but a
    single side.”

    Seth, Ethical Principles, 420—“The secret of the power of the
    moral Ideal is the conviction which it carries with it that it is
    no _mere_ ideal, but the expression of the supreme Reality.”
    Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 364—“The _a priori_ only
    outlines a _possible_, and does not determine what shall be
    _actual_ within the limits of the possible. If experience is to be
    possible, it must take on certain forms, but those forms are
    compatible with an infinite variety of experience.” No _a priori_
    truths or ideals can guarantee Christianity. We want a historical
    basis, an actual Christ, a _realization_ of the divine ideal.
    “Great men,” says Amiel, “are the true men.” Yes, we add, but only
    Christ, the greatest man, shows what the true man is. The heavenly
    perfection of Jesus discloses to us the greatness of our own
    possible being, while at the same time it reveals our infinite
    shortcoming and the source from which all restoration must come.

    Gore, Incarnation, 168—“Jesus Christ is the catholic man. In a
    sense, all the greatest men have overlapped the boundaries of
    their time. ‘The truly great Have all one age, and from one
    visible space Shed influence. They, both in power and act Are
    permanent, and time is not with them, Save as it worketh for them,
    they in it.’ But in a unique sense the manhood of Jesus is
    catholic; because it is exempt, not from the limitations which
    belong to manhood, but from the limitations which make our manhood
    narrow and isolated, merely local or national.” Dale, Ephesians,
    42—“Christ is a servant and something more. There is an ease, a
    freedom, a grace, about his doing the will of God, which can
    belong only to a Son.... There is nothing constrained ... he was
    born to it.... He does the will of God as a child does the will of
    its father, naturally, as a matter of course, almost without
    thought.... No irreverent familiarity about his communion with the
    Father, but also no trace of fear, or even of wonder.... Prophets
    had fallen to the ground when the divine glory was revealed to
    them, but Christ stands calm and erect. A subject may lose his
    self-possession in the presence of his prince, but not a son.”

    Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 148—“What once he had perceived, he
    thenceforth knew. He had no opinions, no conjectures; we are never
    told that he forgot, nor even that he remembered, which would
    imply a degree of forgetting; we are not told that he arrived at
    truths by the process of reasoning them out; but he reasons them
    out for others. It is not recorded that he took counsel or formed
    plans; but he desired, and he purposed, and he did one thing with
    a view to another.” On Christ, as the ideal man, see
    Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 307-336; F. W. Robertson,
    Sermon on The Glory of the Divine Son, 2nd Series, Sermon XIX;
    Wilberforce, Incarnation, 22-99; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:25;
    Moorhouse, Nature and Revelation, 37; Tennyson, Introduction to In
    Memoriam; Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:148-154, and 2:excursus iv;
    Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 276-332; Thomas Hughes, The
    Manliness of Christ; Hopkins, Scriptural Idea of Man, 121-145;
    Tyler, in Bib. Sac., 22:51, 620; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451
    _sq._


(_d_) A human nature that found its personality only in union with the
divine nature,—in other words, a human nature impersonal, in the sense
that it had no personality separate from the divine nature, and prior to
its union therewith.


    By the impersonality of Christ’s human nature, we mean only that
    it had no personality before Christ took it, no personality before
    its union with the divine. It was a human nature whose
    consciousness and will were developed only in union with the
    personality of the Logos. The Fathers therefore rejected the word
    ἀνυποστασία, and substituted the word ἐνυποστασία,—they favored
    not _un_personality but _in_personality. In still plainer terms,
    the Logos did not take into union with himself an already
    developed human person, such as James, Peter, or John, but human
    nature before it had become personal or was capable of receiving a
    name. It reached its personality only in union with his own divine
    nature. Therefore we see in Christ not two persons—a human person
    and a divine person—but one person, and that person possessed of a
    human nature as well as of a divine. For proof of this, see pages
    683-700, also Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:289-308.

    Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 136—“We count it no defect in our
    bodies that they have no personal subsistence apart from
    ourselves, and that, if separated from ourselves, they are
    nothing. They share in a true personal life because we, whose
    bodies they are, are persons. What happens to them happens to us.”
    In a similar manner the personality of the Logos furnished the
    organizing principle of Jesus’ two-fold nature. As he looked
    backward he could see himself dwelling in eternity with God, so
    far as his divine nature was concerned. But as respects his
    humanity he could remember that it was not eternal,—it had had its
    beginnings in time. Yet this humanity had never had a separate
    personal existence,—its personality had been developed only in
    connection with the divine nature. Göschel, quoted in Dorner’s
    Person of Christ, 5:170—“Christ _is_ humanity; we have it; he is
    it entirely; we participate therein. His personality precedes and
    lies at the basis of the personality of the race and its
    individuals. As idea, he is implanted in the whole of humanity; he
    lies at the basis of every human consciousness, without however
    attaining realization in an individual; for this is only possible
    in the entire race at the end of the times.”

    Emma Marie Caillard, on Man in the Light of Evolution, in Contemp.
    Rev., Dec. 1893: 873-881—“Christ is not only the goal of the race
    which is to be conformed to him, but he is also the vital
    principle which moulds each individual of that race into its own
    similitude. The perfect type exists potentially through all the
    intermediate stages by which it is more and more nearly
    approached, and, if it did not exist, neither could they. There
    could be no development of an absent life. The goal of man’s
    evolution, the perfect type of manhood, is Christ. He exists and
    always has existed potentially in the race and in the individual,
    equally before as after his visible incarnation, equally in the
    millions of those who do not, as in the far fewer millions of
    those who do, bear his name. In the strictest sense of the words,
    he is the life of man, and that in a far deeper and more intimate
    sense than he can be said to be the life of the universe.” Dale,
    Christian Fellowship, 159—“Christ’s incarnation was not an
    isolated and abnormal wonder. It was God’s witness to the true and
    ideal relation of all men to God.” The incarnation was no detached
    event,—it was the issue of an eternal process of utterance on the
    part of the Word “_whose goings forth are from of old, from
    everlasting_” (_Micah 5:2_).


(_e_) A human nature germinal, and capable of self-communication,—so
constituting him the spiritual head and beginning of a new race, the
second Adam from whom fallen man individually and collectively derives new
and holy life.


    In _Is. 9:6_, Christ is called “_Everlasting Father_.” In _Is.
    53:10_, it is said that “_he shall see his seed_.” In _Rev.
    22:16_, he calls himself “_the root_” as well as “_the offspring
    of David_.” See also _John 5.21_—“_the Son also giveth life to
    whom he will_”; _15:1_—“_I am the true vine_”—whose roots are
    planted in heaven, not on earth; the vine-man, from whom as its
    stock the new life of humanity is to spring, and into whom the
    half-withered branches of the old humanity are to be grafted that
    they may have life divine. See Trench, Sermon on Christ, the True
    Vine, in Hulsean Lectures. _John 17:2_—“_thou gavest him authority
    over all flesh, that to all whom thou hast given him, he should
    give eternal life_”; _1 Cor. 15:45_—“_the last Adam became a
    life-giving spirit_”—here “_spirit_” = not the Holy Spirit, nor
    Christ’s divine nature, but “the ego of his total divine-human
    personality.”

    _Eph. 5:23_—“_Christ also is the head of the church_” = the head
    to which all the members are united, and from which they derive
    life and power. Christ calls the disciples his “_little children_”
    (_John 13:33_); when he leaves them they are “_orphans_” (_14:18_
    marg.). “He represents himself as a father of children, no less
    than as a brother” (_20:17_—“_my brethren_”; _cf._ _Heb.
    2:11_—“_brethren_”, and _13_—“_Behold, I and the children whom God
    hath given me_”; see Westcott, Com. on _John 13:33_). The new race
    is propagated after the analogy of the old; the first Adam is the
    source of the physical, the second Adam of spiritual, life; the
    first Adam the source of corruption, the second of holiness. Hence
    _John 12:24_—“_if it die, it beareth much fruit_”; _Mat. 10:37_
    and _Luke 14:26_—“_He that loveth father or mother more than me is
    not worthy of me_” = none is worthy of me, who prefers his old
    natural ancestry to his new spiritual descent and relationship.
    Thus Christ is not simply the noblest embodiment of the old
    humanity, but also the fountain-head and beginning of a new
    humanity, the new source of life for the race. _Cf._ _1 Tim.
    2:15_—“_she shall be saved through the child-bearing_”—which
    brought Christ into the world. See Wilberforce, Incarnation,
    227-241; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 638-664; Dorner, Glaubenslehre,
    2:451 _sq._ (Syst. Doct., 3:349 _sq._).

    Lightfoot on _Col. 1:18_—“_who is the beginning, the fruits from
    the dead_”—“Here ἀρχή = 1. priority in time. Christ was first
    fruits of the dead (_1 Cor. 15:20, 23_); 2. originating power, not
    only _principium principiatum_, but also _principium principians_.
    As he _is_ first with respect to the universe, so he _becomes_
    first with respect to the church; _cf._ _Heb. 7:15, 16_—‘_another
    priest, who hath been made, not after the law of a carnal
    commandment but after the power of an endless life_’.” Paul
    teaches that “_the head of every man is Christ_” (_1 Cor. 11:3_),
    and that “_in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily_”
    (_Col. 2:9_). Whiton, Gloria Patri, 88-92, remarks on _Eph. 1:10_,
    that God’s purpose is “_to sum up all things in Christ, the things
    in the heavens, and the things upon the earth_”—to bring all
    things to a head (ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι). History is a perpetually
    increasing incarnation of life, whose climax and crown is the
    divine fulness of life in Christ. In him the before unconscious
    sonship of the world awakes to consciousness of the Father. He is
    worthiest to bear the name of _the_ Son of God, in a preëminent,
    but not exclusive right. We agree with these words of Whiton, if
    they mean that Christ is the only giver of life to man as he is
    the only giver of life to the universe.

    Hence Christ is the only ultimate authority in religion. He
    reveals himself in nature, in man, in history, in Scripture, but
    each of these is only a mirror which reflects _him_ to us. In each
    case the mirror is more or less blurred and the image obscured,
    yet _he_ appears in the mirror notwithstanding. The mirror is
    useless unless there is an eye to look into it, and an object to
    be seen in it. The Holy Spirit gives the eyesight, while Christ
    himself, living and present, furnishes the object (_James
    1:23-25_; _2 Cor. 3:18_; _1 Cor. 13:12_).

    Over against mankind is Christ-kind; over against the fallen and
    sinful race is the new race created by Christ’s indwelling.
    Therefore only when he ascended with his perfected manhood could
    he send the Holy Spirit, for the Holy Spirit which makes men
    children of God is the Spirit of Christ. Christ’s humanity now, by
    virtue of its perfect union with Deity, has become universally
    communicable. It is as consonant with evolution to derive
    spiritual gifts from the second Adam, a solitary source, as it is
    to derive the natural man from the first Adam, a solitary source;
    see George Harris, Moral Evolution, 409; and A. H. Strong, Christ
    in Creation, 174.

    Simon, Reconciliation, 308—“Every man is in a true sense
    essentially of divine nature—even as Paul teaches, θεῖον γένος
    (_Acts 17:29_).... At the centre, as it were, enswathed in fold
    after fold, after the manner of a bulb, we discern the living
    divine spark, impressing us qualitatively if not quantitatively,
    with the absoluteness of the great sun to which it belongs.” The
    idea of truth, beauty, right, has in it an absolute and divine
    quality. It comes from God, yet from the depths of our own nature.
    It is the evidence that Christ, “_the light that lighteth every
    man_” (_John 1:9_), is present and is working within us.

    Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:272—“That the divine idea of
    man as ‘_the son of his love_’ (_Col. 1:13_), and of humanity as
    the kingdom of this Son of God, is the immanent final cause of all
    existence and development even in the prior world of nature, this
    has been the fundamental thought of the Christian Gnosis since the
    apostolic age, and I think that no philosophy has yet been able to
    shake or to surpass this thought—the corner stone of an idealistic
    view of the world.” But Mead, Ritschl’s Place in the History of
    Doctrine, 10, says of Pfleiderer and Ritschl: “Both recognize
    Christ as morally perfect and as the head of the Christian Church.
    Both deny his pre-existence and his essential Deity. Both reject
    the traditional conception of Christ as an atoning Redeemer.
    Ritschl calls Christ God, though inconsistently; Pfleiderer
    declines to say one thing when he seems to mean another.”


The passages here alluded to abundantly confute the Docetic denial of
Christ’s veritable human body, and the Apollinarian denial of Christ’s
veritable human soul. More than this, they establish the reality and
integrity of Christ’s human nature, as possessed of all the elements,
faculties, and powers essential to humanity.


2. The Deity of Christ.


The reality and integrity of Christ’s divine nature have been sufficiently
proved in a former chapter (see pages 305-315). We need only refer to the
evidence there given, that, during his earthly ministry, Christ:

(_a_) Possessed a knowledge of his own deity.


    _John 3:13_—“_the Son of man, who is in heaven_”—a passage with
    clearly indicates Christ’s consciousness, at certain times in his
    earthly life at least, that he was not confined to earth but was
    also in heaven [here, however, Westcott and Hort, with א and B,
    omit ὁ ὢν ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ; for advocacy of the common reading, see
    Broadus, in Hovey’s Com. on _John 3:13_]; _8:58_—“_Before Abraham
    was born, I am_”—here Jesus declares that there is a respect in
    which the idea of birth and beginning does not apply to him, but
    in which he can apply to himself the name “_I am_” of the eternal
    God; _14:9, 10_—“_Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou
    not know me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father;
    how sayest thou, Show us the Father? Believest thou not that I am
    in the Father, and the Father in me?_”

    Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 24-49, gives the following instances
    of Jesus’ supernatural knowledge: 1. Jesus’ knowledge of Peter
    (_John 1:42_); 2. his finding of Philip (_1:43_); 3. his
    recognition of Nathanael (_1:47-50_); 4. of the woman of Samaria
    (_4:17-19, 39_); 5. miraculous draughts of fishes (_Luke 5:6-9_;
    _John 21:6_); 6. death of Lazarus (_John 11:14_); 7. of the ass’s
    colt (_Mat. 21:2_); 8. of the upper room (_Mark 14:15_); 9. of
    Peter’s denial (_Mat. 26:34_); 10. of the manner of his own death
    (_John 12:33_; _18:32_); 11. of the manner of Peter’s death (_John
    21:19_); 12. of the fall of Jerusalem (_Mat. 24:2_).

    Jesus does not say “our Father” but “_my Father_” (_John 20:17_).
    Rejection of him is a greater sin than rejection of the prophets,
    because he is the “_beloved Son_” of God (_Luke 20:13_). He knows
    God’s purposes better than the angels, because he is the Son of
    God (_Mark 13:32_). As Son of God, he alone knows, and he alone
    can reveal, the Father (_Mat. __ 11:27_). There to clearly
    something more in his Sonship than in that of his disciples (_John
    1:14_—“_only begotten_”; _Heb. 1:6_—“_first begotten_”). See
    Chapman, Jesus Christ and the Present Age, 37; Denney, Studies in
    Theology, 33.


(b) Exercised divine powers and prerogatives.


    _John 2:24, 25_—“_But Jesus did not trust himself unto them, for
    that he knew all man, and because he needed not that any one
    should bear witness concerning man; for he himself knew what was
    in man_”; _18:4_—“_Jesus therefore, knowing all the things that
    were coming upon him, went forth_”; _Mark 4:39_—“_he awoke, and
    rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the
    wind ceased, and there was a great calm_”; _Mat. 9:6_—“_But that
    ye may know that the Son of man hath authority on earth to forgive
    sins (then saith he to the sick of the palsy), Arise, and take up
    thy bed, and go unto thy house_”; _Mark 2:7_—“_Why doth this man
    thus speak? he blasphemeth: who can forgive sins but one, even
    God?_”

    It is not enough to keep, like Alexander Severus, a bust of
    Christ, in a private chapel, along with Virgil, Orpheus, Abraham,
    Apollonius, and other persons of the same kind; see Gibbon,
    Decline and Fall, chap. xvi. “Christ is all in all. The prince in
    the Arabian story took from a walnut-shell a miniature tent, but
    that tent expanded so as to cover, first himself, then his palace,
    then his army, and at last his whole kingdom. So Christ’s being
    and authority expand, as we reflect upon them, until they take in,
    not only ourselves, our homes and our country, but the whole world
    of sinning and suffering men, and the whole universe of God”; see
    A. H. Strong, Address at the Ecumenical Missionary Conference,
    April 23, 1900.

    Matheson, Voices of the Spirit, 39—“What is that law which I call
    gravitation, but the sign of the Son of man in heaven? It is the
    gospel of self-surrender in nature. It is the inability of any
    world to be its own centre, the necessity of every world to center
    in something else.... In the firmament as on the earth, the many
    are made one by giving the one for the many.” “Subtlest thought
    shall fail and learning falter; Churches change, forms perish,
    systems go; But our human needs, they will not alter, Christ no
    after age will e’er outgrow. Yea, amen, O changeless One, thou
    only Art life’s guide and spiritual goal; Thou the light across
    the dark vale lonely, Thou the eternal haven of the soul.”


But this is to say, in other words, that there were, in Christ, a
knowledge and a power such as belong only to God. The passages cited
furnish a refutation of both the Ebionite denial of the reality, and the
Arian denial of the integrity, of the divine nature in Christ.


    Napoleon to Count Montholon (Bertrand’s Memoirs): “I think I
    understand somewhat of human nature, and I tell you all these
    [heroes of antiquity] were men, and I am a man; but not one is
    like him: Jesus Christ was more than man.” See other testimonies
    in Schaff, Person of Christ. Even Spinoza, Tract. Theol.-Pol.,
    cap. 1 (vol. 1:383), says that “Christ communed with God, mind to
    mind ... this spiritual closeness is unique” (Martineau, Types,
    1:254), and Channing speaks of Christ as more than a human
    being,—as having exhibited a spotless purity which is the highest
    distinction of heaven. F. W. Robertson has called attention to the
    fact that the phrase “Son of man” (_John 5:27_; _cf._ _Dan. 7:13_)
    itself implies that Christ was more than man; it would have been
    an impertinence for him to have proclaimed himself Son of man,
    unless he had claimed to be something more; could not every human
    being call himself the same? When one takes this for his
    characteristic designation, as Jesus did, he implies that there is
    something strange in his being Son of man; that this is not his
    original condition and dignity; in other words, that he is also
    Son of God.

    It corroborates the argument from Scripture, to find that
    Christian experience instinctively recognizes Christ’s Godhead,
    and that Christian history shows a new conception of the dignity
    of childhood and of womanhood, of the sacredness of human life,
    and of the value of a human soul,—all arising from the belief
    that, in Christ, the Godhead honored human nature by taking it
    into perpetual union with itself, by bearing its guilt and
    punishment, and by raising it up from the dishonors of the grave
    to the glory of heaven. We need both the humanity and the deity of
    Christ; the humanity,—for, as Michael Angelo’s Last Judgment
    witnesses, the ages that neglect Christ’s humanity must have some
    human advocate and Savior, and find a poor substitute for the
    ever-present Christ in Mariolatry, the invocation of the saints,
    and the “real presence” of the wafer and the mass; the deity,—for,
    unless Christ is God, he cannot offer an infinite atonement for
    us, nor bring about a real union between our souls and the Father.
    Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:325-327 (Syst. Doct., 3:221-223)—“Mary
    and the saints took Christ’s place as intercessors in heaven;
    transubstantiation furnished a present Christ on earth.” It might
    almost be said that Mary was made a fourth person in the Godhead.

    Harnack, Das Wesen des Christenthums: “It is no paradox, and
    neither is it rationalism, but the simple expression of the actual
    position as it lies before us in the gospels: Not the Son, but the
    Father alone, has a place in the gospel as Jesus proclaimed it”;
    _i. e._, Jesus has no place, authority, supremacy, in the
    gospel,—the gospel is a Christianity without Christ; see Nicoll,
    The Church’s One Foundation, 48. And this in the face of Jesus’
    own words: “_Come unto me_” (_Mat. 11:28_); “_the Son of man ...
    shall sit on the throne of his glory: and before him shall be
    gathered all the nations_” (_Mat. 25:31, 32_); “_he that hath seen
    me hath seen the Father_” (_John 14:9_); “_he that obeyeth not the
    Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him_”
    (_John 3:36_). Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, advocates the
    nut-theory in distinction from the onion-theory of doctrine. Does
    the fourth gospel appear a second century production? What of it?
    There is an evolution of doctrine as to Christ. “Harnack does not
    conceive of Christianity as a seed, at first a plant in
    potentiality, then a real plant, identical from the beginning of
    its evolution to the final limit, and from the root to the summit
    of the stem. He conceives of it rather as a fruit ripe, or over
    ripe, that must be peeled to reach the incorruptible kernel, and
    he peels his fruit so thoroughly that little remains at the end.”
    R. W. Gilder: “If Jesus is a man, And only a man, I say That of
    all mankind I will cleave to him, And will cleave alway. If Jesus
    Christ is a God, And the only God, I swear I will follow him
    through heaven and hell, The earth, the sea, and the air.”

    On Christ manifested in Nature, see Jonathan Edwards, Observations
    on Trinity, ed. Smyth, 92-97—“He who, by his immediate influence,
    gives being every moment, and by his Spirit actuates the world,
    because he inclines to communicate himself and his excellencies,
    doth doubtless communicate his excellency to bodies, as far as
    there is any consent or analogy. And the beauty of face and sweet
    airs in men are not always the effect of the corresponding
    excellencies of the mind; yet the beauties of nature are really
    emanations or shadows of the excellencies of the Son of God. So
    that, when we are delighted with flowery meadows and gentle
    breezes of wind, we may consider that we see only the emanations
    of the sweet benevolence of Jesus Christ. When we behold the
    fragrant rose and lily, we see his love and purity. So the green
    trees and fields, and singing of birds, are the emanations of his
    infinite joy and benignity. The easiness and naturalness of trees
    and vines are shadows of his beauty and loveliness. The crystal
    rivers and murmuring streams are the footsteps of his favor, grace
    and beauty. When we behold the light and brightness of the sun,
    the golden edges of an evening cloud, or the beauteous bow, we
    behold the adumbrations of his glory and goodness, and in the blue
    sky, of his mildness and gentleness. There are also many things
    wherein we may behold his awful majesty: in the sun in his
    strength, in comets, in thunder, in the hovering thunder clouds,
    in ragged rocks and the brows of mountains. That beauteous light
    wherewith the world is filled in a clear day is a lively shadow of
    his spotless holiness, and happiness and delight in communicating
    himself. And doubtless this is a reason why Christ is compared so
    often to these things, and called by their names, as the Sun of
    Righteousness, the Morning Star, the Rose of Sharon, and Lily of
    the Valley, the apple tree among trees of the wood, a bundle of
    myrrh, a roe, or a young hart. By this we may discover the beauty
    of many of those metaphors and similes which to an unphilosophical
    person do seem so uncouth. In like manner, when we behold the
    beauty of man’s body in its perfection, we still see like
    emanations of Christ’s divine perfections, although they do not
    always flow from the mental excellencies of the person that has
    them. But we see the most proper image of the beauty of Christ
    when we see beauty in the human soul.”

    On the deity of Christ, see Shedd, History of Doctrine, 1:262,
    351; Liddon, Our Lord’s Divinity, 127, 207, 458; Thomasius,
    Christi Person und Werk, 1:61-64; Hovey, God with Us, 17-23;
    Bengel on _John 10:30_. On the two natures of Christ, see A. H.
    Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 201-212.


III. The Union of the two Natures in one Person.


Distinctly as the Scriptures represent Jesus Christ to have been possessed
of a divine nature and of a human nature, each unaltered in essence and
undivested of its normal attributes and powers, they with equal
distinctness represent Jesus Christ as a single undivided personality in
whom these two natures are vitally and inseparably united, so that he is
properly, not God and man, but the God-man. The two natures are bound
together, not by the moral tie of friendship, nor by the spiritual tie
which links the believer to his Lord, but by a bond unique and
inscrutable, which constitutes them one person with a single consciousness
and will,—this consciousness and will including within their possible
range both the human nature and the divine.


    Whiton, Gloria Patri, 79-81, would give up speaking of the union
    of God _and_ man; for this, he says, involves the fallacy of two
    natures. He would speak rather of the manifestation of God _in_
    man. The ordinary Unitarian insists that Christ was “a mere man.”
    As if there could be such a thing as _mere_ man, exclusive of
    aught above him and beyond him, self-centered and self-moved. We
    can sympathize with Whiton’s objection to the phrase “God _and_
    man,” because of its implication of an imperfect union. But we
    prefer the term “God-man” to the phrase “God _in_ man,” for the
    reason that this latter phrase might equally describe the union of
    Christ with every believer. Christ is “the only begotten,” in a
    sense that every believer is not. Yet we can also sympathize with
    Dean Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:115—“Alas that a Church that has
    so divine a service should keep its long list of Articles! I am
    strengthened more than ever in my opinion that there is only
    needed, that there only should be, one, _viz_., ‘I believe that
    Christ is both God and man.’ ”


1. Proof of this Union.


(_a_) Christ uniformly speaks of himself, and is spoken of, as a single
person. There is no interchange of “I” and “thou” between the human and
the divine natures, such as we find between the persons of the Trinity
(John 17:23). Christ never uses the plural number in referring to himself,
unless it be in John 3:11—“we speak that we do know,”—and even here “we”
is more probably used as inclusive of the disciples. 1 John 4:2—“is come
in the flesh”—is supplemented by John 1:14—“became flesh”; and these texts
together assure us that Christ so came in human nature as to make that
nature an element in his single personality.


    _John 17:23_—“_I in them, and thou in me, that they may be
    perfected into one; that the world may know that thou didst send
    me, and lovedst them, even as thou lovedst me_”; _3:11_—“_We speak
    that which we know, and bear witness of that which we have seen;
    and ye receive not our witness_”; _1 John 4:2_—“_every spirit that
    confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God_”;
    _John 1:14_—“_And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us_”—he
    so came in human nature that human nature and himself formed, not
    two persons, but one person.

    In the Trinity, the Father is objective to the Son, the Son to the
    Father, and both to the Spirit. But Christ’s divinity is never
    objective to his humanity, nor his humanity to his divinity.
    Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 97—“He is not so much God
    _and_ man, as God _in_, and _through_, and _as_ man. He is one
    indivisible personality throughout.... We are to study the divine
    in and through the human. By looking for the divine side by side
    with the human, instead of discerning the divine within the human,
    we miss the significance of them both.” We mistake when we say
    that certain words of Jesus with regard to his ignorance of the
    day of the end (_Mark 13:32_) were spoken by his human nature,
    while certain other words with regard to his being in heaven at
    the same time that he was on earth (_John 3:13_) were spoken by
    his divine nature. There was never any separation of the human
    from the divine, or of the divine from the human,—all Christ’s
    words were spoken, and all Christ’s deeds were done, by the one
    person, the God-man. See Forrest, The Authority of Christ, 49-100.


(_b_) The attributes and powers of both natures are ascribed to the one
Christ, and conversely the works and dignities of the one Christ are
ascribed to either of the natures, in a way inexplicable, except upon the
principle that these two natures are organically and indissolubly united
in a single person (examples of the former usage are Rom. 1:3 and 1 Pet.
3:18; of the latter, 1 Tim. 2:5 and Heb. 1:2, 3). Hence we can say, on the
one hand, that the God-man existed before Abraham, yet was born in the
reign of Augustus Cæsar, and that Jesus Christ wept, was weary, suffered,
died, yet is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever; on the other hand,
that a divine Savior redeemed us upon the cross, and that the human Christ
is present with his people even to the end of the world (Eph. 1:23; 4:10;
Mat. 28:20).


    _Rom. 1:3_—“_his Son, who was born of the seed of David according
    to the flesh_”; _1 Pet. 3:18_—“_Christ also suffered for sins once
    ... being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the
    spirit_”; _1 Tim. 2:5_—“_one mediator also between God and men,
    himself man, Christ Jesus_”; _Heb. 1:2, 3_—“_his Son, whom he
    appointed heir of all things ... who being the effulgence of his
    glory ... when he had made purification of sins, sat down on the
    right hand of the Majesty on high_”; _Eph. 1:22, 23_—“_put all
    things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over
    all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him
    that filleth all in all_”; _4:10_—“_He that descended is the same
    also that ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill
    all things_”; _Mat. 28:20_—“_lo, I am with you always, even unto
    the end of the world._”

    Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 142-145—“Mary was Theotokos, but she
    was not the mother of Christ’s Godhood, but of his humanity. We
    speak of the blood of God the Son, but it is not as God that he
    has blood. The hands of the babe Jesus made the worlds, only in
    the sense that he whose hands they were was the Agent in
    creation.... Spirit and body in us are not merely put side by
    side, and insulated from each other. The spirit does not have the
    rheumatism, and the reverent body does not commune with God. The
    reason why they affect each other is because they are equally
    ours.... Let us avoid sensuous, fondling, modes of addressing
    Christ—modes which dishonor him and enfeeble the soul of the
    worshiper.... Let us also avoid, on the other hand, such phrases
    as ‘the dying God’, which loses the manhood in the Godhead.”
    Charles H. Spurgeon remarked that people who “dear” everybody
    reminded him of the woman who said she had been reading in “dear
    Hebrews.”


(_c_) The constant Scriptural representations of the infinite value of
Christ’s atonement and of the union of the human race with God which has
been secured in him are intelligible only when Christ is regarded, not as
a man of God, but as the God-man, in whom the two natures are so united
that what each does has the value of both.


    _1 John 2:2_—“_he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for
    ours only, but also for the whole world,_”—as John in his gospel
    proves that Jesus is the Son of God, the Word, God, so in his
    first Epistle he proves that the Son of God, the Word, God, has
    become man; _Eph. 2:16-18_—“_might reconcile them both_ [Jew and
    Gentile] _in one body unto God through the cross, having slain the
    enmity thereby; and he came and preached peace to you that were
    far off, and peace to them that were nigh: for through him we both
    have our access in one Spirit unto the Father_”; _21, 22_—“_in
    whom each several building, fitly framed together, groweth into a
    holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are builded together for
    a habitation of God in the Spirit_”; _2 Pet. 1:4_—“_that through
    these_ [promises] _ye may become partakers of the divine nature._”
    John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:107—“We cannot separate
    Christ’s divine from his human acts, without rending in twain the
    unity of his person and life.”


(_d_) It corroborates this view to remember that the universal Christian
consciousness recognizes in Christ a single and undivided personality, and
expresses this recognition in its services of song and prayer.

The foregoing proof of the union of a perfect human nature and of a
perfect divine nature in the single person of Jesus Christ suffices to
refute both the Nestorian separation of the natures and the Eutychian
confounding of them. Certain modern forms of stating the doctrine of this
union, however—forms of statement into which there enter some of the
misconceptions already noticed—need a brief examination, before we proceed
to our own attempt at elucidation.


    Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:403-411 (Syst. Doct., 3:300-308)—“Three
    ideas are included in incarnation: (1) assumption of human nature
    on the part of the Logos (_Heb. 2:14_—‘_partook __ of ... flesh
    and blood_’; _2 Cor. 5:19_—‘_God was in Christ_’; _Col. 2:9_—‘_in
    him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily_’); (2) new
    creation of the second Adam, by the Holy Ghost and power of the
    Highest (_Rom. 5:14_—‘_Adam’s’ transgression, who is a figure of
    him that was to come_’; _1 Cor. 15:22_—‘_as in Adam all die, so
    also in Christ shall all be made alive_’; _15:45_—‘_The first man
    Adam became a living soul, the last Adam became a life-giving
    Spirit_’; _Luke 1:35_—‘_the Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and
    the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee_’; _Mat.
    1:20_—‘_that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit_’);
    (3) becoming flesh, without contraction of deity or humanity (_1
    Tim. 3:16_—‘_who was manifested in the flesh_’; _1 John
    4:2_—‘_Jesus Christ is come in the flesh_’; _John 6:41, 51_—‘_I am
    the bread which came down out of heaven.... I am the living
    bread_’; _2 John 7_—‘_Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh_’; _John
    1:14_—‘_the word became flesh_’). This last text cannot mean: The
    Logos ceased to be what he was, and began to be only man. Nor can
    it be a mere theophany, in human form. The reality of the humanity
    is intimated, as well as the reality of the Logos.”

    The Lutherans hold to a communion of the natures, as well as to an
    impartation of their properties: (1) _genus
    idiomaticum_—impartation of attributes of both natures to the one
    person; (2) _genus apotelesmaticum_ (from ἀποτέλεσμα, “that which
    is finished or completed,” _i. e._, Jesus’ work)—attributes of the
    one person imparted to each of the constituent natures. Hence Mary
    may be called “the mother of God,” as the Chalcedon symbol
    declares, “as to his humanity,” and what each nature did has the
    value of both; (3) _genus majestaticum_—attributes of one nature
    imparted to the other, yet so that the divine nature imparts to
    the human, not the human to the divine. The Lutherans do not
    believe in a _genus tapeinoticon_, _i. e._, that the human
    elements communicated themselves to the divine. The only
    communication of the human was to the person, not to the divine
    nature, of the God-man. Examples of this third _genus
    majestaticum_ are found is _John 3:13_—“_no one hath ascended into
    heaven, but he that descended out of heaven, even the Son of man,
    who is in heaven_” [here, however, Westcott and Hort, with א and
    B, omit ὁ ὢν ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ]; _5:27_—“_he gave him authority to
    execute judgment, because he is a son of man._” Of the explanation
    that this is the figure of speech called “_allæosis,_” Luther
    says: “_Allæosis_ est larva quædam diaboli, secundum cujus
    rationes ego certe nolim esse Christianus.”

    The _genus majestaticum_ is denied by the Reformed Church, on the
    ground that it does not permit a clear distinction of the natures.
    And this is one great difference between it and the Lutheran
    Church. So Hooker, in commenting upon the Son of man’s “ascending
    up where he was before,” says: “By the ‘_Son of man_’ must be
    meant the whole person of Christ, who, being man upon earth,
    filled heaven with his glorious presence; but not according to
    that nature for which the title of man is given him.” For the
    Lutheran view of this union and its results in the communion of
    natures, see Hase, Hutterus Redivivus, 11th ed., 195-197;
    Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:24, 25. For the Reformed
    view, see Turretin, loc. 13, quæst. 8; Hodge, Syst. Theol.,
    2:387-397, 407-418.


2. Modern misrepresentations of this Union.


A. Theory of an incomplete humanity.—Gess and Beecher hold that the
immaterial part in Christ’s humanity is only contracted and metamorphosed
deity.

The advocates of this view maintain that the divine Logos reduced himself
to the condition and limits of human nature, and thus literally became a
human soul. The theory differs from Apollinarianism, in that it does not
necessarily presuppose a trichotomous view of man’s nature. While
Apollinarianism, however, denied the human origin only of Christ’s πνεῦμα,
this theory extends the denial to his entire immaterial being,—his body
alone being derived from the Virgin. It is held, in slightly varying
forms, by the Germans, Hofmann and Ebrard, as well as by Gess; and Henry
Ward Beecher was its chief representative in America.


    Gess holds that Christ gave up his eternal holiness and divine
    self-consciousness, to become man, so that he never during his
    earthly life thought, spoke, or wrought as God, but was at all
    times destitute of divine attributes. See Gess, Scripture Doctrine
    of the Person of Christ; and synopsis of his view, by Reubelt, in
    Bib. Sac., 1870:1-32; Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:234-241, and 2:20;
    Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:144-151, and in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.:
    Jesus Christ, der Gottmensch; also Liebner, Christliche Dogmatik.
    Henry Ward Beecher, in his Life of Jesus the Christ, chap. 3,
    emphasizes the word “_flesh,_” in _John 1:14_ and declares the
    passage to mean that the divine Spirit enveloped himself in a
    human _body_, and in that condition was subject to the
    indispensable limitations of material laws. All these advocates of
    the view hold that Deity was dormant, or paralyzed, in Christ
    during his earthly life. Its essence is there, but not its
    efficiency at any time.


Against this theory we urge the following objections:

(_a_) It rests upon a false interpretation of the passage John 1:14—ὁ
λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο. The word σάρξ here has its common New Testament
meaning. It designates neither soul nor body alone, but human nature in
its totality (_cf._ John 3:6—τὸ γεγεννημένον ἐκ τῆς σαρκὸς σάρξ ἐστιν;
Rom. 7:18—οὐκ οἰκεῖ ἐν ἐμοί, τοῦτ᾽ ἔστιν ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου, ἀγαθόν). That
ἐγένετο does not imply a transmutation of the λόγος into human nature, or
into a human soul, is evident from ἐσκήνωσεν which follows—an allusion to
the Shechinah of the Mosaic tabernacle; and from the parallel passage 1
John 4:2—ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα—where we are taught not only the oneness of
Christ’s person, but the distinctness of the constituent natures.


    _John 1:14_—“_the Word became flesh, and dwelt_ [tabernacled]
    _among us, and we behold his glory_”; _3:6_—“_That which is born
    of the flesh is flesh_”; _Rom., 7:18_—“_in me, that is, in my
    flesh, dwelleth no good thing_”; _1 John 4:2_—“_Jesus Christ is
    come in the flesh._” Since “_flesh_,” in Scriptural usage, denotes
    human nature in its entirety, there is as little reason to infer
    from these passages a change of the Logos into a human body, as a
    change of the Logos into a human soul. There is no curtailed
    humanity in Christ. One advantage of the monistic doctrine is that
    it avoids this error. Omnipresence is the presence of the whole of
    God in every place. _Ps. 85:9_—“_Surely his salvation is nigh them
    that fear him, That glory may dwell in our land_”—was fulfilled
    when Christ, the true Shekinah, tabernacled in human flesh and men
    “_beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father,
    full of grace and truth_” (_John 1:14_). And Paul can say in _2
    Cor. 12:9_—“_Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my
    weaknesses, that the power of Christ may spread a tabernacle over
    me._”


(_b_) It contradicts the two great classes of Scripture passages already
referred to, which assert on the one hand the divine knowledge and power
of Christ and his consciousness of oneness with the Father, and on the
other hand the completeness of his human nature and its derivation from
the stock of Israel and the seed of Abraham (Mat. 1:1-16; Heb. 2:16). Thus
it denies both the true humanity, and the true deity, of Christ.


    See the Scripture passages cited in proof of the Deity of Christ,
    pages 305-315. Gess himself acknowledges that, if the passages in
    which Jesus avers his divine knowledge and power and his
    consciousness of oneness with the Father refer to his earthly
    life, his theory is overthrown. “Apollinarianism had a certain
    sort of grotesque grandeur, in giving to the human body and soul
    of Christ an infinite, divine πνεῦμα. It maintained at least the
    divine side of Christ’s person. But the theory before us denies
    both sides.” While it so curtails deity that it is no proper
    deity, it takes away from humanity all that is valuable in
    humanity; for a manhood that consists only in body is no proper
    manhood. Such manhood is like the “half length” portrait which
    depicted only the _lower half_ of the man. _Mat. 1:1-16_, the
    genealogy of Jesus, and _Heb. 2:16_—“_taketh hold of the seed of
    Abraham_”—intimate that Christ took all that belonged to human
    nature.


(_c_) It is inconsistent with the Scriptural representations of God’s
immutability, in maintaining that the Logos gives up the attributes of
Godhead, and his place and office as second person of the Trinity, in
order to contract himself into the limits of humanity. Since attributes
and substance are correlative terms, it is impossible to hold that the
substance of God is in Christ, so long as he does not possess divine
attributes. As we shall see hereafter, however, the possession of divine
attributes by Christ does not necessarily imply his constant exercise of
them. His humiliation indeed, consisted in his giving up their independent
exercise.


    See Dorner, Unveränderlichkeit Gottes, in Jahrbuch für deutsche
    Theologie, 1:361; 2:440; 3:579; esp. 1:390-412—“Gess holds that,
    during the thirty-three years of Jesus’ earthly life, the Trinity
    was altered; the Father no more poured his fulness into the Son;
    the Son no more, with the Father, sent forth the Holy Spirit; the
    world was upheld and governed by Father and Spirit alone, without
    the mediation of the Son; the Father ceased to beget the Son. He
    says the Father alone has _aseity_; he is the only Monas. The
    Trinity is a family, whose head is the Father, but whose number
    and condition is variable. To Gess, it is indifferent whether the
    Trinity consists of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or (as during
    Jesus’ life) of only one. But this is a Trinity in which two
    members are accidental. A Trinity that can get along without one
    of its members is not the Scriptural Trinity. The Father depends
    on the Son, and the Spirit depends on the Son, as much as the Son
    depends on the Father. To take away the Son is to take away the
    Father and the Spirit. This giving up of the actuality of his
    attributes, even of his holiness, on the part of the Logos, is in
    order to make it possible for Christ to sin. But can we ascribe
    the possibility of sin to a being who is really God? The reality
    of temptation requires us to postulate a veritable human soul.”


(_d_) It is destructive of the whole Scriptural scheme of salvation, in
that it renders impossible any experience of human nature on the part of
the divine,—for when God becomes man he ceases to be God; in that it
renders impossible any sufficient atonement on the part of human
nature,—for mere humanity, even though its essence be a contracted and
dormant deity, is not capable of a suffering which shall have infinite
value; in that it renders impossible any proper union of the human race
with God in the person of Jesus Christ,—for where true deity and true
humanity are both absent, there can be no union between the two.


    See Dorner, Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 1:390—“Upon this theory only
    an exhibitory atonement can be maintained. There is no real
    humanity that, in the strength of divinity, can bring a sacrifice
    to God. Not substitution, therefore, but obedience, on this view,
    reconciles us to God. Even if it is said that God’s Spirit is the
    real soul in all men, this will not help the matter; for we should
    then have to make an essential distinction between the indwelling
    of the Spirit in the unregenerate, the regenerate, and Christ,
    respectively. But in that case we lose the likeness between
    Christ’s nature and our own,—Christ’s being preëxistent, and ours
    not. Without this pantheistic doctrine, Christ’s unlikeness to us
    is yet greater; for he is really a wandering God, clothed in a
    human body, and cannot properly be called a human soul. We have
    then no middle-point between the body and the Godhead; and in the
    state of exaltation, we have no manhood at all,—only the infinite
    Logos, in a glorified body as his garment.”

    Isaac Watts’s theory of a preëxistent humanity in like manner
    implies that humanity is originally in deity; it does not proceed
    from a human stock, but from a divine; between the human and the
    divine there is no proper distinction; hence there can be no
    proper redeeming of humanity; see Bib. Sac., 1875:421. A. A.
    Hodge, Pop. Lectures, 226—“If Christ does not take a human πνεῦμα,
    he cannot be a high-priest who feels with us in all our
    infirmities, having been tempted like us.” Mason, Faith of the
    Gospel, 138—“The conversion of the Godhead into flesh would have
    only added one more man to the number of men—a sinless one,
    perhaps, among sinners—but it would have effected no union of God
    and men.” On the theory in general, see Hovey, God with Us, 62-69;
    Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:430-440; Philippi, Glaubenslehre,
    4:386-408; Biedermann, Christliche Dogmatik, 356-359; Bruce,
    Humiliation of Christ, 187, 230; Schaff, Christ and Christianity,
    115-119.


B. Theory of a gradual incarnation.—Dorner and Rothe hold that the union
between the divine and the human natures is not completed by the
incarnating act.

The advocates of this view maintain that the union between the two natures
is accomplished by a gradual communication of the fulness of the divine
Logos to the man Christ Jesus. This communication is mediated by the human
consciousness of Jesus. Before the human consciousness begins, the
personality of the Logos is not yet divine-human. The personal union
completes itself only gradually, as the human consciousness is
sufficiently developed to appropriate the divine.


    Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:660 (Syst. Doct., 4:125)—“In order that
    Christ might show his high-priestly love by suffering and death,
    the different sides of his personality yet stood to one another in
    relative separableness. The divine-human union in him,
    accordingly, was before his death not yet completely actualized,
    although its completion was from the beginning divinely assured.”
    2:431 (Syst. Doct., 3:328)—“In spite of this _becoming_, inside of
    the _Unio_, the Logos is from the beginning united with Jesus in
    the deepest foundation of his being, and Jesus’ life has ever been
    a divine-human one, in that a present receptivity for the Godhead
    has never remained without its satisfaction.... Even the
    unconscious humanity of the babe turns receptively to the Logos,
    as the plant turns toward the light. The initial union makes
    Christ already the God-man, but not in such a way as to prevent a
    subsequent _becoming_; for surely he did become omniscient and
    incapable of death, as he was not at the beginning.”

    2:464 _sq._ (Syst. Doct., 3:363 _sq._)—“The actual life of God, as
    the Logos, reaches beyond the beginnings of the divine-human life.
    For if the _Unio_ is to complete itself by growth, the relation of
    impartation and reception must continue. In his personal
    consciousness, there was a distinction between duty and being. The
    will had to take up practically, and turn into action, each new
    revelation or perception of God’s will on the part of intellect or
    conscience. He had to maintain, with his will, each revelation of
    his nature and work. In his twelfth year, he says: ‘_I must be
    about my Father’s business._’ To Satan’s temptation: ‘_Art thou
    God’s Son?_’ he must reply with an affirmation that suppresses all
    doubt, though he will not prove it by miracle. This moral growth,
    as it was the will of the Father, was his task. He hears from his
    Father, and obeys. In him, imperfect knowledge was never the same
    with false conception. In us, ignorance has error for its obverse
    side. But this was never the case with him, though he grew in
    knowledge unto the end.” Dorner’s view of the Person of Christ may
    be found in his Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 5:248-261;
    Glaubenslehre, 2:347-474 (Syst. Doct., 3:243-373).

    A summary of his views is also given in Princeton Rev.,
    1873:71-87—Dorner illustrates the relation between the humanity
    and the deity of Christ by the relation between God and man, in
    conscience, and in the witness of the Spirit. “So far as the human
    element was immature or incomplete, so far the Logos was not
    present. Knowledge advanced to unity with the Logos, and the human
    will afterwards confirmed the best and highest knowledge. A
    resignation of both the Logos and the human nature to the union is
    involved in the incarnation. The growth continues until the idea,
    and the reality, of divine humanity perfectly coincide. The
    assumption of unity was gradual, in the life of Christ. His
    exaltation began with the perfection of this development.” Rothe’s
    statement of the theory can be found in his Dogmatik, 2:49-182;
    and in Bib. Sac., 27:386.


It is objectionable for the following reasons:

(_a_) The Scripture plainly teaches that that which was born of Mary was
as completely Son of God as Son of man (Luke 1:35); and that in the
incarnating act, and not at his resurrection, Jesus Christ became the
God-man (Phil. 2:7). But this theory virtually teaches the birth of a man
who subsequently and gradually became the God-man, by consciously
appropriating the Logos to whom he sustained ethical relations—relations
with regard to which the Scripture is entirely silent. Its radical error
is that of mistaking an incomplete consciousness of the union for an
incomplete union.


    In _Luke 1:35_—“_the holy thing which is begotten shall be called
    the Son of God_”—and _Phil. 2:7_—“_emptied himself, taking the
    form of servant, being made in the likeness of men_”—we have
    evidence that Christ was both Son of God and Son of man from the
    very beginning of his earthly life. But, according to Dorner,
    before there was any human consciousness, the personality of Jesus
    Christ was not divine-human.


(_b_) Since consciousness and will belong to personality, as distinguished
from nature, the hypothesis of a mutual, conscious, and voluntary
appropriation of divinity by humanity and of humanity by divinity, during
the earthly life of Christ, is but a more subtle form of the Nestorian
doctrine of a double personality. It follows, moreover, that as these two
personalities do not become absolutely one until the resurrection, the
death of the man Jesus Christ, to whom the Logos has not yet fully united
himself, cannot possess an infinite atoning efficacy.


    Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:68-70, objects to Dorner’s
    view, that it “leads us to a man who is in intimate communion with
    God,—a man of God, but not a man who is God.” He maintains,
    against Dorner, that “the union between the divine and human in
    Christ exists before the consciousness of it.” 193-195—Dorner’s
    view “makes each element, the divine and the human, long for the
    other, and reach its truth and reality only in the other. This, so
    far as the divine is concerned, is very like pantheism. Two
    _willing_ personalities are presupposed, with ethical relation to
    each other,—two persons, at least at the first. Says Dorner: ‘So
    long as the manhood is yet unconscious, the person of the Logos is
    not yet the central _ego_ of this man. At the beginning, the Logos
    does not impart himself, so far as he is person or
    self-consciousness. He keeps apart by himself, just in proportion
    as the manhood fails in power of perception.’ At the beginning,
    then, this man is not yet the God-man; the Logos only works in
    him, and on him. ‘The _unio personalis_ grows and completes
    itself,—becomes ever more all-sided and complete. Till the
    resurrection, there is a relative separability still.’ Thus
    Dorner. But the Scripture knows nothing of an ethical relation of
    the divine, to the human in Christ’s person. It knows only of one
    divine-human subject.” See also Thomasius, 2:80-92.


(_c_) While this theory asserts a final complete union of God and man in
Jesus Christ, it renders this union far more difficult to reason, by
involving the merging of two persons in one, rather than the union of two
natures in one person. We have seen, moreover, that the Scripture gives no
countenance to the doctrine of a double personality during the earthly
life of Christ. The God-man never says: “I and the Logos are one”; “he
that hath seen me hath seen the Logos”; “the Logos is greater than I”; “I
go to the Logos.” In the absence of all Scripture evidence in favor of
this theory, we must regard the rational and dogmatic arguments against it
as conclusive.


    Liebner, in Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 3:349-366, urges, against
    Dorner, that there is no sign in Scripture of such communion
    between the two natures of Christ as exists between the three
    persons of the Trinity. Philippi also objects to Dorner’s view:
    (1) that it implies a pantheistic identity of essence in both God
    and man; (2) that it makes the resurrection, not the birth, the
    time when the Word became flesh; (3) that it does not explain how
    two personalities can become one; see Philippi, Glaubenslehre,
    4:364-380. Philippi quotes Dorner as saying: “The unity of essence
    of God and man is the great discovery of this age.” But that
    Dorner was no pantheist appears from the following quotations from
    his Hist. Doctrine of the Person of Christ, II, 3:5, 23, 69,
    115—“Protestant philosophy has brought about the recognition of
    the essential connection and unity of the human and the divine....
    To the theology of the present day, the divine and human are not
    mutually exclusive but connected magnitudes, having an inward
    relation to each other and reciprocally confirming each other, by
    which view both separation and identification are set aside....
    And now the common task of carrying on the union of faculties and
    qualities to a union of essence was devolved on both. The
    difference between them is that only God has aseity.... Were we to
    set our face against every view which represents the divine and
    human as intimately and essentially related, we should be wilfully
    throwing away the gains of centuries, and returning to a soil
    where a Christology is an absolute impossibility.”

    See also Dorner, System, 1:123—“Faith postulates a difference
    between the world and God, between whom religion seeks a union.
    Faith does not wish to be a mere relation to itself or to its own
    representations and thoughts. That would be a monologue; faith
    desires a dialogue. Therefore it does not consent with a monism
    which recognizes only God or the world (with the ego). The duality
    (not the dualism, which is opposed to such monism, but which has
    no desire to oppose the rational demand for unity) is in fact a
    condition of true and vital unity.” The _unity_ is the foundation
    of religion; the _difference_ is the foundation of morality.
    Morality and religion are but different manifestations of the same
    principle. Man’s moral endeavor is the working of God within him.
    God can be revealed only in the perfect character and life of
    Jesus Christ. See Jones, Robert Browning, 146.

    Stalker, Imago Christi: “Christ was not half a God and half a man,
    but he was perfectly God and perfectly man.” Moberly, Atonement
    and Personality, 95—“The Incarnate did not oscillate between being
    God and being man. He was indeed _always_ God, and yet never
    otherwise God than as expressed within the possibilities of human
    consciousness and character.” He knew that he was something more
    than he was as incarnate. His miracles showed what humanity might
    become. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 14—“The divinity
    of Christ was not that of a divine nature in local or mechanical
    juxtaposition with a human, but of a divine nature that suffused,
    blended, identified itself with the thoughts, feelings, volitions
    of a human individuality. Whatever of divinity could not
    organically unite itself with and breathe through a human spirit,
    was not and could not be present in one who, whatever else he was,
    was really and truly human.” See also Biedermann, Dogmatik,
    351-353; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:428-430.


3. The real nature of this Union.


(_a_) Its great importance.—While the Scriptures represent the person of
Christ as the crowning mystery of the Christian scheme (Matt 11:27; Col.
1:27; 2:2; 1 Tim. 3:16), they also incite us to its study (John 17:3;
20:27; Luke 24:39; Phil. 3:8, 10). This is the more needful, since Christ
is not only the central point of Christianity, but is Christianity
itself—the embodied reconciliation and union between man and God. The
following remarks are offered, not as fully explaining, but only as in
some respects relieving, the difficulties of the subject.


    _Matt. 11:27_—“_no one knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither
    doth any know the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the
    Son willeth to reveal him._” Here it seems to be intimated that
    the mystery of the nature of the Son is even greater than that of
    the Father. Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:408—The Person of Christ is in
    some respects more baffling to reason than the Trinity. Yet there
    is a profane neglect, as well as a profane curiosity: _Col.
    1:27_—“_the riches of the glory of this mystery ... which is
    Christ in you, the hope of glory_”; _2:2, 3_—“_the mystery of God,
    even Christ, in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge
    hidden_”; _1 Tim. 3:16_—“_great is the mystery of godliness; He
    who was manifested in the flesh_”—here the Vulgate, the Latin
    Fathers, and Buttmann make μυστήριον the antecedent of ὅς, the
    relative taking the _natural_ gender of its antecedent, and
    μυστήριον referring to Christ; _Heb. 2:11_—“_both he that
    sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one_ [not
    father, but race, or substance]” (_cf._ _Acts 17:26_—“_he made of
    one every nation of men_”)—an allusion to the solidarity of the
    race and Christ’s participation in all that belongs to us.

    _John 17:3_—“_this is life eternal, that they should know thee the
    only true God, and him who thou didst send, even Jesus Christ_”;
    _20:27_—“_Reach hither thy finger, and see my hands; and reach
    hither thy hand, and put it into my side: and be not faithless,
    but believing_”; _Luke 24:39_—“_See my hands and my feet, that it
    is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and
    bones, as ye behold me having_”; _Phil. 3:8, 10_—“_I count all
    things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ
    Jesus my Lord ... that I may know him_”; _1 John 1:1_—“_that which
    we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which
    we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life._”

    Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 254, 255—“Ranke said that Alexander
    was one of the few men in whom biography is identical with
    universal history. The words apply far better to Christ.” Crane,
    Religion of To-morrow, 267—“Religion being merely the personality
    of God, Christianity the personality of Christ.” Pascal: “Jesus
    Christ is the centre of everything and the object of everything,
    and he who does not know him knows nothing of the order of nature
    and nothing of himself.” Goethe in his last years wrote: “Humanity
    cannot take a retrograde step, and we may say that the Christian
    religion, now that it has once appeared, can never again
    disappear; now that it has once found a divine embodiment, cannot
    again be dissolved.” H. B. Smith, that man of clear and devout
    thought, put his whole doctrine into one sentence: “Let us come to
    Jesus,—the person of Christ is the centre of theology.” Dean
    Stanley never tired of quoting as his own Confession of Faith the
    words of John Bunyan: “Blest Cross—blest Sepulchre—blest rather
    he—The man who there was put to shame for me!” And Charles Wesley
    wrote on Catholic Love: “Weary of all this wordy strife, These
    motions, forms, and modes and names, To thee, the Way, the Truth,
    the Life, Whose love my simple heart inflames—Divinely taught, at
    last I fly, With thee and thine to live and die.”

    “We have two great lakes, named Erie and Ontario, and these are
    connected by the Niagara River through which Erie pours its waters
    into Ontario. The whole Christian Church throughout the ages has
    been called the overflow of Jesus Christ, who is infinitely
    greater than it. Let Lake Erie be the symbol of Christ, the
    pre-existent Logos, the Eternal Word, God revealed in the
    universe. Let Niagara River be a picture to us of this same Christ
    now confined to the narrow channel of His manifestation in the
    flesh, but within those limits showing the same eastward current
    and downward gravitation which men perceived so imperfectly
    before. The tremendous cataract, with its waters plunging into the
    abyss and shaking the very earth, is the suffering and death of
    the Son of God, which for the first time makes palpable to human
    hearts the forces of righteousness and love operative in the
    Divine nature from the beginning. The law of universal life has
    been made manifest; now it is seen that justice and judgment are
    the foundations of God’s throne; that God’s righteousness
    everywhere and always makes penalty to follow sin; that the love
    which creates and upholds sinners must itself be numbered with the
    transgressors, and must bear their iniquities. Niagara has
    demonstrated the gravitation of Lake Erie. And not in vain. For
    from Niagara there widens out another peaceful lake. Ontario is
    the offspring and likeness of Erie. So redeemed humanity is the
    overflow of Jesus Christ, but only of Jesus Christ after He has
    passed through the measureless self-abandonment of His earthly
    life and of His tragic death on Calvary. As the waters of Lake
    Ontario are ever fed by Niagara, so the Church draws its life from
    the cross. And Christ’s purpose is, not that we should repeat
    Calvary, for that we can never do, but that we should reflect in
    ourselves the same onward movement and gravitation towards
    self-sacrifice which He has revealed as characterizing the very
    life of God” (A. H. Strong, Sermon before the Baptist World
    Congress, London, July 12, 1905).


(_b_) The chief problems.—These problems are the following: 1. one
personality and two natures; 2. human nature without personality; 3.
relation of the Logos to the humanity during the earthly life of Christ;
4. relation of the humanity to the Logos during the heavenly life of
Christ. We may throw light on 1, by the figure of two concentric circles;
on 2, by remembering that two earthly parents unite in producing a single
child; on 3, by the illustration of latent memory, which contains so much
more than present recollection; on 4, by the thought that body is the
manifestation of spirit, and that Christ in his heavenly state is not
confined to place.


    Luther said that we should need “new tongues” before we could
    properly set forth this doctrine,—particularly a new language with
    regard to the nature of man. The further elucidation of the
    problems mentioned above will immediately occupy our attention.
    Our investigation should not be prejudiced by the fact that the
    divine element in Jesus Christ manifests itself within human
    limitations. This is the condition of all revelation. _John
    14:9_—“_he that hath seen me hath seen the father_”; _Col.
    2:9_—“_in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily_” =
    up to the measure of human capacity to receive and to express the
    divine. _Heb. 2:11_ and _Acts 17:26_ both attribute to man a
    consubstantiality with Christ, and Christ is the manifested God.
    It is a law of hydrostatics that the smallest column of water will
    balance the largest. Lake Erie will be no higher than the water in
    the tube connected therewith. So the person of Christ reached the
    level of God, though limited in extent and environment. He was God
    manifest in the flesh.

    Robert Browning, Death in the Desert: “I say, the acknowledgment
    of God in Christ Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee All
    questions in the earth and out of it, And has so far advanced thee
    to be wise”; Epilogue to Dramatis Personæ: “That one Face, far
    from vanish, rather grows, Or decomposes but to recompose, Become
    my Universe that feels and knows.” “That face,” said Browning to
    Mrs. Orr, as he finished reading the poem, “is the face of Christ.
    That is how I feel him.” This is his answer to those victims of
    nineteenth century scepticism for whom incarnate Love has
    disappeared from the universe, carrying with it the belief in God.
    He thus attests the continued presence of God in Christ, both in
    nature and humanity. On Browning as a Christian Poet, see A. H.
    Strong, The Great Poets and their Theology, 373-447; S. Law
    Wilson, Theology of Modern Literature, 181-226.


(_c_) Reason for mystery.—The union of the two natures in Christ’s person
is necessarily inscrutable, because there are no analogies to it in our
experience. Attempts to illustrate it on the one hand from the union and
yet the distinctness of soul and body, of iron and heat, and on the other
hand from the union and yet the distinctness of Christ and the believer,
of the divine Son and the Father, are one-sided and become utterly
misleading, if they are regarded as furnishing a rationale of the union
and not simply a means of repelling objection. The first two illustrations
mentioned above lack the essential element of two natures to make them
complete: soul and body are not two natures, but one, nor are iron and
heat two substances. The last two illustrations mentioned above lack the
element of single personality: Christ and the believer are two persons,
not one, even as the Son and the Father are not one person, but two.


    The two illustrations most commonly employed are the union of soul
    and body, and the union of the believer with Christ. Each of these
    illustrates one side of the great doctrine, but each must be
    complemented by the other. The former, taken by itself, would be
    Eutychian; the latter, taken by itself, would be Nestorian. Like
    the doctrine of the Trinity, the Person of Christ is an absolutely
    unique fact, for which we can find no complete analogies. But
    neither do we know how soul and body are united. See Blunt, Dict.
    Doct. and Hist. Theol., art.: Hypostasis; Sartorius, Person and
    Work of Christ, 27-65; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 39-77; Luthardt,
    Fund. Truths, 281-334.

    A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 218, 230—“Many people are
    Unitarians, not because of the difficulties of the Trinity, but
    because of the difficulties of the Person of Christ.... The union
    of the two natures is not mechanical, as between oxygen and
    nitrogen in our air; nor chemical, as between oxygen and hydrogen
    in water; nor organic, as between our hearts and our brains; but
    personal. The best illustration is the union of body and soul in
    our own persons,—how perfectly joined they are in the great
    orator! Yet here are not two natures, but one human nature. We
    need therefore to add the illustration of the union between the
    believer and Christ.” And here too we must confess the
    imperfection of the analogy, for Christ and the believer are two
    persons, and not one. The person of the God-man is unique and
    without adequate parallel. But this constitutes its dignity and
    glory.


(_d_) Ground of possibility.—The possibility of the union of deity and
humanity in one person is grounded in the original creation of man in the
divine image. Man’s kinship to God, in other words, his possession of a
rational and spiritual nature, is the condition of incarnation. Brute-life
is incapable of union with God. But human nature is capable of the divine,
in the sense not only that it lives, moves, and has its being in God, but
that God may unite himself indissolubly to it and endue it with divine
powers, while yet it remains all the more truly human. Since the moral
image of God in human nature has been lost by sin, Christ, the perfect
image of God after which man was originally made, restores that lost image
by uniting himself to humanity and filling it with his divine life and
love.


    _2 Pet. 1:4_—“_partakers of the divine nature._” Creation and
    providence do not furnish the last limit of God’s indwelling.
    Beyond these, there is the spiritual union between the believer
    and Christ, and even beyond this, there is the unity of God and
    man in the person of Jesus Christ. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:283
    (Syst. Doct., 3:180)—“Humanity in Christ is related to divinity,
    as woman to man in marriage. It is receptive, but it is exalted by
    receiving. Christ is the offspring of the [marriage] covenant
    between God and Israel.” _Ib._, 2:403-411 (Syst. Doct.,
    3:301-308)—“The question is: How can Christ be both Creator and
    creature? The Logos, as such, stands over against the creature as
    a distinct object. How can he become, and be, that which exists
    only as object of his activity and inworking? Can the cause become
    its own effect? The problem is solved, only by remembering that
    the divine and human, though distinct from each other, are not to
    be thought of as foreign to each other and mutually exclusive. The
    very thing that distinguishes them binds them together. Their
    essential distinction is that God has aseity, while man has simply
    dependence. ‘_Deep calleth unto deep_’ (_Ps. 42:7_)—the deep of
    the divine riches, and the deep of human poverty, call to each
    other. ‘From me a cry,—from him reply.’ God’s infinite resources
    and man’s infinite need, God’s measureless supply and man’s
    boundless receptivity, attract each other, until they unite in him
    in whom dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. The mutual
    attraction is of an ethical sort, but the divine love has ‘_first
    loved_’ (_1 John 4:19_).

    “The new second creation is therefore not merely, like the first
    creation, one that distinguishes from God,—it is one that unites
    with God. Nature is distinct from God, yet God moves and works in
    nature. Much more does human nature find its only true reality, or
    realization, in union with God. God’s uniting act does not violate
    or unmake it, but rather first causes it to be what, in God’s
    idea, it was meant to be.” Incarnation is therefore the very
    fulfilment of the idea of humanity. The supernatural assumption of
    humanity is the most natural of all things. Man is not a mere
    tangent to God, but an empty vessel to be filled from the infinite
    fountain. Natura humana in Christo capax divinæ. See Talbot, in
    Bap. Quar., 1868:129; Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 270.

    God could not have become an angel, or a tree, or a stone. But he
    could become man, because man was made in his image. God in man,
    as Phillips Brooks held, is the absolutely natural. Channing said
    that “all minds are of one family.” E. B. Andrews: “Divinity and
    humanity are not contradictory predicates. If this had been
    properly understood, there would have been no Unitarian movement.
    Man is in a true sense divine. This is also true of Christ. But he
    is infinitely further along in the divine nature than we are. If
    we say his divinity is a new kind, then the new kind arises out of
    the degree.” “Were not the eye itself a sun, No light for it could
    ever shine: By nothing godlike could the soul be won, Were not the
    soul itself divine.”

    John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:165—“A smaller circle
    may represent a larger in respect of its circularity; but a
    circle, small or large, cannot be the image of a square.” ...
    2:101—“God would not be God without union with man, and man would
    not be man without union with God. Immanent in the spirits he has
    made, he shares their pains and sorrows.... Showing the infinite
    element in man, Christ attracts us toward his own moral
    excellence.” Lyman Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist,
    190—“Incarnation is the indwelling of God in his children, of
    which the type and pattern is seen in him who is at once the
    manifestation of God to man, and the revelation to men of what
    humanity is to be when God’s work in the world is done—perfect God
    and perfect man, because God perfectly dwelling in a perfect man.”

    We have quoted these latter utterances, not because we regard them
    as admitting the full truth with regard to the union of the divine
    and human in Christ; but because they recognize the essential
    likeness of the human to the divine, and so help our understanding
    of the union between the two. We go further than the writers
    quoted, in maintaining not merely an indwelling of God in Christ,
    but an organic and essential union. Christ moreover is not the
    God-man by virtue of his possessing a larger measure of the divine
    than we, but rather by being the original source of all life, both
    human and divine. We hold to his deity as well as to his divinity,
    as some of these authors apparently do not. See _Heb. 7:15,
    16_—“_another priest, who hath been made ... after the power of an
    endless life_”; _John 1:4_—“_In him was life; and the life was the
    light of men._”


(_e_) No double personality.—This possession of two natures does not
involve a double personality in the God-man, for the reason that the Logos
takes into union with himself, not an individual man with already
developed personality, but human nature which has had no separate
existence before its union with the divine. Christ’s human nature is
impersonal, in the sense that it attains self-consciousness, and
self-determination only in the personality of the God-man. Here it is
important to mark the distinction between nature and person. Nature is
substance possessed in common; the persons of the Trinity have one nature;
there is a common nature of mankind. Person is nature separately
subsisting, with powers of consciousness and will. Since the human nature
of Christ has not and never had a separate subsistence, it is impersonal,
and in the God-man the Logos furnishes the principle of personality. It is
equally important to observe that self-consciousness and
self-determination do not belong to nature as such, but only to
personality. For this reason, Christ has not two consciousnesses and two
wills, but a single consciousness and a single will. This consciousness
and will, moreover, is never simply human, but is always theanthropic—an
activity of the one personality which unites in itself the human and the
divine (Mark 13:32; Luke 22:42).


    The human father and the human mother are distinct persons, and
    they each give something of their own peculiar nature to their
    child; yet the result is, not two persons in the child, but only
    one person, with one consciousness and one will. So the Fatherhood
    of God and the motherhood of Mary produced not a double
    personality in Christ, but a single personality. Dorner
    illustrates the union of human and divine in Jesus by the _Holy
    Spirit_ in the Christian,—nothing foreign, nothing distinguishable
    from the human life into which it enters; and by the _moral
    sense_, which is the very presence and power of God in the human
    soul,—yet conscience does not break up the unity of the life; see
    C. C. Everett, Essays, 32. These illustrations help us to
    understand the interpenetration of the human by the divine in
    Jesus; but they are defective in suggesting that his relation to
    God was different from ours not in kind but only in degree. Only
    Jesus could say: “_Before Abraham was born, I am_” (_John 8:58_);
    “_I and the Father are one_” (_John 10:30_).

    The theory of two consciousnesses and two wills, first elaborated
    by John of Damascus, was an unwarranted addition to the orthodox
    doctrine propounded at Chalcedon. Although the view of John of
    Damascus was sanctioned by the Council of Constantinople (681),
    “this Council has never been regarded by the Greek Church as
    œcumenical, and its composition and spirit deprive its decisions
    of all value as indicating the true sense of Scripture”; see
    Bruce, Humiliation of Christ, 90. _Nature_ has consciousness and
    will, only as it is manifested in _person_. The one person has a
    single consciousness and will, which embraces within its scope at
    all times a human nature, and sometimes a divine. Notice that we
    do not say Christ’s human nature had no will, but only that it had
    none before its union with the divine nature, and none separately
    from the one will which was made up of the human and the divine
    united; _versus_ Current Discussions in Theology, 5:283.

    Sartorius uses the illustration of two concentric circles: the one
    ego of personality in Christ is at the same time the centre of
    both circles, the human nature and the divine. Or, still better,
    illustrate by a smaller vessel of air inverted and sunk, sometimes
    below its centre, sometimes above, in a far larger vessel of
    water. See _Mark 13:32_—“_of that day or that hour knoweth no one,
    not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son_”; _Luke
    22:42_—“_Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me:
    nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done._” To say that,
    although in his capacity as man he was ignorant, yet at that same
    moment in his capacity as God he was omniscient, is to accuse
    Christ of unveracity. Whenever Christ spoke, it was not one of the
    natures that spoke, but the person in whom both natures were
    united.

    We subjoin various definitions of personality: Boëthius, quoted in
    Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:415 (Syst. Doct., 3:313)—“Persona est
    animæ rationalis individua substantia”; F. W. Robertson, Lect. on
    Gen., p. 3—“Personality = self-consciousness, will, character”;
    Porter, Human Intellect, 626—“Personality = distinct subsistence,
    either actually or latently self-conscious and self-determining”;
    Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 408—“Person = being, conscious of
    self, subsisting in individuality and identity, and endowed with
    intuitive reason, rational sensibility, and free-will.” Dr. E. G.
    Robinson defines “nature” as “that substratum or condition of
    being which determines the kind and attributes of the person, but
    which is clearly distinguishable from the person itself.”

    Lotze, Metaphysics, § 244—“The identity of the subject of inward
    experience is all that we require. So far as, and so long as, the
    soul knows itself as this identical subject, it is and is named,
    simply for that reason, substance.” Illingworth, Personality,
    Human and Divine, 32—“Our conception of substance is not derived
    from the physical, but from the mental, world. Substance is first
    of all that which underlies our mental affections and
    manifestations. Kant declared that the idea of freedom is the
    source of our idea of personality. Personality consists in the
    freedom of the whole soul from the mechanism of nature.” On
    personality, see Windelband, Hist. Philos., 238. For the theory of
    two consciousnesses and two wills, see Philippi, Glaubenslehre,
    4:129, 234; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 2:314; Ridgeley, Body of Divinity,
    1:476; Hodge, Syst Theol., 2:378-391; Shedd, Dogm. Theol.,
    2:289-308, esp. 328. _Per contra_, see Hovey, God with Us, 66;
    Schaff, Church Hist., 1:757, and 3:751; Calderwood, Moral
    Philosophy, 12-14; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 148-169; Van
    Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 512-518.


(_f_) Effect upon the human.—The union of the divine and the human natures
makes the latter possessed of the powers belonging to the former; in other
words, the attributes of the divine nature are imparted to the human
without passing over into its essence,—so that the human Christ even on
earth had power to be, to know, and to do, as God. That this power was
latent, or was only rarely manifested, was the result of the self-chosen
state of humiliation upon which the God-man had entered. In this state of
humiliation, the communication of the contents of his divine nature to the
human was mediated by the Holy Spirit. The God-man, in his servant-form,
knew and taught and performed only what the Spirit permitted and directed
(Mat. 3:16; John 3:34; Acts 1:2; 10:38; Heb. 9:14). But when thus
permitted, he knew, taught, and performed, not, like the prophets, by
power communicated from without, but by virtue of his own inner divine
energy (Mat. 17:2; Mark 5:41; Luke 5:20, 21; 6:19; John 2:11, 24, 25;
3:13; 20:19).


    Kahnis, Dogmatik, 2d ed., 2:77—“Human nature does not become
    divine, but (as Chemnitz has said) only the medium of the divine;
    as the moon has not a light of her own, but only shines in the
    light of the sun. So human nature may derivatively exercise divine
    attributes, because it is united to the divine in one person.”
    Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 151—“Our souls spiritualize our
    bodies, and will one day give us the spiritual body, while yet the
    body does not become spirit. So the Godhead gives divine powers to
    the humanity in Christ, while yet the humanity does not cease to
    be humanity.”

    Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:131—“The union exalts the human, as
    light brightens the air, heat gives glow to the iron, spirit
    exalts the body, the Holy Spirit hallows the believer by union
    with his soul. Fire gives to iron its own properties of lighting
    and burning; yet the iron does not become fire. Soul gives to body
    its life-energy; yet the body does not become soul. The Holy
    Spirit sanctifies the believer, but the believer does not become
    divine; for the divine principle is the determining one. We do not
    speak of airy light, of iron heat, or of a bodily soul. So human
    nature possesses the divine only derivatively. In this sense it is
    _our_ destiny to become ‘_partakers of the divine nature_’ (_2
    Pet. 1:4_). Even in his earthly life, when he wished to be, or
    more correctly, when the Spirit permitted, he was omnipotent,
    omniscient, omnipresent, could walk the sea, or pass through
    closed doors. But, in his state of humiliation, he was subject to
    the Holy Spirit.”

    In _Mat. 3:16_, the anointing of the Spirit at his baptism was not
    the descent of a material dove (“_as a dove_”). The dove-like
    appearance was only the outward sign of the coming forth of the
    Holy Spirit from the depths of his being and pouring itself like a
    flood into his divine-human consciousness. _John 3:34_—“_for he
    giveth not the Spirit by measure_”; _Acts 1:2_—“_after that he had
    given commandment through the Holy Spirit unto the apostles_”;
    _10:38_—“_Jesus of Nazareth, how God anointed him with the Holy
    Spirit and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all
    that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him_”; _Heb,
    9:14_—“_the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit
    offered himself without blemish onto God._”

    When permitted by the Holy Spirit, he knew, taught, and wrought as
    God: _Mat. 17:2_—“_he was transfigured before them_”; _Mark
    5:41_—“_Damsel, I say unto thee, Arise_”; _Luke 5:20, 21_—“_Man,
    thy sins are forgiven thee.... Who can forgive sins, but God
    alone?_”—_Luke 6:19_—“_power came forth from him, and healed them
    all_”; _John 2:11_—“_This beginning of his signs did Jesus in Cana
    of Galilee, and manifested his glory_”; _24, 25_—“_he knew all
    men.... he himself knew what was in man_”; _3:13_—“_the Son of
    man, who is __ in heaven_” [here, however, Westcott and Hort, with
    א and B, omit ὁ ὢν ἔν τῷ ὀυρανῷ,—for advocacy of the common
    reading, see Broadus, in Hovey’s Com., on _John 3:13_];
    _20:19_—“_when the doors were shut ... Jesus came and stood in the
    midst._”

    Christ is the “_servant of Jehovah_” (_Is. 42:1-7; 49:1-12; 52:13;
    53:11_) and the meaning of παῖς (_Acts 3:13, 28; 4:27, 30_) is not
    “child” or “Son”; it is “_servant_,” as in the Revised Version.
    But, in the state of exaltation, Christ is the “_Lord of the
    Spirit_” (_2 Cor. 3:18_—Meyer), giving the Spirit (_John 16:7_—“_I
    will send him unto you_”), present in the Spirit (_John 14:18_—“_I
    come unto you_”; _Mat. 28:20_—“_I am with you always, even unto
    the the end of the world_”), and working through the Spirit (_1
    Cor. 15:45_—“_The last Adam became a life-giving spirit_”); _2
    Cor. 3:17_—“_Now the Lord is the Spirit_”. On Christ’s relation to
    the Holy Spirit, see John Owen, Works, 282-297; Robins, in Bib.
    Sac., Oct. 1874:615; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 208-241.

    Delitzsch: “The conception of the servant of Jehovah is, as it
    were, a pyramid, of which the base is the people of Israel as a
    whole; the central part, Israel according to the Spirit; and the
    summit, the Mediator of Salvation who rises out of Israel.” Cheyne
    on Isaiah, 2:253, agrees with this view of Delitzsch, which is
    also the view of Oehler. The O. T. is the life of a nation; the N.
    T. is the life of a man. The chief end of the nation was to
    produce the man; the chief end of the man was to save the world.
    Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 59—“If humanity were not potentially
    and in some degree an Immanuel, God with us, there would never
    have issued from its bosom he who bore and revealed this blessed
    name.” We would enlarge and amend this illustration of the
    pyramid, by making the base to be the Logos, as Creator and
    Upholder of all (_Eph. 1:23_; _Col. 1:16_); the stratum which
    rests next upon the Logos is universal humanity (_Ps, 8:5, 6_);
    then comes Israel as a whole (_Mat. 2:15_); spiritual Israel rests
    upon Israel after the flesh (_Is. 42:1-7_); as the acme and cap
    stone of all, Christ appears, to crown the pyramid, the true
    servant of Jehovah and Son of man (_Is. 53:11_; _Mat. 20:28_). We
    may go even further and represent Christ as forming the basis of
    another inverted pyramid of redeemed humanity ever growing and
    rising to heaven (_Is. 9:6_—“_Everlasting Father_”; _Is.
    53:10_—“_he shall see his seed_”; _Rev. 22:16_—“_root and
    offspring of David_”; _Heb. 2:13_—“_I and the children whom God
    hath given me._”)


(_g_) Effect upon the divine.—This communion of the natures was such that,
although the divine nature in itself is incapable of ignorance, weakness,
temptation, suffering, or death, the one person Jesus Christ was capable
of these by virtue of the union of the divine nature with a human nature
in him. As the human Savior can exercise divine attributes, not in virtue
of his humanity alone, but derivatively, by virtue of his possession of a
divine nature, so the divine Savior can suffer and be ignorant as man, not
in his divine nature, but derivatively, by virtue of his possession of a
human nature. We may illustrate this from the connection between body and
soul. The soul suffers pain from its union with the body, of which apart
from the body it would be incapable. So the God-man, although in his
divine nature impassible, was capable, through his union with humanity, of
absolutely infinite suffering.


    Just as my soul could never suffer the pains of fire if it were
    only soul, but can suffer those pains in union with the body, so
    the otherwise impassible God can suffer mortal pangs through his
    union with humanity, which he never could suffer if he had not
    joined himself to my nature. The union between the humanity and
    the deity is so close, that deity itself is brought under the
    curse and penalty of the law. Because Christ was God, did he pass
    unscorched through the fires of Gethsemane and Calvary? Rather let
    us say, because Christ was God, he underwent a suffering that was
    absolutely infinite. Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:300 _sq._;
    Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 24:41; Schöberlein, in Jahrbuch für
    deutsche Theologie, 1871:459-501.

    A. J. F. Behrends, in The Examiner, April 21, 1898—“Jesus Christ
    is God in the form of man; as completely God as if he were not
    man; as completely man as if he were not God. He is always divine
    and always human.... The infirmities and pains of his body pierced
    his divine nature.... The demand of the law was not laid upon
    Christ from without, but proceeded from within. It is the
    righteousness _in_ him which makes his death necessary.”


(_h_) Necessity of the union.—The union of two natures in one person is
necessary to constitute Jesus Christ a proper mediator between man and
God. His two-fold nature gives him fellowship with both parties, since it
involves an equal dignity with God, and at the same time a perfect
sympathy with man (Heb. 2:17, 18; 4:15, 16). This two-fold nature,
moreover, enables him to present to both God and man proper terms of
reconciliation: being man, he can make atonement for man; being God, his
atonement has infinite value; while both his divinity and his humanity
combine to move the hearts of offenders and constrain them to submission
and love (1 Tim. 2:5; Heb. 7:25).


    _Heb. 2:17,18_—“_Wherefore it behooved him in all things to be
    made like unto his brethren, that he might become a merciful and
    faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make
    propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself
    hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are
    tempted_”; _4:15,16_—“_For we have not a high priest that cannot
    be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but one that hath
    been in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us
    therefore draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace, that
    we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help us in time of
    need_”; _1 Tim. 2:5_—“_one God, one mediator also between God and
    men, himself man, Christ Jesus_”; _Heb. 7:25_—“_Wherefore also he
    is able to save to the uttermost them that draw near unto God
    through him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for
    them._”

    Because Christ is man, he can make atonement for man and can
    sympathize with man. Because Christ is God, his atonement has
    infinite value, and the union which he effects with God is
    complete. A merely human Savior could never reconcile or reunite
    us to God. But a divine-human Savior meets all our needs. See
    Wilberforce, Incarnation, 170-208. As the high priest of old bore
    on his mitre the name Jehovah, and on his breastplate the names of
    the tribes of Israel, so Christ Jesus is God with us, and at the
    same time our propitiatory representative before God. In Virgil’s
    Æneid, Dido says well: “Haud ignara malí, miseris succurrere
    disco”—“Myself not ignorant of woe, Compassion I have learned to
    show.” And Terence uttered almost a Christian word when he wrote:
    “Homo sum, et humani nihil a me alienum puto”—“I am a man, and I
    count nothing human as foreign to me.” Christ’s experience and
    divinity made these words far more true of him than of any merely
    human being.


(_i_) The union eternal.—The union of humanity with deity in the person of
Christ is indissoluble and eternal. Unlike the avatars of the East, the
incarnation was a permanent assumption of human nature by the second
person of the Trinity. In the ascension of Christ, glorified humanity has
attained the throne of the universe. By his Spirit, this same divine-human
Savior is omnipresent to secure the progress of his kingdom. The final
subjection of the Son to the Father, alluded to in 1 Cor. 15:28, cannot be
other than the complete return of the Son to his original relation to the
Father; since, according to John 17:5, Christ is again to possess the
glory which he had with the Father before the world was (_cf._ Heb. 1:8;
7:24, 25).


    _1 Cor. 15:28_—“_and when all things have been subjected unto him,
    then shall the Son also himself be subjected to him that did
    subject all things unto him, that God may be all in all_”; _John
    17:5_—“_Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory
    which I had with thee before the world was_”; _Heb. 1:8_—“_of the
    Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever_”;
    _7:24_—“_he, because he abideth forever, hath his priesthood
    unchangeable._” Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:281-283 (Syst. Doct.
    3:177-179), holds that there is a present and relative distinction
    between the Son’s will, as Mediator, and that of the Father (_Mat.
    26:39_—“_not as I will, but as thou wilt_”)—a distinction which
    shall cease when Christ becomes Judge (_John 16:26_—“_In that day
    ye shall ask in my name: and I say not onto you, that I will pray
    the Father for you_”) If Christ’s _reign_ ceased, he would be
    inferior to the saints, who are themselves to reign. But they are
    to reign only in and with Christ, their head.

    The best illustration of the possible meaning of Christ’s giving
    up the kingdom is found in the Governor of the East India Company
    giving up his authority to the Queen and merging it in that of the
    home government, he himself, however, at the same time becoming
    Secretary of State for India. So Christ will give up his
    vicegerency, but not his mediatorship. Now he reigns by delegated
    authority; then he will reign in union with the Father. So
    Kendrick, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1890:68-83. Wrightnour: “When the
    great remedy has wrought its perfect cure, the physician will no
    longer be looked upon as the physician. When the work of
    redemption is completed, the mediatorial office of the Son will
    cease.” We may add that other offices of friendship and
    instruction will then begin.

    Melanchthon: “Christ will finish his work as Mediator, and then
    will reign as God, immediately revealing to us the Deity.”
    Quenstedt, quoted in Schmid, Dogmatik, 293, thinks the giving up
    of the kingdom will be only an exchange of outward administration
    for inward,—not a surrender of all power and authority, but only
    of one mode of exercising it. Hanna, on Resurrection, lect. 4—“It
    is not a giving up of his mediatorial authority,—that throne is to
    endure forever,—but it is a simple public recognition of the fact
    that God is all in all, that Christ is God’s medium of
    accomplishing all.” An. Par. Bible, on _1 Cor. 15:28_—“Not his
    mediatorial relation to his own people shall be given up; much
    less his personal relation to the Godhead, as the divine Word; but
    only his mediatorial relation to the world at large.” See also
    Edwards, Observations on the Trinity, 85 _sq._ Expositor’s Greek
    Testament, on _1 Cor. 15:28_, “affirms no other subjection than is
    involved in Sonship.... This implies no inferiority of nature, no
    extrusion from power, but the free submission of love ... which is
    the essence of the filial spirit which actuated Christ from first
    to last.... Whatsoever glory he gains is devoted to the glory and
    power of the Father, who glorifies him in turn.”

    Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:402 (Syst. Doct., 3:297-299)—“We are not
    to imagine incarnations of Christ in the angel-world, or in other
    spheres. This would make incarnation only the change of a garment,
    a passing theophany; and Christ’s relation to humanity would be a
    merely external one.” Bishop of Salisbury, quoted in Swayne, Our
    Lord’s Knowledge as Man, XX—“Are we permitted to believe that
    there is something parallel to the progress of our Lord’s humanity
    in the state of humiliation, still going on even now, in the state
    of exaltation? that it is, in fact, becoming more and more
    adequate to the divine nature? See _Col. 1:24_—‘_fill up that
    which is lacking_’; _Heb. 10:12, 13_—‘_expecting till his
    enemies_’; _1 Cor. 15:28_—‘_when all things have been subjected
    unto him._’ ” In our judgment such a conclusion is unwarranted, in
    view of the fact that the God-man in his exaltation has the glory
    of his preëxistent state (_John 17:5_); that all the heavenly
    powers are already subject to him (_Eph. 1:21, 22_); and that he
    is now omnipresent (_Mat. 28:20_).


(_j_) Infinite and finite in Christ.—Our investigation of the Scripture
teaching with regard to the Person of Christ leads us to three important
conclusions: 1. that deity and humanity, the infinite and the finite, in
him are not mutually exclusive; 2. that the humanity in Christ differs
from his deity not merely in degree but also in kind; and 3. that this
difference in kind is the difference between the infinite original and the
finite derivative, so that Christ is the source of life, both physical and
spiritual, for all men.


    Our doctrine excludes the view that Christ is only quantitatively
    different from other men in whom God’s Spirit dwells. He is
    qualitatively different, in that he is the source of life, and
    they the recipients. Not only is it true that the fulness of the
    Godhead is in him alone,—it is also true that he is himself God,
    self-revealing and self-communicating, as men are not. Yet we
    cannot hold with E. H. Johnson, Outline of Syst. Theol., 176-178,
    that Christ’s humanity was of one species with his deity, but not
    of one substance. We know of but one underlying substance and
    ground of being. This one substance is self-limiting, and so
    self-manifesting, in Jesus Christ. The determining element is not
    the human but the divine. The infinite Source has a finite
    manifestation; but in the finite we see the Infinite; _2 Cor.
    5:19_—“_God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself_”;
    _John 14:9_—“_he that hath seen me hath seen the Father._” We can
    therefore agree with the following writers who regard all men as
    partakers of the life of God, while yet we deny that Christ is
    only a man, distinguished from his fellows by having a larger
    share in that life than they have.

    J. M. Whiton: “How is the divine spirit which is manifest in the
    life of the man Christ Jesus to be distinguished, _qua_ divine,
    from the same divine spirit as manifested in the life of humanity?
    I answer, that in him, the person Christ, dwelleth the _fulness_
    of the Godhead bodily. I emphasize _fulness_, and say: The
    God-head is alike in the race and in its spiritual head, but the
    _fulness_ is in the head alone—a fulness of course not absolute,
    since circumscribed by a human organism, but a fulness to the
    limits of the organism. Essential deity cannot be ascribed to the
    human Christ, except as in common with the race created in the
    image of God. Life is one, and all life is divine.”... Gloria
    Patri, 88, 23—“Every incarnation of life is _pro tanto_ and in its
    measure an incarnation of God ... and God’s way is a perpetually
    increasing incarnation of life whose climax and crown is the
    divine fulness of life in Christ.... The _Homoousios_ of the
    Nicene Creed was a great victory of the truth. But the Nicene
    Fathers builded better than they knew. The Unitarian Dr. Hedge
    praised them because they got at the truth, the logical conclusion
    of which was to come so long after, that God and man are of one
    substance.” So Momerie, Inspiration, holds man’s nature to be the
    same in kind with God’s. See criticism of this view in Watts, New
    Apologetic, 133, 134. _Homoiousios_ he regards as involving
    _homoousios_; the divine nature capable of fission or
    segmentation, broken off in portions, and distributed among finite
    moral agents; the divine nature undergoing perpetual curtailment;
    every man therefore to some extent inspired, and evil as truly an
    inspiration of God as is good. Watts seems to us to lack the
    proper conception of the infinite as the ground of the finite, and
    so not excluding it.

    Lyman Abbott affirms that Christ is, “not God _and_ man, but God
    _in_ man.” Christ differs from other men only as the flower
    differs from the bulb. As the true man, he is genuinely divine.
    Deity and humanity are not two distinct natures, but one nature.
    The ethico-spiritual nature which is finite in man is identical
    with the nature which is infinite in God. Christ’s distinction
    from other men is therefore in the degree in which he shared this
    nature and possessed a unique fulness of life—“_anointed with the
    Holy Spirit and with power_” (_Acts 10:38_). Phillips Brooks: “To
    this humanity of man as a part of God—to this I cling; for I do
    love it, and I will know nothing else.... Man is, in virtue of his
    essential humanity, partaker of the life of the essential Word....
    Into every soul, just so far as it is possible for that soul to
    receive it, God beats his life and gives his help.” Phillips
    Brooks believes in the redemptive indwelling of God in man, so
    that salvation is of man, for man, and by man. He does not scruple
    to say to every man: “You are a part of God.”

    While we shrink from the expressions which seem to imply a
    partition of the divine nature, we are compelled to recognize a
    truth which these writers are laboring to express, the truth
    namely of the essential oneness of all life, and of God in Christ
    as the source and giver of it. “Jesus quotes approvingly the words
    of _Psalm 82:6_—‘_I said, Ye are Gods._’ Microscopic, indeed, but
    divine are we—sparks from the flame of deity. God is the Creator,
    but it is through Christ as the mediating and as the final Cause.
    ‘_And we through him_’ (_1 Cor. 8:6_)—we exist for him, for the
    realization of a divine humanity in solidarity with him. Christ is
    at once the end and the instrumental cause of the whole process.”
    Samuel Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, speaks of “the
    essentially human in God, and the essentially divine in man.” The
    Son, or Word of God, “when manifested in the forms of a finite
    personality, is the essential Christ, revealing that in God which
    is essentially and eternally human.”

    Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:196—“The whole of humanity is the
    object of the divine love; it is an Immanuel and son of God; its
    whole history is a continual incarnation of God; as indeed it is
    said in Scripture that we are a divine offspring, and that we live
    and move and have our being in God. But what lies potentially in
    the human consciousness of God is not on that account also
    manifestly revealed to it from the beginning.” Hatch, Hibbert
    Lectures, 175-180, on Stoic monism and Platonic dualism, tells us
    that the Stoics believed in a personal λόγος and an impersonal
    ὕλη, both of them modes of a single substance. Some regarded God
    as a mode of matter, _natura naturata_: “Jupiter est quodcunque
    vides, quodcunque moveris” (Lucan, Phars., 9:579); others
    conceived of him as the _natura naturans_,—this became the
    governing conception.... The products are all divine, but not
    equally divine.... Nearest of all to the pure essence of God is
    the human soul: it is an emanation or outflow from him, a sapling
    which is separate from and yet continues the life of the parent
    tree, a colony in which some members of the parent state have
    settled. Plato followed Anaxagoras in holding that mind is
    separate from matter and acts upon it. God is outside the world.
    He shapes it as a carpenter shapes wood. On the general subject of
    the union of deity and humanity in the person of Christ, see
    Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Christologie; Barrows, in Bib. Sac.,
    10:765; 26:83; also, Bib. Sac., 17:535; John Owen, Person of
    Christ, in Works, 1:223; Hooker, Eccl. Polity, book v. chap.
    51-56: Boyce, in Bap. Quar., 1870:385; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:403
    sq.; Hovey, God with Us, 61-88; Plumptre, Christ and Christendom,
    appendix; E. H. Johnson, The Idea of Law in Christology, in Bib.
    Sac., Oct. 1889:599-625.



Section III.—The Two States Of Christ.


I. The State of Humiliation.


1. The nature of this humiliation.


We may dismiss, as unworthy of serious notice, the views that it consisted
essentially either in the union of the Logos with human nature,—for this
union with human nature continues in the state of exaltation; or in the
outward trials and privations of Christ’s human life,—for this view casts
reproach upon poverty, and ignores the power of the soul to rise superior
to its outward circumstances.


    E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 224—“The error of supposing it
    too humiliating to obey law was derived from the Roman treasury of
    merit and works of supererogation. Better was Frederick the
    Great’s sentiment when his sturdy subject and neighbor, the
    miller, whose windmill he had attempted to remove, having beaten
    him in a lawsuit, the thwarted monarch exclaimed: ‘Thank God,
    there is law in Prussia!’ ” Palmer, Theological Definition,
    79—“God reveals himself in the rock, vegetable, animal, man. Must
    not the process go on? Must there not appear in the fulness of
    time a man who will reveal God as perfectly as is possible in
    human conditions—a man who is God under the limitations of
    humanity? Such incarnation is humiliation only in the eyes of men.
    To Christ it is lifting up, exaltation, glory; _John 12:32_—‘_And
    I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto
    myself._’ ” George Harris, Moral Evolution, 409—“The divinity of
    Christ is not obscured, but is more clearly seen, shining through
    his humanity.”


We may devote more attention to the

A. Theory of Thomasius, Delitzsch, and Crosby, that the humiliation
consisted in the surrender of the relative divine attributes.

This theory holds that the Logos, although retaining his divine
self-consciousness and his immanent attributes of holiness, love, and
truth, surrendered his relative attributes of omniscience, omnipotence,
and omnipresence, in order to take to himself veritable human nature.
According to this view, there are, indeed, two natures in Christ, but
neither of these natures is infinite. Thomasius and Delitzsch are the
chief advocates of this theory in Germany. Dr. Howard Crosby has
maintained a similar view in America.


    The theory of Thomasius, Delitzsch, and Crosby has been, though
    improperly, called the theory of the Kenosis (from
    ἐκένωσεν—“_emptied himself_”—in _Phil. 2:7_), and its advocates
    are often called Kenotic theologians. There is a Kenosis of the
    Logos, but it is of a different sort from that which this theory
    supposes. For statements of this theory, see Thomasius, Christi
    Person und Werk, 2:233-255, 542-550; Delitzsch, Biblische
    Psychologie, 323-333; Howard Crosby, in Bap. Quar., 1870:350-363—a
    discourse subsequently published in a separate volume, with the
    title: The True Humanity of Christ, and reviewed by Shedd, in
    Presb. Rev., April, 1881:429-431. Crosby emphasizes the word
    “_became_,” in _John 1:14_—“_and the Word became flesh_”—and gives
    the Word “_flesh_” the sense of “man,” or “human.” Crosby, then,
    should logically deny, though he does not deny, that Christ’s body
    was derived from the Virgin.


We object to this view that:

(_a_) It contradicts the Scriptures already referred to, in which Christ
asserts his divine knowledge and power. Divinity, it is said, can give up
its world-functions, for it existed without these before creation. But to
give up divine attributes is to give up the substance of Godhead. Nor is
it a sufficient reply to say that only the relative attributes are given
up, while the immanent attributes, which chiefly characterize the Godhead,
are retained; for the immanent necessarily involve the relative, as the
greater involve the less.


    Liebner, Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 3:349-356—“Is the Logos here? But
    wherein does he show his presence, that it may be known?” Hase,
    Hutterus Redivivus, 11th ed., 217, note. John Caird, Fund. Ideas
    of Christianity, 2:125-146, criticises the theory of the Kenosis,
    but grants that, with all its self-contradictions, as he regards
    them, it is an attempt to render conceivable the profound truth of
    a sympathizing, self-sacrificing God.


(_b_) Since the Logos, in uniting himself to a human soul, reduces himself
to the condition and limitations of a human soul, the theory is virtually
a theory of the coëxistence of two human souls in Christ. But the union of
two finite souls is more difficult to explain than the union of a finite
and an infinite,—since there can be in the former case no intelligent
guidance and control of the human element by the divine.


    Dorner, Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 1:397-408—“The impossibility of
    making two finite souls into one finally drove Arianism to the
    denial of any human soul in Christ” (Apollinarianism). This
    statement of Dorner, which we have already quoted in our account
    of Apollinarianism, illustrates the similar impossibility, upon
    the theory of Thomasius, of constructing out of two finite souls
    the person of Christ. See also Hovey, God with Us, 68.


(_c_) This theory fails to secure its end, that of making comprehensible
the human development of Jesus,—for even though divested of the relative
attributes of Godhood, the Logos still retains his divine
self-consciousness, together with his immanent attributes of holiness,
love, and truth. This is as difficult to reconcile with a purely natural
human development as the possession of the relative divine attributes
would be. The theory logically leads to a further denial of the possession
of any divine attributes, or of any divine consciousness at all, on the
part of Christ, and merges itself in the view of Gess and Beecher, that
the Godhead of the Logos is actually transformed into a human soul.


    Kahnis, Dogmatik 3:343—“The old theology conceived of Christ as in
    full and unbroken use of the divine self-consciousness, the divine
    attributes, and the divine world-functions, from the conception
    until death. Though Jesus, as fœtus, child, boy, was not almighty
    and omnipresent according to his human nature, yet he was so, as
    to his divine nature, which constituted one _ego_ with his human.
    Thomasius, however, declared that the Logos gave up his relative
    attributes, during his sojourn in flesh. Dorner’s objection to
    this, on the ground of the divine unchangeableness, overshoots the
    mark, because it makes any _becoming_ impossible.

    “But some things in Thomasius’ doctrine are still difficult: 1st,
    divinity can certainly give up its world-functions, for it has
    existed without these before the world was. In the nature of an
    absolute personality, however, lies an absolute knowing, willing,
    feeling, which it cannot give up. Hence _Phil. 2:6-11_ speaks of a
    giving-up of divine glory, but not of a giving-up of divine
    attributes or nature. 2d, little is gained by such an assumption
    of the giving-up of _relative_ attributes, since the Logos, even
    while divested of a part of his attributes, still has full
    possession of his divine self-consciousness, which must make a
    purely human development no less difficult. 3d, the expressions of
    divine self-consciousness, the works of divine power, the words of
    divine wisdom, prove that Jesus was in possession of his divine
    self-consciousness and attributes.

    “The essential thing which the Kenotics aim at, however, stands
    fast; namely, that the divine personality of the Logos divested
    itself of its glory (_John 17:5_), riches (_2 Cor. 8:6_), divine
    form (_Phil. 2:6_). This divesting is the becoming man. The
    humiliation, then, was a giving up of the use, not of the
    possession, of the divine nature and attributes. That man can thus
    give up self-consciousness and powers, we see every day in sleep.
    But man does not, thereby, cease to be man. So we maintain that
    the Logos, when he became man, did not divest himself of his
    divine person and nature, which was impossible; but only divested
    himself of the use and exercise of these—these being latent to
    him—in order to unfold themselves to use in the measure to which
    his human nature developed itself—a use which found its completion
    in the condition of exaltation.” This statement of Kahnis,
    although approaching correctness, is still neither quite correct
    nor quite complete.


B. Theory that the humiliation consisted in the surrender of the
independent exercise of the divine attributes.

This theory, which we regard as the most satisfactory of all, may be more
fully set forth as follows. The humiliation, as the Scriptures seem to
show, consisted:

(_a_) In that act of the preëxistent Logos by which he gave up his divine
glory with the Father, in order to take a servant-form. In this act, he
resigned not the possession, nor yet entirely the use, but rather the
independent exercise, of the divine attributes.


    _John 17:5_—“_glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory
    which I had with thee before the world was_”; _Phil. 2:6,
    7_—“_who, existing in the form of God, counted not the being on an
    equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself,
    taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men_”;
    _2 Cor. 8:9_—“_For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
    that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that
    ye through his poverty might become rich._” Pompilia, in Robert
    Browning’s The Ring and the Book: “Now I see how God is likest God
    in being born.”

    Omniscience gives up all knowledge but that of the child, the
    infant, the embryo, the infinitesimal germ of humanity.
    Omnipotence gives up all power but that of the impregnated ovum in
    the womb of the Virgin. The Godhead narrows itself down to a point
    that is next to absolute extinction. Jesus washing his disciples’
    feet, in _John 13:1-20_, is the symbol of his coming down from his
    throne of glory and taking the form of a servant, in order that he
    may purify us, by regeneration and sanctification, for the
    marriage-supper of the Lamb.


(_b_) In the submission of the Logos to the control of the Holy Spirit and
the limitations of his Messianic mission, in his communication of the
divine fulness of the human nature which he had taken into union with
himself.


    _Acts 1:2_—Jesus, “_after that he had given commandment through
    the Holy Spirit unto the apostles whom he had chosen_”;
    _10:38_—“_Jesus of Nazareth, how God anointed him with the Holy
    Spirit and with power_”; _Heb. 9:14_—“_the blood of Christ, who
    through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto
    God._” A minor may have a great estate left to him, yet may have
    only such use of it as his guardian permits. In Homer’s Iliad,
    when Andromache brings her infant son to part with Hector, the boy
    is terrified by the warlike plumes of his father’s helmet, and
    Hector puts them off to embrace him. So God lays aside “That
    glorious form, that light unsufferable, And that far-beaming blaze
    of majesty.” Arthur H. Hallam, in John Brown’s Rab and his
    Friends, 282, 283—“Revelation is the voluntary approximation of
    the infinite Being to the ways and thoughts of finite humanity.”


(_c_) In the continuous surrender, on the part of the God-man, so far as
his human nature was concerned, of the exercise of those divine powers
with which it was endowed by virtue of its union with the divine, and in
the voluntary acceptance, which followed upon this, of temptation,
suffering, and death.


    _Mat. 26:53_—“_thinkest thou that I cannot beseech my Father, and
    he shall even now send me more than twelve legions of angels?_”
    _John 10:17, 18_—“_Therefore doth the Father love me, because I
    lay down my life, that I may take it again. No one taketh it away
    from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down,
    and I have power to take it again_”; _Phil. 2:8_—“_and being found
    in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient even
    unto death, yea, the death of the cross._” _Cf._ Shakespeare,
    Merchant of Venice: “Such music is there in immortal souls, That
    while this muddy vesture of decay Doth close it in, we cannot see
    it.”


Each of these elements of the doctrine has its own Scriptural support. We
must therefore regard the humiliation of Christ, not as consisting in a
single act, but as involving a continuous self-renunciation, which began
with the Kenosis of the Logos in becoming man, and which culminated in the
self-subjection of the God-man to the death of the cross.


    Our doctrine of Christ’s humiliation will be better understood if
    we put it midway between two pairs of erroneous views, making it
    the third of five. The list would be as follows: (1) Gess: The
    Logos gave up all divine attributes; (2) Thomasius: The Logos gave
    up relative attributes only; (3) True View: The Logos gave up the
    independent exercise of divine attributes; (4) Old Orthodoxy:
    Christ gave up the use of divine attributes; (5) Anselm: Christ
    acted as if he did not possess divine attributes. The full
    exposition of the classical passage with reference to the
    humiliation, namely, _Phil. 2:5-8_, we give below, under the next
    paragraph, pages 705, 706. Brentius illustrated Christ’s
    humiliation by the king who travels incognito. But Mason, Faith of
    the Gospel, 158, says well that “to part in appearance with only
    the fruition of the divine attributes would be to impose upon us
    with a pretence of self-sacrifice; but to part with it in reality
    was to manifest most perfectly the true nature of God.”

    This same objection lies against the explanation given in the
    Church Quarterly Review, Oct. 1891:1-30, on Our Lord’s Knowledge
    as Man: “If divine knowledge exists in a different form from
    human, and a translation into a different form is necessary before
    it can be available in the human sphere, our Lord might know the
    day of judgment as God, and yet be ignorant of it as man. This
    must have been the case if he did not choose to translate it into
    the human form. But it might also have been incapable of
    translation. The processes of divine knowledge may be far above
    our finite comprehension.” This seems to us to be a virtual denial
    of the unity of Christ’s person, and to make our Lord play fast
    and loose with the truth. He either knew, or he did not know; and
    his denial that he knew makes it impossible that he should have
    known in any sense.


2. The stages of Christ’s humiliation.


We may distinguish: (_a_) That act of the preïncarnate Logos by which, in
becoming man, he gave up the independent exercise of the divine
attributes. (_b_) His submission to the common laws which regulate the
origin of souls from a preëxisting sinful stock, in taking his human
nature from the Virgin,—a human nature which only the miraculous
conception rendered pure. (_c_) His subjection to the limitations involved
in a human growth and development,—reaching the consciousness of his
sonship at his twelfth year, and working no miracles till after the
baptism. (_d_) The subordination of himself, in state, knowledge,
teaching, and acts, to the control of the Holy Spirit,—so living, not
independently, but as a servant. (_e_) His subjection, as connected with a
sinful race, to temptation and suffering, and finally to the death which
constituted the penalty of the law.


    Peter Lombard asked whether God could know more than he was aware
    of? It is only another way of putting the question whether, during
    the earthly life of Christ, the Logos existed outside of the flesh
    of Jesus. We must answer in the affirmative. Otherwise the number
    of the persons in the Trinity would be variable, and the universe
    could do without him who is ever “_upholding all things by the
    word of his power_” (_Heb. 1:3_), and in whom “_all things
    consist_” (_Col. 1:17_). Let us recall the nature of God’s
    omnipresence (see pages 279-282). Omnipresence is nothing less
    than the presence of the whole of God in every place. From this it
    follows, that the whole Christ can be present in every believer as
    fully as if that believer were the only one to receive of his
    fulness, and that the whole Logos can be united to and be present
    in the man Christ Jesus, while at the same time he fills and
    governs the universe. By virtue of this omnipresence, therefore,
    the whole Logos can suffer on earth, while yet the whole Logos
    reigns in heaven. The Logos outside of Christ has the perpetual
    consciousness of his Godhead, while yet the Logos, as united to
    humanity in Christ, is subject to ignorance, weakness, and death.
    Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:153—“Jehovah, though present in the form of
    the burning bush, was at the same time omnipresent also”;
    2:265-284, esp. 282—“Because the sun is shining in and through a
    cloud, it does not follow that it cannot at the same time be
    shining through the remainder of universal space, unobstructed by
    any vapor whatever.” Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 21—“Not with
    God, as with finite man, does arrival in one place necessitate
    withdrawal from another.” John Calvin: “The whole Christ was
    there; but not all that was in Christ was there.” See Adamson, The
    Mind of Christ.

    How the independent exercise of the attributes of omnipotence,
    omniscience, and omnipresence can be surrendered, even for a time,
    would be inconceivable, if we were regarding the Logos as he is in
    himself, seated upon the throne of the universe. The matter is
    somewhat easier when we remember that it was not the Logos _per
    se_, but rather the God-man, Jesus Christ, in whom the Logos
    submitted to this humiliation. South, Sermons, 2:9—“Be the
    fountain never so full, yet if it communicate itself by a little
    pipe, the stream can be but small and inconsiderable, and equal to
    the measure of its conveyance.” Sartorius, Person and Work of
    Christ, 39—“The human eye, when open, sees heaven and earth; but
    when shut, it sees little or nothing. Yet its inherent capacity
    does not change. So divinity does not change its nature, when it
    drops the curtain of humanity before the eyes of the God-man.”

    The divine in Christ, during most of his earthly life, is latent,
    or only now and then present to his consciousness or manifested to
    others. Illustrate from second childhood, where the mind itself
    exists, but is not capable of use; or from first childhood, where
    even a Newton or a Humboldt, if brought back to earth and made to
    occupy an infant body and brain, would develop as an infant, with
    infantile powers. There is more in memory than we can at this
    moment recall,—memory is greater than recollection. There is more
    of us at all times than we know,—only the sudden emergency reveals
    the largeness of our resources of mind and heart and will. The new
    nature, in the regenerate, is greater than it appears: “_Beloved,
    now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what
    we shall be. We, know that, if he shall be manifested, we shall be
    like him_” (_1 John 3:2_). So in Christ there was an ocean-like
    fulness of resource, of which only now and then the Spirit
    permitted the consciousness and the exercise.

    Without denying (with Dorner) the completeness, even from the
    moment of the conception, of the union between the deity and the
    humanity, we may still say with Kahnis: “The human nature of
    Christ, according to the measure of its development, appropriates
    more and more to its conscious use the latent fulness of the
    divine nature.” So we take the middle ground between two opposite
    extremes. On the one hand, the Kenosis was not the extinction of
    the Logos. Nor, on the other hand, did Christ hunger and sleep by
    miracle,—this is Docetism. We must not minimize Christ’s
    humiliation, for this was his glory. There was no limit to his
    descent, except that arising from his sinlessness. His humiliation
    was not merely the giving-up of the appearance of Godhead. Baird,
    Elohim Revealed, 585—“Should any one aim to celebrate the
    condescension of the emperor Charles the Fifth, by dwelling on the
    fact that he laid aside the robes of royalty and assumed the style
    of a subject, and altogether ignore the more important matter that
    he actually became a private person, it would be very weak and
    absurd.” _Cf._ _2 Cor. 8:9_—“_though he was rich, yet for your
    sakes he became poor_” = he beggared himself. _Mat. 27:46_—“_My
    God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?_” = non-exercise of divine
    omniscience.

    Inasmuch, however, as the passage _Phil. 2:6-8_ is the chief basis
    and support of the doctrine of Christ’s humiliation, we here
    subjoin a more detailed examination of it.

    EXPOSITION OF PHILIPPIANS, 2:6-8. The passage reads: “_who,
    existing in the form of God, counted not the being on an equality
    with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the
    form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men; and being
    found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient
    even unto death, yea, the death of the cross_.”

    The subject of the sentence is at first (_verses 6, 7_) Christ
    Jesus, regarded as the preëxistent Logos; subsequently (_verse
    8_), this same Christ Jesus, regarded as incarnate. This change in
    the subject is indicated by the contrast between μορφῇ θεοῦ
    (_verse 6_) and μορφὴν δούλου (_verse 7_), as well as by the
    participles λαβών and γενόμενος (_verse 7_) and εύρεθείς (_verse
    8_) It is asserted, then, that the preëxisting Logos, “although
    subsisting in the form of God, did not regard his equality with
    God as a thing to be forcibly retained, but emptied himself by
    taking the form of a servant, (that is,) by being made in the
    likeness of men. And being found in outward condition as a man, he
    (the incarnate son of God, yet further) humbled himself, by
    becoming obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (_verse
    8_).

    Here notice that what the Logos divested himself of, in becoming
    man, is not the substance of his Godhead, but the “_form of God_”
    in which this substance was manifested. This “_form of God_” can
    be only that independent exercise of the powers and prerogatives
    of Deity which constitutes his “_equality with God_.” This he
    surrenders, in the act of “_taking the form of a servant_”—or
    becoming subordinate, as man. (Here other Scriptures complete the
    view, by their representations of the controlling influence of the
    Holy Spirit in the earthly life of Christ.) The phrases “made in
    the likeness of men” and “found in fashion as a man” are used to
    intimate, not that Jesus Christ was not really man, but that he
    was God as well as man, and therefore free from the sin which
    clings to man (_cf._ _Rom. 8:3_—ἐν ὁμοιώματι σαρκὸς
    ἁμαρτίας—Meyer). Finally, this one person, now God and man united,
    submits himself, consciously and voluntarily, to the humiliation
    of an ignominious death.

    See Lightfoot, on _Phil. 2:8_—“Christ divested himself, not of his
    divine nature, for that was impossible, but of the glories and
    prerogatives of Deity. This he did by taking the form of a
    servant.” Evans, in Presb. Rev., 1883:287—“Two stages in Christ’s
    humiliation, each represented by a finite verb defining the
    central act of the particular stage, accompanied by two modal
    participles. 1st stage indicated in _v. 7_. Its central act is:
    ‘_he emptied himself_.’ Its two modalities are: (1) ‘_taking the
    form of servant_’; (2) ‘_being made in the likeness of men_.’ Here
    we have the humiliation of the Kenosis,—that by which Christ
    _became_ man. 2d stage, indicated in _v. 8_. Its central act is:
    ‘_he humbled himself_.’ Its two modalities are: (1) ‘_being found
    in fashion as a man_’; (2) ‘_becoming obedient unto death, yea,
    the death of the cross_.’ Here we have the humiliation of his
    obedience and death,—that by which, _in_ humanity, he became a
    sacrifice for our sins.”

    Meyer refers _Eph. 5:31_ exclusively to Christ and the church,
    making the completed union future, however, _i. e._, at the time
    of the Parousia. “_For this cause shall a man leave his father and
    mother_” = “in the incarnation, Christ leaves father and mother
    (his seat at the right hand of God), and cleaves to his wife (the
    church), and then the two (the descended Christ and the church)
    become one flesh (one ethical person, as the married pair become
    one by physical union). The Fathers, however, (Jerome, Theodoret,
    Chrysostom), referred it to the incarnation.” On the
    interpretation of _Phil 2:6-11_, see Comm. of Neander, Meyer,
    Lange, Ellicott.

    On the question whether Christ would have become man had there
    been no sin, theologians are divided. Dorner, Martensen, and
    Westcott answer in the affirmative; Robinson, Watts, and Denney in
    the negative. See Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person of Christ, 5:236;
    Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 327-329; Westcott, Com. on
    Hebrews, page 8—“The Incarnation is in its essence independent of
    the Fall, though conditioned by it as to its circumstances.” _Per
    contra_, see Robinson, Christ. Theol., 219, note—“It would be
    difficult to show that a like method of argument from _a priori_
    premisses will not equally avail to prove sin to have been a
    necessary part of the scheme of creation.” Denney, Studies in
    Theology, 101, objects to the doctrine of necessary incarnation
    irrespective of sin, that it tends to obliterate the distinction
    between nature and grace, to blur the definite outlines of the
    redemption wrought by Christ, as the supreme revelation of God and
    his love. See also Watts, New Apologetic, 198-202; Julius Müller,
    Dogmat. Abhandlungen, 66-126; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 512-526,
    543-548; Forrest, The Authority of Christ, 340-345. On the general
    subject of the Kenosis of the Logos, see Bruce, Humiliation of
    Christ; Robins, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1874:615; Philippi,
    Glaubenslehre, 4:138-150, 386-475; Pope, Person of Christ, 23;
    Bodemeyer, Lehre von der Kenosis; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:610-625.


II. The State of Exaltation.


1. The nature of this exaltation.


It consisted essentially in: (_a_) A resumption, on the part of the Logos,
of his independent exercise of divine attributes. (_b_) The withdrawal, on
the part of the Logos, of all limitations in his communication of the
divine fulness to the human nature of Christ. (_c_) The corresponding
exercise, on the part of the human nature, of those powers which belonged
to it by virtue of its union with the divine.


    The eighth Psalm, with its account of the glory of human nature,
    is at present fulfilled only in Christ (see _Heb. 2:9_—“_but we
    behold ... Jesus_”). _Heb. 2:7_—ἠλάττωσας αὐτὸν βραχύ τι παρ᾽
    ἀγγέλους—may be translated, as in the margin of the Rev. Vers.:
    “_Thou madest __ him for a little while lower than the angels._”
    Christ’s human body was not necessarily subject to death; only by
    outward compulsion or voluntary surrender could he die. Hence
    resurrection was a natural necessity (_Acts 2:24_—“_whom God
    raised up, having loosed the pangs of death: because it was not
    possible he should be holden of it_”; _31_—“_neither was he left
    unto Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption_”). This exaltation,
    which then affected humanity only in its head, is to be the
    experience also of the members. Our bodies also are to be
    delivered from the bondage of corruption, and we are to sit with
    Christ upon his throne.


2. The stages of Christ’s exaltation.


(a) The quickening and resurrection.

Both Lutherans and Romanists distinguish between these two, making the
former precede, and the latter follow, Christ’s “preaching to the spirits
in prison.” These views rest upon a misinterpretation of 1 Pet. 3:18-20.
Lutherans teach that Christ descended into hell, to proclaim his triumph
to evil spirits. But this is to give ἐκήρυξεν the unusual sense of
proclaiming his triumph, instead of his gospel. Romanists teach that
Christ entered the underworld to preach to Old Testament saints, that they
might be saved. But the passage speaks only of the disobedient; it cannot
be pressed into the support of a sacramental theory of the salvation of
Old Testament believers. The passage does not assert the descent of Christ
into the world of spirits, but only a work of the preïncarnate Logos in
offering salvation, through Noah, to the world then about to perish.


    Augustine, Ad Euodiam, ep. 99—“The spirits shut up in prison are
    the unbelievers who lived in the time of Noah, whose spirits or
    souls were shut up in the darkness of ignorance as in a prison;
    Christ preached to them, not in the flesh, for he was not yet
    incarnate, but in the spirit, that is, in his divine nature.”
    Calvin taught that Christ descended into the underworld and
    suffered the pains of the lost. But not all Calvinists hold with
    him here; see Princeton Essays, 1:153. Meyer, on _Rom. 10:7_,
    regards the question—“_Who shall descend into the abyss?_ (_that
    is, to bring Christ up from the dead_)”—as an allusion to, and so
    indirectly a proof-text for, Christ’s descent into the underworld.
    Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 211, favors a preaching to the dead:
    “During that time [the three days] he did not return to heaven and
    his Father.” But though _John 20:17_ is referred to for proof, is
    not this statement true only of his body? So far as the soul is
    concerned, Christ can say: “_Father, into thy hands I commend my
    spirit_,” and “_To-day thou shalt be with me in Paradise_” (_Luke
    23:43, 46_).

    Zahn and Dorner best represent the Lutheran view. Zahn, in
    Expositor, March, 1898: 216-223—“If Jesus was truly man, then his
    soul, after it left the body, entered into the fellowship of
    departed spirits.... If Jesus is he who lives forevermore and even
    his dying was his act, this carrying in the realm of the dead
    cannot be thought of as a purely passive condition, but must have
    been known to those who dwelt there..... If Jesus was the Redeemer
    of mankind, the generations of those who had passed away must have
    thus been brought into personal relation to him, his work and his
    kingdom, without waiting for the last day.”

    Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:662 (Syst. Doct., 4:127), thinks
    “Christ’s descent into Hades marks a new era of his pneumatic
    life, in which he shows himself free from the limitations of time
    and space.” He rejects “Luther’s notion of a merely triumphal
    progress and proclamation of Christ. Before Christ,” he says,
    “there was no abode peopled by the damned. The descent was an
    application of the benefit of the atonement (implied in
    κηρύσσειν). The work was prophetic, not high-priestly nor kingly.
    Going to the spirits in prison is spoken of as a spontaneous act,
    not one of physical necessity. No power of Hades led him over into
    Hades. Deliverance from the limitations of a mortal body is
    already an indication of a higher stage of existence. Christ’s
    soul is bodiless for a time—πνεῦμα only—as the departed were.

    “The ceasing of this preaching is neither recorded, nor reasonably
    to be supposed,—indeed the ancient church supposed it carried on
    through the apostles. It expresses the universal significance of
    Christ for former generations and for the entire kingdom of the
    dead. No physical power is a limit to him. The gates of hell, or
    Hades, shall not prevail over or against him. The intermediate
    state is one of blessedness for him, and he can admit the penitent
    thief into it. Even those who were not laid hold of by Christ’s
    historic manifestation in this earthly life still must, and may,
    be brought into relation with him, in order to be able to accept
    or to reject him. And thus the universal relation of Christ to
    humanity and the absoluteness of the Christian religion are
    confirmed.” So Dorner, for substance.

    All this _versus_ Strauss, who thought that the dying of vast
    masses of men, before and after Christ, who had not been brought
    into relation to Christ, proves that the Christian religion is not
    necessary to salvation, because not universal. For advocacy of
    Christ’s preaching to the dead, see also Jahrbuch für d. Theol.,
    23:177-228; W. W. Patton, in N. Eng., July, 1882:460-478; John
    Miller, Problems Suggested by the Bible, part 1:93-98; part 2:38;
    Plumptre, The Spirits in Prison; Kendrick, in Bap. Rev., Apl.
    1888; Clemen, Niedergefahren zu den Toten.

    For the opposite view, see “No Preaching to the Dead,” in
    Princeton Rev., March, 1875:197; 1878:451-491; Hovey, in Bap.
    Quar., 4:486 _sq._, and Bib. Eschatology, 97-107; Love, Christ’s
    Preaching to the Spirits in Prison; Cowles, in Bib. Sac.,
    1875:401; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:616-622; Salmond, in Popular
    Commentary; and Johnstone, Com., in loco. So Augustine, Thomas
    Aquinas, and Bishop Pearson. See also E. D. Morris, Is There
    Salvation after Death? and Wright, Relation of Death to Probation,
    22:28—“If Christ preached to spirits in Hades, it may have been to
    demonstrate the _hopelessness_ of adding in the other world to the
    privileges enjoyed in this. We do not read that it had any
    favorable effect upon the hearers. If men will not hear Moses and
    the Prophets, then they will not hear one risen from the dead.
    ‘_Today thou shalt be with me in Paradise_’ (_Luke 23:43_) was not
    comforting, if Christ was going that day to the realm of lost
    spirits. The antediluvians, however, were specially favored with
    Noah’s preaching, and were specially wicked.”

    For full statement of the view presented in the text, that the
    preaching referred to was the preaching of Christ as preëxisting
    Logos to the spirits, now in prison, when once they were
    disobedient in the days of Noah, see Bartlett, in New Englander,
    Oct. 1872: 601 sq., and in Bib. Sac., Apr. 1883:333-373. Before
    giving the substance of Bartlett’s exposition, we transcribe in
    full the passage in question, _1 Pet. 3:18-20_—“_Because Christ
    also suffered for sins once, the righteous for the unrighteous,
    that he might bring us to God; being put to death in the flesh,
    but made alive in the spirit; in which also he went and preached
    unto the spirits in prison, that aforetime were disobedient, when
    the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah._”

    Bartlett expounds as follows: “ ‘_In which_ [πνεύματι, divine
    nature] ‘_he went and preached to the spirits in prison when once
    they disobeyed._’ ἀπειθήσασιν is circumstantial aorist, indicating
    the time of the preaching as a definite past: It is an anarthrous
    dative, as in _Luke 8:27_; _Mat. 8:23_; _Acts 15:25_; _22:17_. It
    is an appositive, or predicative, participle. [That the aorist
    participle does not necessarily describe an action preliminary to
    that of the principal verb appears from its use in _verse 18_
    (θανατωθείς), in _1 Thess. 1:6_ (δεξάμενοι), and in _Col. 2:11,
    13_.] The connection of thought is: Peter exhorts his readers to
    endure suffering bravely, because Christ did so,—in his lower
    nature being put to death, in his higher nature enduring the
    opposition of sinners before the flood. Sinners of that time only
    are mentioned, because this permits an introduction of the
    subsequent reference to baptism. _Cf._ _Gen. 6:3_; _1 Pet. 1:10,
    11_; _2 Pet. 2:4, 5_.”


(_b_) The ascension and sitting at the right hand of God.

As the resurrection proclaimed Christ to men as the perfected and
glorified man, the conqueror of sin and lord of death, the ascension
proclaimed him to the universe as the reinstated God, the possessor of
universal dominion, the omnipresent object of worship and hearer of
prayer. _Dextra Dei ubique est._


    _Mat. 28:18, 20_—“_All authority hath been given unto me in heaven
    and on earth.... lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of
    the world_”; _Mark 16:19_—“_So then the Lord Jesus, after he had
    spoken unto them, was received up into heaven, and sat down at the
    right hand of God_”; _Acts 7:55_—“_But he, being full of the Holy
    Spirit, looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of
    God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God_”; _2 Cor.
    13:4_—“_he was crucified through weakness, yet he liveth through
    the power of God_”; _Eph. 1:22, 23_—“_he put all things in
    subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things
    to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth
    all in all_”; _4:10_—“_He that descended is the same also that
    ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all
    things._” Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:184-189—“Before the
    resurrection, Christ was the God-_man_; since the resurrection, he
    is the _God_-man.... He ate with his disciples, not to show the
    _quality_, but the _reality_, of his human body.” Nicoll, Life of
    Christ: “It was hard for Elijah to ascend”—it required chariot and
    horses of fire—“but it was easier for Christ to ascend than to
    descend,”—there was a gravitation upwards. Maclaren: “He has not
    left the world, though he has ascended to the Father, any more
    than he left the Father when he came into the world”; _John
    1:18_—“_the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the
    Father_”; _3:13_—“_the Son of man, who is in heaven._”

    We are compelled here to consider the problem of the relation of
    the humanity to the Logos in the state of exaltation. The
    Lutherans maintain the ubiquity of Christ’s human body, and they
    make it the basis of their doctrine of the sacraments. Dorner,
    Glaubenslehre, 2:674-676 (Syst. Doct., 4:138-142), holds to “a
    presence, not simply of the Logos, but of the whole God-man, with
    all his people, but not necessarily likewise a similar presence in
    the world; in other words, his presence is morally conditioned by
    men’s receptivity.” The old theologians said that Christ is not in
    heaven, quasi carcere. Calvin, Institutes, 2:15—he is “incarnate,
    but not incarcerated.” He has gone into heaven, the place of
    spirits, and he manifests himself there; but he has also gone far
    above all heavens, that he may fill all things. He is with his
    people alway. All power is given into his hand. The church is the
    fulness of him that filleth all in all. So the Acts of the
    Apostles speak constantly of the Son of man, of the man Jesus as
    God, ever present, the object of worship, seated at the right hand
    of God, having all the powers and prerogatives of Deity. See
    Westcott, Bible Com., on _John 20:22_—“_he breathed on them, and
    saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Spirit_”—“The characteristic
    effect of the Paschal gift was shown in the new faith by which the
    disciples were gathered into a living society; the characteristic
    effect of the Pentecostal gift was shown in the exercise of
    supremacy potentially universal.”

    Who and what is this Christ who is present with his people when
    they pray? It is not enough to say, He is simply the Holy Spirit;
    for the Holy Spirit is the “_Spirit of Christ_” (_Rom. 8:9_), and
    in having the Holy Spirit we have Christ himself (_John 16:7_—“_I
    will send him_ [the Comforter] _unto you_”; _14:18_—“_I come unto
    you_”). The Christ, who is thus present with us when we pray, is
    not simply the Logos, or the divine nature of Christ,—his humanity
    being separated from the divinity and being localized in heaven.
    This would be inconsistent with his promise, “_Lo, I am with
    you_,” in which the “I” that spoke was not simply Deity, but Deity
    and humanity inseparably united; and it would deny the real and
    indissoluble union of the two natures. The elder brother and
    sympathizing Savior who is with us when we pray is man, as well as
    God. This manhood is therefore ubiquitous by virtue of its union
    with the Godhead.

    But this is not to say that Christ’s human _body_ is everywhere
    present. It would seem that body must exist in spatial relations,
    and be confined to place. We do not know that this is so with
    regard to soul. Heaven would seem to be a place, because Christ’s
    body is there; and a spiritual body is not a body which is spirit,
    but a body which is suited to the uses of the spirit. But even
    though Christ may manifest himself, in a glorified human body,
    only in heaven, his human soul, by virtue of its union with the
    divine nature, can at the same moment be with all his scattered
    people over the whole earth. As, in the days of his flesh, his
    humanity was confined to place, while as to his Deity he could
    speak of the Son of man who is in heaven, so now, although his
    human body may be confined to place, his human soul is ubiquitous.
    Humanity can exist without body; for during the three days in the
    sepulchre, Christ’s body was on earth, but his soul was in the
    other world; and in like manner there is, during the intermediate
    state, a separation of the soul and the body of believers. But
    humanity cannot exist without soul; and if the human Savior is
    with us, then his humanity, at least so far as respects its
    immaterial part, must be everywhere present. _Per contra_, see
    Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:326, 327. Since Christ’s human nature has
    derivatively become possessed of divine attributes, there is no
    validity in the notion of a progressiveness in that nature, now
    that it has ascended to the right hand of God. See Philippi,
    Glaubenslehre, 4:131; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 558, 576.

    Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:327—“Suppose the presence of the divine
    nature of Christ in the soul of a believer in London. This divine
    nature is at the same moment conjoined with, and present to, and
    modified by, the human nature of Christ, which is in heaven and
    not in London.” So Hooker, Eccl. Pol., 54, 55, and E. G. Robinson:
    “Christ is in heaven at the right hand of the Father, interceding
    for us, while he is present in the church by his Spirit. We pray
    to the theanthropic Jesus. Possession of a human body does not now
    constitute a limitation. We know little of the nature of the
    present body.” We add to this last excellent remark the expression
    of our own conviction that the modern conception of the merely
    relative nature of space, and the idealistic view of matter as
    only the expression of mind and will, have relieved this subject
    of many of its former difficulties. If Christ is omnipresent and
    if his body is simply the manifestation of his soul, then every
    soul may feel the presence of his humanity even now and “_every
    eye_” may “_see him_” at his second coming, even though believers
    may be separated as far as is Boston from Pekin. The body from
    which his glory flashes forth may be visible in ten thousand
    places at the same time; (_Mat. 28:20_; _Rev. 1:7_).



Section IV.—The Offices Of Christ.


The Scriptures represent Christ’s offices as three in number,—prophetic,
priestly, and kingly. Although these terms are derived from concrete human
relations, they express perfectly distinct ideas. The prophet, the priest,
and the king, of the Old Testament, were detached but designed
prefigurations of him who should combine all these various activities in
himself, and should furnish the ideal reality, of which they were the
imperfect symbols.


    _1 Cor. 1:30_—“_of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who was made unto
    us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and
    redemption._” Here “_wisdom_” seems to indicate the prophetic,
    “_righteousness_” (or “_justification_”) the priestly, and
    “_sanctification and redemption_” the kingly work of Christ.
    Denovan: “Three offices are necessary. Christ must be a prophet,
    to save us from the ignorance of sin; a priest, to save us from
    its guilt; a king, to save us from its dominion in our flesh. Our
    faith cannot have firm basis in any one of these alone, any more
    than a stool can stand on less than three legs.” See Van
    Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 583-586; Archer Butler, Sermons, 1:314.

    A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 235—“For ‘office,’ there are two
    words in Latin: _munus_ = position (of Mediator), and _officia_ =
    functions (of Prophet, Priest, and King). They are not separate
    offices, as are those of President, Chief-Justice, and Senator.
    They are not separate functions, capable of successive and
    isolated performance. They are rather like the several functions
    of the one living human body—lungs, heart, brain—functionally
    distinct, yet interdependent, and together constituting one life.
    So the functions of Prophet, Priest, and King mutually imply one
    another: Christ is always a prophetical Priest, and a priestly
    Prophet; and he is always a royal Priest, and a priestly King; and
    together they accomplish one redemption, to which all are equally
    essential. Christ is both μεσίτης and παράκλητος.”


I. The Prophetic Office of Christ.


1. The nature of Christ’s prophetic work.


(_a_) Here we must avoid the narrow interpretation which would make the
prophet a mere foreteller of future events. He was rather an inspired
interpreter or revealer of the divine will, a medium of communication
between God and men (προφήτης = not foreteller, but forteller, or
forth-teller. _Cf._ Gen. 20:7,—of Abraham; Ps. 105:15,—of the patriarchs;
Mat. 11:9,—of John the Baptist; 1 Cor. 12:28, Eph. 2:20, and 3:5,—of N. T.
expounders of Scripture).


    _Gen. 20:7_—“_restore the man’s wife; for he is a prophet_”—spoken
    of Abraham; _Ps. 105:15_—“_Touch not mine anointed ones, And do my
    prophets no harm_”—spoken of the patriarchs; _Mat. 11:9_—“_But
    wherefore went ye out? to see a prophet? Yea, I say into you, and
    much more than a prophet_”—spoken of John the Baptist, from whom
    we have no recorded predictions, and whose pointing to Jesus as
    the “_Lamb of God_” (_John 1:29_) was apparently but an echo of
    _Isaiah 53_. _1 Cor. 12:28_—“_first apostles, secondly prophets_”;
    _Eph. 2:20_—“_built upon the foundation of the apostles and
    prophets_”; _3:5_—“_revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets
    in the Spirit_”—all these latter texts speaking of New Testament
    expounders of Scripture.

    Any organ of divine revelation, or medium of divine communication,
    is a prophet. “Hence,” says Philippi, “the books of Joshua,
    Judges, Samuel, and Kings are called ‘_prophetæ priores_,’ or ‘the
    earlier prophets.’ Bernard’s _Respice, Aspice, Prospice_ describes
    the work of the prophet: for the prophet might see and might
    disclose things in the past, things in the present, or things in
    the future. Daniel was a prophet, in telling Nebuchadnezzar what
    his dream had been, as well as in telling its interpretation
    (_Dan. 2:28, 36_). The woman of Samaria rightly called Christ a
    prophet, when he told her all things that ever she did (_John
    4:29_).” On the work of the prophet, see Stanley, Jewish Church,
    1:491.


(_b_) The prophet commonly united three methods of fulfilling his
office,—those of teaching, predicting, and miracle-working. In all these
respects, Jesus Christ did the work of a prophet (Deut 18:15; _cf._ Acts
3:22; Mat. 13:57; Luke 13:33; John 6:14). He taught (Mat. 5-7), he uttered
predictions (Mat. 24 and 25), he wrought miracles (Mat. 8 and 9), while in
his person, his life, his work, and his death, he revealed the Father
(John 8:26; 14:9; 17:8).


    _Deut. 18:15_—“_Jehovah thy God will raise up unto thee a prophet,
    from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him
    shall ye hearken_”; _cf._ _Acts 3:22_—where this prophecy is said
    to be fulfilled in Christ. Jesus calls himself a prophet in _Mat.
    13:57_—“_A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country,
    and in his own house_”; _Luke 13:33_—“_Nevertheless I must go on
    my way to-day and to-morrow and the day following: for it cannot
    be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem._” He was called a
    prophet: _John 6:14_—“_When therefore the people saw the sign
    which he did, they said, This is of a truth the prophet that
    cometh into the world._” _John 8:26_—“_the things which I heard
    from him_ [the Father], _these speak I unto the world_”;
    _14:9_—“_he that hath seen me hath seen the Father_”; _17:8_—“_the
    words which thou gavest me I have given unto them._”

    Denovan: “Christ teaches us by his word, his Spirit, his example.”
    Christ’s miracles were mainly miracles of healing. “Only sickness
    is contagious with us. But Christ was an example of perfect
    health, and his health was contagious. By its overflow, he healed
    others. Only a ‘_touch_’ (_Mat. 9:21_) was necessary.”

    Edwin P. Parker, on Horace Bushnell: “The two fundamental elements
    of prophecy are insight and expression. Christian prophecy implies
    insight or discernment of spiritual things by divine illumination,
    and expression of them, by inspiration, in terms of Christian
    truth or in the tones and cadences of Christian testimony. We may
    define it, then, as the publication, under the impulse of
    inspiration, and for edification, of truths perceived by divine
    illumination, apprehended by faith, and assimilated by
    experience.... It requires a natural basis and rational
    preparation in the human mind, a suitable stock of natural gifts
    on which to graft the spiritual gift for support and nourishment.
    These gifts have had devout culture. They have been crowned by
    illuminations and inspirations. Because insight gives foresight,
    the prophet will be a seer of things as they are unfolding and
    becoming; will discern far-signalings and intimations of
    Providence; will forerun men to prepare the way for them, and them
    for the way of God’s coming kingdom.”


2. The stages of Christ’s prophetic work.


These are four, namely:

(_a_) The preparatory work of the Logos, in enlightening mankind before
the time of Christ’s advent in the flesh.—All preliminary religious
knowledge, whether within or without the bounds of the chosen people, is
from Christ, the revealer of God.


    Christ’s prophetic work began before he came in the flesh. _John
    1:9_—“_There was the true light, even the light which lighteth
    every man, coming into the world_”—all the natural light of
    conscience, science, philosophy, art, civilization, is the light
    of Christ. Tennyson: “Our little systems have their day, They have
    their day and cease to be; They are but broken lights of thee, And
    thou, O Lord, art more than they.” _Heb. 12:25, 26_—“_See that ye
    refuse not him that speaketh.... whose voice then_ [at Sinai]
    _shook the earth: but now he hath promised, saying, Yet once more
    will I make to tremble not the earth only, but also the heaven_”;
    _Luke 11:49_—“_Therefore said the wisdom of God, I will send unto
    them prophets and apostles_”; _cf._ _Mat 23:34_—“_behold, I send
    unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: some of them shall
    ye kill and crucify_”—which shows that Jesus was referring to his
    own teachings, as well as to those of the earlier prophets.


(_b_) The earthly ministry of Christ incarnate.—In his earthly ministry,
Christ showed himself the prophet _par excellence_. While he submitted,
like the Old Testament prophets, to the direction of the Holy Spirit,
unlike them, he found the sources of all knowledge and power within
himself. The word of God did not _come_ to him,—he was _himself_ the Word.


    _Luke 6:19_—“_And all the multitude sought to touch him; for power
    came forth from him, and healed them all_”; _John 2:11_—“_This
    beginning of his signs did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and
    manifested his glory_”; _8:38, 58_—“_I speak the things which I
    have seen with my Father.... Before Abraham was born, I am_”;
    _cf._ _Jer. 2:1_—“_the word of Jehovah came to me_”; _John
    1:1_—“_In the beginning was the Word._” _Mat. 26:53_—“_twelve
    legions of angels_”; _John 10:18_—of his life: “_I have power to
    lay it down, and I have power to take it again_”; _34_—“_Is it not
    written in your law, I said, Ye are gods? If he called them gods,
    unto whom the word of God came ... say ye of him, whom the Father
    sanctified and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest, because I
    said, I am the Son of God?_” Martensen, Dogmatics, 295-301, says
    of Jesus’ teaching that “its source was not inspiration, but
    incarnation.” Jesus was not inspired,—he was the Inspirer.
    Therefore he is the true “Master of those who know.” His disciples
    act in his name; he acts in his own name.


(_c_) The guidance and teaching of his church on earth, since his
ascension.—Christ’s prophetic activity is continued through the preaching
of his apostles and ministers, and by the enlightening influences of his
Holy Spirit (John 16:12-14; Acts 1:1). The apostles unfolded the germs of
doctrine put into their hands by Christ. The church is, in a derivative
sense, a prophetic institution, established to teach the world by its
preaching and its ordinances. But Christians are prophets, only as being
proclaimers of Christ’s teaching (Num. 11:29; Joel 2:28).


    _John 16:12-14_—“_I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye
    cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is
    come, he shall guide you into all the truth.... He shall glorify
    me: for he shall take of mine and shall declare it unto you_”;
    _Acts 1:1_—“_The former treatise I made, O Theophilus, concerning
    all that Jesus began both to do and to teach_”—Christ’s prophetic
    work was only _begun_, during his earthly ministry; it is
    continued since his ascension. The inspiration of the apostles,
    the illumination of all preachers and Christians to understand and
    to unfold the meaning of the word they wrote, the conviction of
    sinners, and the sanctification of believers,—all these are parts
    of Christ’s prophetic work, performed through the Holy Spirit.

    By virtue of their union with Christ and participation in Christ’s
    Spirit, all Christians are made in a secondary sense prophets, as
    well as priests and kings. _Num. 11:29_—“_Would that all Jehovah’s
    people were prophets, that Jehovah would put his Spirit upon
    them_”; _Joel 2:28_—“_I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh;
    and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy._” All modern
    prophecy that is true, however, is but the republication of
    Christ’s message—the proclamation and expounding of truth already
    revealed in Scripture. “All so-called new prophecy, from Montanus
    to Swedenborg, proves its own falsity by its lack of attesting
    miracles.”

    A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 242—“Every human prophet
    presupposes an infinite eternal divine Prophet from whom his
    knowledge is received, just as every stream presupposes a fountain
    from which it flows.... As the telescope of highest power takes
    into its field the narrowest segment of the sky, so Christ the
    prophet sometimes gives the intensest insight into the glowing
    centre of the heavenly world to those whom this world regards as
    unlearned and foolish, and the church recognizes as only babes in
    Christ.”


(_d_) Christ’s final revelation of the Father to his saints in glory (John
16:25; 17:24, 26; _cf._ Is. 64:4; 1 Cor. 13:12).—Thus Christ’s prophetic
work will be an endless one, as the Father whom he reveals is infinite.


    _John 16:25_—“_the hour cometh, when I shall no more speak unto
    you in dark sayings, but shall tell you plainly of the Father_”;
    _17:24_—“_I desire that where I am, they also may be with me; that
    they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me_”; _26_—“_I
    made known unto them thy name, and will make it known._” The
    revelation of his own glory will be the revelation of the Father,
    in the Son. _Is. 64:4_—“_For from of old men have not heard, nor
    perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen a God besides
    thee, who worketh for him that waiteth for him_”; _1 Cor.
    13:12_—“_now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face:
    now I know in part; but then shall I know fully even as also I was
    fully known._” _Rev. 21:23_—“_And the city hath no need of the
    sun, neither of the moon, to shine upon it: for the glory of God
    did lighten it, and the lamp thereof is the Lamb_”—not light, but
    lamp. Light is something generally diffused; one sees _by_ it, but
    one cannot see _it_. Lamp is the narrowing down, the
    concentrating, the focusing of light, so that the light becomes
    definite and visible. So in heaven Christ will be the visible God.
    We shall never see the Father separate from Christ. No man or
    angel has at any time seen God, “_whom no man hath seen, nor can
    see._” “_The only begotten Son ... he hath declared him,_” and he
    will forever declare him (_John 1:18_; _1 Tim. 6:16_).

    The ministers of the gospel in modern times, so far as they are
    joined to Christ and possessed by his spirit, have a right to call
    themselves prophets. The prophet is one—1. sent by God and
    conscious of his mission; 2. with a message from God which he is
    under compulsion to deliver; 3. a message grounded in the truth of
    the past, setting it in new lights for the present, and making new
    applications of it for the future. The word of the Lord must come
    to him; it must be his gospel; there must be things new as well as
    old. All mathematics are in the simplest axiom; but it needs
    divine illumination to discover them. All truth was in Jesus’
    words, nay, in the first prophecy uttered after the Fall, but only
    the apostles brought it out. The prophet’s message must be 4. a
    message for the place and time—primarily for contemporaries and
    present needs; 5. a message of eternal significance and worldwide
    influence. As the prophet’s word was for the whole world, so our
    word may be for other worlds, that _“__unto the principalities and
    the powers in the heavenly places might be made known through the
    church the manifold wisdom of God__”__ (Eph. 3:10)_. It must be
    also 6. a message of the kingdom and triumph of Christ, which puts
    over against the distractions and calamities of the present time
    the glowing ideal and the perfect consummation to which God is
    leading his people: “_Blessed be the glory of Jehovah from his
    place_”; “_Jehovah is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep
    silence before him_” (_Ez. 3:12; Hab. 2:20_). On the whole subject
    of Christ’s prophetic office, see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV,
    2:24-27; Bruce, Humiliation of Christ, 320-330; Shedd, Dogm.
    Theol., 2:366-370.


II. The Priestly Office of Christ.


The priest was a person divinely appointed to transact with God on man’s
behalf. He fulfilled his office, first by offering sacrifice, and secondly
by making intercession. In both these respects Christ is priest.


    _Hebrews 7:24-28_—“_he, because he abideth forever, hath his
    priesthood unchangeable. Wherefore also he is able to save to the
    uttermost them that draw near unto God through him, seeing he ever
    liveth to make intercession for them. For such a high priest
    became us, holy, guileless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and
    made higher than the heavens; who needeth not daily, like these
    high priests, to offer up sacrifices, first for his own sins, and
    then for the sins of the people: for this he did once for all,
    when he offered up himself. For the law appointeth men high
    priests, having infirmity; but the word of the oath, which was
    after the law, appointeth a Son, perfected for evermore._” The
    whole race was shut out from God by its sin. But God chose the
    Israelites as a priestly nation, Levi as a priestly tribe, Aaron
    as a priestly family, the high priest out of this family as type
    of the great high priest, Jesus Christ. J. S. Candlish, in Bib.
    World, Feb. 1897:87-97, cites the following facts with regard to
    our Lord’s sufferings as proofs of the doctrine of atonement: 1.
    Christ gave up his life by a perfectly free act; 2. out of regard
    to God his Father and obedience to his will; 3. the bitterest
    element of his suffering was that he endured it at the hand of
    God; 4. this divine appointment and infliction of suffering is
    inexplicable, except as Christ endured the divine judgment against
    the sin of the race.


1. Christ’s Sacrificial Work, or the Doctrine of the Atonement.


The Scriptures teach that Christ obeyed and suffered in our stead, to
satisfy an immanent demand of the divine holiness, and thus remove an
obstacle in the divine mind to the pardon and restoration of the guilty.
This statement may be expanded and explained in a preliminary way as
follows:—

(_a_) The fundamental attribute of God is holiness, and holiness is not
self-communicating love, but self-affirming righteousness. Holiness limits
and conditions love, for love can will happiness only as happiness results
from or consists with righteousness, that is, with conformity to God.


    We have shown in our discussion of the divine attributes (vol. 1,
    pages 268-275) that holiness is neither self-love nor love, but
    self-affirming purity and right. Those who maintain that love is
    self-affirming as well as self-communicating, and therefore that
    holiness is God’s love for himself, must still admit that this
    self-affirming love which is holiness conditions and furnishes the
    standard for the self-communicating love which is benevolence. But
    we hold that holiness is not identical with, nor a manifestation
    of, love. Since self-maintenance must precede self-impartation;
    and since benevolence finds its object, motive, standard, and
    limit in righteousness, holiness, the self-affirming attribute,
    can in no way be resolved into love, the self-communicating. God
    must first maintain his own being before he can give to another;
    and this self-maintenance must have its reason and motive in the
    worth of that which is maintained. Holiness cannot be love,
    because love is irrational and capricious except as it has a
    standard by which it is regulated, and this standard cannot be
    itself love, but must be holiness. To make holiness a form of love
    is really to deny its existence, and with this to deny that any
    atonement is necessary for man’s salvation.


(_b_) The universe is a reflection of God, and Christ the Logos is its
life. God has constituted the universe, and humanity as a part of it, so
as to express his holiness, positively by connecting happiness with
righteousness, negatively by attaching unhappiness or suffering to sin.


    We have seen, in vol. I, pages 109, 309-311, 335-338, that since
    Christ is the Logos, the immanent God, God revealed in nature, in
    humanity, and in redemption, the universe must be recognized as
    created, upheld and governed by the same Being who in the course
    of history was manifest in human form and who made atonement for
    human sin by his death on Calvary. As all God’s creative activity
    has been exercised through Christ (vol. I, page 310), so it is
    Christ in whom all things consist or are held together (vol. I,
    page 311). Providence, as well as preservation, is his work. He
    makes the universe to reflect God, and especially God’s ethical
    nature. That pain or loss universally and inevitably follow sin is
    the proof that God is unalterably opposed to moral evil; and the
    demands and reproaches of conscience witness that holiness is the
    fundamental attribute of God’s being.


(_c_) Christ the Logos, as the Revealer of God in the universe and in
humanity, must condemn sin by visiting upon it the suffering which is its
penalty; while at the same time, as the Life of humanity, he must endure
the reaction of God’s holiness against sin which constitutes that penalty.


    Here is a double work of Christ which Paul distinctly declares in
    _Rom. 8:3_—“_For what the law could not do, in that it was weak
    through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of
    sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh._” The
    meaning is that God did through Christ what the law could not do,
    namely, accomplish deliverance for humanity; and did this by
    sending his son in a nature which in us is identified with sin. In
    connection with sin (περὶ ἁμαρτίας), and as an offering for sin,
    God condemned sin, by condemning Christ. Expositor’s Greek
    Testament, _in loco_: “When the question is asked, In what sense
    did God send his Son ‘in connection with sin’, there is only one
    answer possible. He sent him to expiate sin by his sacrificial
    death. This is the centre and foundation of Paul’s gospel; see
    _Rom. 3:25_ _sq._” But whatever God did in condemning sin he did
    through Christ; “_God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto
    himself_” (_2 Cor. 5:19_); Christ was the condemner, as well as
    the condemned; conscience in us, which unites the accuser and the
    accused, shows us how Christ could be both the Judge and the
    Sin-bearer.


(_d_) Our personality is not self-contained. We live, move, and have our
being naturally in Christ the Logos. Our reason, affection, conscience,
and will are complete only in him. He is generic humanity, of which we are
the offshoots. When his righteousness condemns sin, and his love
voluntarily endures the suffering which is sin’s penalty, humanity
ratifies the judgment of God, makes full propitiation for sin, and
satisfies the demands of holiness.


    My personal existence is grounded in God. I cannot perceive the
    world outside of me nor recognize the existence of my fellow men,
    except as he bridges the gulf between me and the universe.
    Complete self-consciousness would be impossible if we did not
    partake of the universal Reason. The smallest child makes
    assumptions and uses processes of logic which are all instinctive,
    but which indicate the working in him of an absolute and infinite
    Intelligence. True love is possible only as God’s love flows into
    us and takes possession of us; so that the poet can truly say:
    “Our loves in higher love endure.” No human will is truly free,
    unless God emancipates it; only he whom the Son of God makes free
    is free indeed; “_work out your own salvation with fear and
    trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to
    work_” (_Phil. 2:12, 13_). Our moral nature, even more than our
    intellectual nature, witnesses that we are not sufficient to
    ourselves, but are complete only in him in whom we live and move
    and have our being (_Col. 2:10_; _Acts 17:28_). No man can make a
    conscience for himself. There is a common conscience, over and
    above the finite and individual conscience. That common conscience
    is one in all moral beings. John Watson: “There is no
    consciousness of self apart from the consciousness of other selves
    and things, and no consciousness of the world apart from the
    consciousness of the single Reality presupposed in both.” This
    single Reality is Jesus Christ, the manifested God, the Light that
    lighteth every man, and the Life of all that lives (_John 1:4,
    9_). He can represent humanity before God, because his immanent
    Deity constitutes the very essence of humanity.


(_e_) While Christ’s love explains his willingness to endure suffering for
us, only his holiness furnishes the reason for that constitution of the
universe and of human nature which makes this suffering necessary. As
respects us, his sufferings are substitutionary, since his divinity and
his sinlessness enable him to do for us what we could never do for
ourselves. Yet this substitution is also a sharing—not the work of one
external to us, but of one who is the life of humanity, the soul of our
soul and the life of our life, and so responsible with us for the sins of
the race.


    Most of the recent treatises on the Atonement have been
    descriptions of the effects of the Atonement upon life and
    character, but have thrown no light upon the Atonement itself, if
    indeed they have not denied its existence. We must not emphasize
    the effects by ignoring the cause. Scripture declares the ultimate
    aim of the Atonement to be that God “_might himself be just_”
    (_Rom. 3:26_); and no theory of the atonement will meet the
    demands of reason or conscience that does not ground its necessity
    in God’s righteousness, rather than in his love. We acknowledge
    that our conceptions of atonement have suffered some change. To
    our fathers the atonement was a mere historical fact, a sacrifice
    offered in a few brief hours upon the Cross. It was a literal
    substitution of Christ’s suffering for ours, the payment of our
    debt by another, and upon the ground of that payment we are
    permitted to go free. Those sufferings were soon over, and the
    hymn, “Love’s Redeeming Work is Done,” expressed the believer’s
    joy in a finished redemption. And all this is true. But it is only
    a part of the truth. The atonement, like every other doctrine of
    Christianity, is a fact of life; and such facts of life cannot be
    crowded into our definitions, because they are greater than any
    definitions that we can frame. We must add to the idea of
    _substitution_ the idea of _sharing_. Christ’s doing and suffering
    is not that of one external and foreign to us. He is bone of our
    bone, and flesh of our flesh; the bearer of our humanity; yes, the
    very life of the race.


(_f_) The historical work of the incarnate Christ is not itself the
atonement,—it is rather the revelation of the atonement. The suffering of
the incarnate Christ is the manifestation in space and time of the eternal
suffering of God on account of human sin. Yet without the historical work
which was finished on Calvary, the age-long suffering of God could never
have been made comprehensible to men.


    The life that Christ lived in Palestine and the death that he
    endured on Calvary were the revelation of a union with mankind
    which antedated the Fall. Being thus joined to us from the
    beginning, he has suffered in all human sin; “_in all our
    affliction he has been afflicted_” (_Is. 63:9_); so that the
    Psalmist can say: “_Blessed be the Lord, who daily beareth our
    burden, even the God who is our salvation_” (_Ps. 68:19_). The
    historical sacrifice was a burning-glass which focused the
    diffused rays of the Sun of righteousness and made them effective
    in the melting of human hearts. The sufferings of Christ take
    deepest hold upon us only when we see in them the two contrasted
    but complementary truths: that holiness must make penalty to
    follow sin, and that love must share that penalty with the
    transgressor. The Cross was the concrete exhibition of the
    holiness that required, and of the love that provided, man’s
    redemption. Those six hours of pain could never have procured our
    salvation if they had not been a revelation of eternal facts in
    the being of God. The heart of God and the meaning of all previous
    history were then unveiled. The whole evolution of humanity was
    there depicted in its essential elements, on the one hand the sin
    and condemnation of the race, on the other hand the grace and
    suffering of him who was its life and salvation. As he who hung
    upon the cross was God, manifest in the flesh, so the suffering of
    the cross was God’s suffering for sin, manifest in the flesh. The
    imputation of our sins to him is the result of his natural union
    with us. He has been our substitute from the beginning. We cannot
    quarrel with the doctrine of substitution when we see that this
    substitution is but the sharing of our griefs and sorrows by him
    whose very life pulsates in our veins. See A. H. Strong, Christ in
    Creation, 78-80, 177-180.


(_g_) The historical sacrifice of our Lord is not only the final
revelation of the heart of God, but also the manifestation of the law of
universal life—the law that sin brings suffering to all connected with it,
and that we can overcome sin in ourselves and in the world only by
entering into the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings and Christ’s victory,
or, in other words, only by union with him through faith.


    We too are subject to the same law of life. We who enter into
    fellowship with our Lord “_fill up ... that which is lacking of
    the afflictions of Christ ... for his body’s sake, which is the
    church_” (_Col. 1:24_). The Christian Church can reign with Christ
    only as it partakes in his suffering. The atonement becomes a
    model and stimulus to self-sacrifice, and a test of Christian
    character. But it is easy to see how the subjective effect of
    Christ’s sacrifice may absorb the attention, to the exclusion of
    its ground and cause. The moral influence of the atonement has
    taken deep hold upon our minds, and we are in danger of forgetting
    that it is the holiness of God, and not the salvation of men, that
    primarily requires it. When sharing excludes substitution; when
    reconciliation of man to God excludes reconciliation of God to
    man; when the only peace secured is peace in the sinner’s heart
    and no thought is given to that peace with God which it is the
    first object of the atonement to secure; then the whole
    evangelical system is weakened, God’s righteousness is ignored,
    and man is practically put in place of God. We must not go back to
    the old mechanical and arbitrary conceptions of the atonement,—we
    must go forward to a more vital apprehension of the relation of
    the race to Christ. A larger knowledge of Christ, the life of
    humanity, will enable us to hold fast the objective nature of the
    atonement, and its necessity as grounded in the holiness of God;
    while at the same time we appropriate all that is good in the
    modern view of the atonement, as the final demonstration of God’s
    constraining love which moves men to repentance and submission.
    See A. H. Strong, Cleveland Address, 1904:16-18; Dinsmore, The
    Atonement in Literature and in Life, 213-250.


A. Scripture Methods of Representing the Atonement.


We may classify the Scripture representations according as they conform to
moral, commercial, legal or sacrificial analogies.

(_a_) MORAL.—The atonement is described as

A _provision originating in God’s love_, and manifesting this love to the
universe; but also as an _example of disinterested love_, to secure our
deliverance from selfishness.—In these latter passages, Christ’s death is
referred to as a source of moral stimulus to men.


    _A provision_: _John 3:16_—“_For God so loved the world, that he
    gave his only begotten Son_”; _Rom. 5:8_—“_God commendeth his own
    love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died
    for us_”; _1 John 4:9_—“_Herein was the love of God manifested in
    us, that God hath sent his only begotten Son into the world that
    we might live through him_”; _Heb. 2:9_—“_Jesus, because of the
    suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, that by the grace
    of God he should taste of death for every man_”—redemption
    originated in the love of the Father, as well as in that of the
    Son.—_An example_: _Luke 9:22-24_—“_The Son of man must suffer ...
    and be killed.... If any man would come after me, let him ... take
    up his cross daily, and follow me ... whosoever shall lose his
    life for my sake, the same shall save it_”; _2 Cor. 5:15_—“_he
    died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto
    themselves_”; _Gal. 1:4_—“_gave himself for our sins, that he
    might deliver us out of this present __ evil world_”; _Eph.
    5:25-27_—“_Christ also loved the church, and gave himself up for
    it; that he might sanctify it_”; _Col. 1:22_—“_reconciled in the
    body of his flesh through death, to present you holy_”; _Titus
    2:14_—“_gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all
    iniquity, and purify_”; _1 Pet. 2:21-24_—“_Christ also suffered
    for you, leaving you an example, that ye should follow his steps:
    who did no sin ... who his own self bare our sins in his body upon
    the tree, that we, having died unto sins, might live unto
    righteousness._” Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 181—“A pious
    cottager, on hearing the text, ‘_God so loved the world_,’
    exclaimed: ‘Ah, that _was_ love! I could have given myself, but I
    could never have given my son.’ ” There was a wounding of the
    Father through the heart of the Son: “_they shall look unto me
    whom they have pierced; and they shall mourn for him, as one
    mourneth for his only son_” (_Zech. 12:10_).


(b) COMMERCIAL.—The atonement is described as

A _ransom_, paid to free us from the bondage of sin (note in these
passages the use of ἀντί, the preposition of price, bargain, exchange).—In
these passages, Christ’s death is represented as the price of our
deliverance from sin and death.


    _Mat. 20:28, and Mark 10:45_—“_to give his life a ransom for
    many_”—λύτρον ἀντὶ πολλῶν. _1 Tim. 2:6_—“_who gave himself a
    ransom for all_”—ἀντίλυτρον. Ἀντί (“_for_,” in the sense of
    “instead of”) is never confounded with ὑπέρ (“_for_,” in the sense
    of “in behalf of,” “for the benefit of”). Ἀντί is the preposition
    of price, bargain, exchange; and this signification is traceable
    in every passage where it occurs in the N. T. See _Mat.
    2:22_—“_Archelaus was reigning over Judea in the room of_ [ἀντί]
    _his father Herod_”; _Luke 11:11_—“_shall his son ask ... a fish,
    and he for_ [ἀντί] _a fish give him a serpent?_” _Heb.
    12:2_—“_Jesus the author and perfecter of our faith, who for_
    [ἀντί = as the price of] _the joy that was set before him endured
    the cross_”; _16_—“_Esau, who for_ [ἀντί = in exchange for] _one
    mess of meat sold his own birthright._” See also _Mat.
    16:26_—“_what shall a man give in exchange for_ (ἀντάλλαγμα) _his
    life_” = how shall he buy it back, when once he has lost it?
    Ἀντίλυτρον = substitutionary ransom. The connection in _1 Tim.
    2:6_ requires that ὑπέρ should mean “instead of.” We should
    interpret this ὑπέρ by the ἀντί in _Mat. 20:28_. “Something befell
    Christ, and by reason of that, the same thing need not befall
    sinners” (E. Y. Mullins).

    Meyer, on _Mat. 20:28_—“_to give his life a ransom for many_”—“The
    ψυχή is conceived of as λύτρον, a ransom, for, through the
    shedding of the blood, it becomes the τιμή (price) of redemption.”
    See also _1 Cor. 6:20; 7:23_—“_ye were bought with a price_”; and
    _2 Pet. 2:1_—“_denying even the Master that bought them._” The
    word “redemption,” indeed, means simply “repurchase,” or “the
    state of being repurchased”—_i. e._, delivered by the payment of a
    price. _Rev. 5:9_—“_thou wast slain, and didst purchase unto God
    with thy blood men of every tribe._” Winer, N. T. Grammar, 258—“In
    Greek, ἀντί is the preposition of price.” Buttmann, N. T. Grammar,
    321—“In the signification of the preposition ἀντί (instead of,
    for), no deviation occurs from ordinary usage.” See Grimm’s Wilke,
    Lexicon Græco-Lat.: “ἀντί, _in vicem_, _anstatt_”; Thayer, Lexicon
    N. T.—“ἀντί, of that for which anything is given, received,
    endured; ... of the price of sale (or purchase) _Mat. 20:28_”;
    also Cremer, N. T. Lex., on ἀντάλλαγμα.

    Pfleiderer, in New World, Sept. 1899, doubts whether Jesus ever
    really uttered the words “_give his life a ransom for many_”
    (_Mat. 20:28_). He regards them as essentially Pauline, and the
    result of later dogmatic reflection on the death of Jesus as a
    means of redemption. So Paine, Evolution of Trinitarianism,
    377-381. But these words occur not in Luke, the Pauline gospel,
    but in Matthew, which is much earlier. They represent at any rate
    the apostolic conception of Jesus’ teaching, a conception which
    Jesus himself promised should be formed under the guidance of the
    Holy Spirit, who should bring all things to the remembrance of his
    apostles and should guide them into all the truth (_John 14:26_;
    _16:13_). As will be seen below, Pfleiderer declares the Pauline
    doctrine to be that of substitutionary suffering.


(_c_) LEGAL.—The atonement is described as

An act of _obedience_ to the law which sinners had violated; a _penalty_,
borne in order to rescue the guilty; and an _exhibition_ of God’s
righteousness, necessary to the vindication of his procedure in the pardon
and restoration of sinners.—In these passages the death of Christ is
represented as demanded by God’s law and government.


    _Obedience_: _Gal. 4:4, 5_—“_born of a woman, born under the law,
    that he might redeem them that were under the law_”; _Mat.
    3:15_—“_thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness_”—Christ’s
    baptism prefigured his death, and was a consecration to death;
    _cf._ _Mark 10:38_—“_Are ye able to drink the cup that I drink? or
    to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?_” _Luke
    12:50_—“_I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I
    straitened till it be accomplished!_” _Mat. 26:39_—“_My Father, if
    it be possible, let this cup pass away from me: nevertheless, not
    as I will, but as thou wilt_”; _5:17_—“_Think not that I came to
    destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to
    fulfil_”; _Phil. 2:8_—“_becoming obedient even unto death_”; _Rom.
    5:19_—“_through the obedience of the one shall the many be made
    righteous_”; _10:4_—“_Christ is the end of the law unto
    righteousness to every one that believeth._”—_Penalty_: _Rom.
    4:25_—“_who was delivered up for our trespasses, and was raised
    for our justification_”; _8:3_—“_God, sending his own Son in the
    likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the
    flesh_”; _2 Cor. 5:21_—“_Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on
    our behalf_”—here “_sin_”—a sinner, an accursed one (Meyer); _Gal.
    1:4_—“_gave himself for our sins_”; _3:13_—“_Christ redeemed us
    from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us; for it is
    written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree_”; _cf._ _Deut
    21:23_—“_he that is hanged is accursed of God._” _Heb.
    9:28_—“_Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of
    many_”; _cf._ _Lev. 5:17_—“_if any one sin ... yet is he guilty,
    and shall bear his iniquity_”; _Num. 14:34_—“_for every day a
    year, shall ye bear your iniquities, even forty years_”; _Lam.
    5:7_—“_Our fathers sinned and are not; And we have borne their
    iniquities._”—_Exhibition_: _Rom. 3:25, 26_—“_whom God set forth
    to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his
    righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done
    aforetime, in the forbearance of God_”; _cf._ _Heb. 9:15_—“_a
    death having taken place for the redemption of the transgressions
    that were under the first covenant._”

    On these passages, see an excellent section in Pfleiderer, Die
    Ritschl’sche Theologie, 38-53. Pfleiderer severely criticizes
    Ritschl’s evasion of their natural force and declares Paul’s
    teaching to be that Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the
    law by suffering as a substitute the death threatened by the law
    against sinners. So Orelli Cone, Paul, 261. On the other hand, L.
    L. Paine, Evolution of Trinitarianism, 288-307, chapter on the New
    Christian Atonement, holds that Christ taught only reconciliation
    on condition of repentance. Paul added the idea of mediation drawn
    from the Platonic dualism of Philo. The Epistle to the Hebrews
    made Christ a sacrificial victim to propitiate God, so that the
    reconciliation became Godward instead of manward. But Professor
    Paine’s view that Paul taught an Arian Mediatorship is incorrect.
    “_God was in Christ_” (_2 Cor. 5:19_) and God “_manifested in the
    flesh_” (_1 Tim. 3:16_) are the keynote of Paul’s teaching, and
    this is identical with John’s doctrine of the Logos: “_the Word
    was God_,” and “_the Word became flesh_” (_John 1:1, 14_)

    The Outlook, December 15, 1900, in criticizing Prof. Paine, states
    three postulates of the New Trinitarianism as: 1. The essential
    kinship of God and man,—in man there is an essential divineness,
    in God there is an essential humanness. 2. The divine
    immanence,—this universal presence gives nature its physical
    unity, and humanity its moral unity. This is not pantheism, any
    more than the presence of man’s spirit in all he thinks and does
    proves that man’s spirit is only the sum of his experiences. 3.
    God transcends all phenomena,—though in all, he is greater than
    all. He entered perfectly into one man, and through this
    indwelling in one man he is gradually entering into all men and
    filling all men with his fulness, so that Christ will be the
    first-born among many brethren. The defects of this view, which
    contains many elements of truth, are: 1. That it regards Christ as
    the product instead of the Producer, the divinely formed man
    instead of the humanly acting God, the head man among men instead
    of the Creator and Life of humanity; 2. That it therefore renders
    impossible any divine bearing of the sins of all men by Jesus
    Christ, and substitutes for it such a histrionic exhibition of
    God’s feeling and such a beauty of example as are possible within
    the limits of human nature,—in other words, there is no real Deity
    of Christ and no objective atonement.


(d) SACRIFICIAL.—The atonement is described as

A work of _priestly mediation_, which reconciles God to men,—notice here
that the term “reconciliation” has its usual sense of removing enmity, not
from the offending, but from the offended party;—a _sin-offering_,
presented on behalf of transgressors;—a _propitiation_, which satisfies
the demands of violated holiness;—and a _substitution_, of Christ’s
obedience and sufferings for ours.—These passages, taken together, show
that Christ’s death is demanded by God’s attribute of justice, or
holiness, if sinners are to be saved.


    _Priestly mediation_: _Heb. 9:11, 12_—“_Christ having come a high
    priest, ... nor yet through the blood of goats and calves, but
    through his own blood, entered in once for all into the holy
    place, having obtained eternal redemption_”; _Rom. 5:10_—“_while
    we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of
    his Son_”; _2 Cor. 5:18, 19_—“_all things are of God, who
    reconciled us to himself through Christ.... God was in Christ
    reconciling the world unto himself, not reckoning unto them their
    trespasses_”; _Eph. 2:16_—“_might reconcile them both in one body
    unto God through the cross, having slain the enmity thereby_”;
    _cf._ _12, 13, 19_—“_strangers from the covenants of the
    promise.... far off.... no more strangers and sojourners, but ye
    are fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of
    God_”; _Col. 1:20_—“_through him to reconcile all things unto
    himself, having made peace through the blood of his cross._”

    On all these passages, see Meyer, who shows the meaning of the
    apostle to be, that “we were ‘_enemies_,’ not actively, as hostile
    to God, but passively, as those with whom God was angry.” The
    epistle to the Romans begins with the revelation of wrath against
    Gentile and Jew alike (_Rom. 1:18_). “_While we were enemies_”
    (_Rom. 5:10_)—“when God was hostile to us.” “Reconciliation” is
    therefore the removal of God’s wrath toward man. Meyer, on this
    last passage, says that Christ’s death does not remove man’s wrath
    toward God [this is not the work of Christ, but of the Holy
    Spirit]. The offender reconciles the person offended, not himself.
    See Denney, Com. on _Rom. 5:9-11_, in Expositor’s Gk. Test.

    _Cf._ _Num. 25:13_, where Phinehas, by slaying Zimri, is said to
    have “_made atonement for the children of Israel_.” Surely, the
    “_atonement_” here cannot be a reconciliation of _Israel_. The
    action terminates, not on the subject, but on the object—God. So,
    _1 Sam. 29:4_—“_wherewith should this fellow reconcile himself
    unto his lord? should it not be with the heads of these men?_”
    _Mat. 5:23, 24_—“_If therefore thou art offering thy gift at the
    altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against
    thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way, first
    be reconciled to thy brother_ [_i. e._, remove his enmity, not
    thine own], _and then come and offer thy gift._” See Shedd, Dogm.
    Theol., 2:387-398.

    Pfleiderer, Die Ritschl’sche Theologie, 42—“Ἐχθροὶ ὄντες (_Rom.
    5:10_) = not the active disposition of enmity to God on our part,
    but our passive condition under the enmity or wrath of God.” Paul
    was not the author of this doctrine,—he claims that he received it
    from Christ himself (_Gal. 1:12_). Simon, Reconciliation, 167—“The
    idea that only man needs to be reconciled arises from a false
    conception of the unchangeableness of God. But God would be
    unjust, if his relation to man were the same after his sin as it
    was before.” The old hymn expressed the truth: “My God is
    reconciled; His pardoning voice I hear; He owns me for his child;
    I can no longer fear; With filial trust I now draw nigh, And
    ‘Father, Abba, Father’ cry.”

    _A sin-offering_: _John 1:29_—“_Behold, the Lamb of God, that
    taketh away the sin of the world_”—here αἴρων means to take away
    by taking or bearing; to take, and so take away. It is an allusion
    to the sin-offering of _Isaiah 53:6-12_—“_when thou shalt make his
    soul an offering for sin ... as a lamb that is led to the
    slaughter ... Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all._”
    _Mat. 26:28_—“_this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured
    out for many unto remission of sins_”; _cf._ _Ps. 50:5_—“_made a
    covenant with me by sacrifice._” _1 John 1:7_—“_the blood of Jesus
    his Son cleanseth us from all sin_”—not sanctification, but
    justification; _1 Cor. 5:7_—“_our passover also hath been
    sacrificed, even Christ_”; _cf._ _Deut. 16:2-6_—“_thou shalt
    sacrifice the passover unto Jehovah thy God._” _Eph. 5:2_—“_gave
    himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for an odor
    of a sweet smell_” (see Com. of Salmond, in Expositor’s Greek
    Testament); _Heb. 9:14_—“_the blood of Christ, who through the
    eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God_”; _22,
    26_—“_apart from shedding of blood there is no remission.... now
    once in the end of the ages hath he been manifested to put away
    sin by the sacrifice of himself_”; _1 Pet. 1:18, 19_—“_redeemed
    ... with precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without
    spot, even the blood of Christ._” See Expos. Gk. Test., on _Eph.
    1:7_.

    Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 35, points out that _John
    6:52-59_—“_eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood_”—is Christ’s
    reference to his death in terms of _sacrifice_. So, as we shall
    see below, it is a _propitiation_ (_1 John 2:2_). We therefore
    strongly object to the statement of Wilson, Gospel of Atonement,
    64—“Christ’s death is a sacrifice, if sacrifice means the crowning
    instance of that suffering of the innocent for the guilty which
    springs from the solidarity of mankind; but there is no thought of
    substitution or expiation.” Wilson forgets that this necessity of
    suffering arises from God’s righteousness; that without this
    suffering man cannot be saved; that Christ endures what we, on
    account of the insensibility of sin, cannot feel or endure; that
    this suffering takes the place of ours, so that we are saved
    thereby. Wilson holds that the Incarnation _constituted_ the
    Atonement, and that all thought of expiation may be eliminated.
    Henry B. Smith far better summed up the gospel in the words:
    “Incarnation in order to Atonement.” We regard as still better the
    words: “Incarnation in order to reveal the Atonement.”

    _A propitiation_: _Rom. 3:25, 26_—“_whom God set forth to be a
    propitiation, ... in his blood ... that he might himself be just,
    and the justifier of him that hath faith in Jesus._” A full and
    critical exposition of this passage will be found under the
    Ethical Theory of the Atonement, pages 750-760. Here it is
    sufficient to say that it shows: (1) that Christ’s death is a
    propitiatory sacrifice; (2) that its first and main effect is upon
    God; (3) that the particular attribute in God which demands the
    atonement is his justice, or holiness; (4) that the satisfaction
    of this holiness is the necessary condition of God’s justifying
    the believer.

    Compare _Luke 18:13_, marg.—“_God, be thou merciful unto me the
    sinner_”; lit.: “_God be propitiated toward me the sinner_”—by the
    sacrifice, whose smoke was ascending before the publican, even
    while he prayed. _Heb. 2:17_—“_a merciful and faithful high priest
    in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of
    the people_”; _1 John 2:2_—“_and he is the propitiation for our
    sins; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world_”;
    _4:10_—“_Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved
    us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins_”; _cf._
    _Gen. 32:20_, LXX.—“_I will appease_ [ἐξιλάσομαι, “propitiate”]
    _him with the present that goeth before me_”; _Prov. 16:14_,
    LXX.—“_The wrath of a king is as messengers of death; but a wise
    man will pacify it_” [ἐξιλάσεται, “propitiate it”].

    On propitiation, see Foster, Christian Life and Theology,
    216—“Something was thereby done which rendered God inclined to
    pardon the sinner. God is made inclined to forgive sinners by the
    sacrifice, because his righteousness was exhibited by the
    infliction of the penalty of sin; but not because he needed to be
    inclined in heart to love the sinner or to exercise his mercy. In
    fact, it was he himself who ‘_set forth_’ Jesus as ‘_a
    propitiation_’ (_Rom. 3:25, 26_).” Paul never merges the objective
    atonement in its subjective effects, although no writer of the New
    Testament has more fully recognized these subjective effects. With
    him Christ for us upon the Cross is the necessary preparation for
    Christ _in_ us by his Spirit. Gould, Bib. Theol. N. T., 74, 75,
    89, 172, unwarrantably contrasts Paul’s representation of Christ
    as priest with what he calls the representation of Christ as
    prophet in the Epistle to the Hebrews: “The priest says: Man’s
    return to God is not enough,—there must be an expiation of man’s
    sin. This is Paul’s doctrine. The prophet says: There never was a
    divine provision for sacrifice. Man’s return to God is the thing
    wanted. But this return must be completed. Jesus is the perfect
    prophet who gives us an example of restored obedience, and who
    comes in to perfect man’s imperfect work. This is the doctrine of
    the Epistle to the Hebrews.” This recognition of expiation in
    Paul’s teaching, together with denial of its validity and
    interpretation of the Epistle to the Hebrews as prophetic rather
    than priestly, is a curiosity of modern exegesis.

    Lyman Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist, 107-127, goes still
    further and affirms: “In the N. T. God is never said to be
    propitiated, nor is it ever said that Jesus Christ propitiates God
    or satisfies God’s wrath.” Yet Dr. Abbott adds that in the N. T.
    God is represented as self-propitiated: “Christianity is
    distinguished from paganism by representing God as appeasing his
    own wrath and satisfying his own justice by the forth-putting of
    his own love.” This self-propitiation however must not be thought
    of as a bearing of penalty: “Nowhere in the O. T. is the idea of a
    sacrifice coupled with the idea of penalty,—it is always coupled
    with purification—‘_with his stripes we are healed_’ (_Is. 53:5_).
    And in the N. T., ‘_the Lamb of God ... taketh away the sin of the
    world_’ (_John 1:29_); ‘_the blood of Jesus ... cleanseth_’ (_1
    John 1:7_).... What humanity needs is not the removal of the
    penalty, but removal of the sin.” This seems to us a distinct
    contradiction of both Paul and John, with whom propitiation is an
    essential of Christian doctrine (see _Rom. 3:25_; _1 John 2:2_),
    while we grant that the propitiation is made, not by sinful man,
    but by God himself in the person of his Son. See George B. Gow, on
    The Place of Expiation in Human Redemption, Am. Jour. Theol.,
    1900:734-756.

    _A substitution_: _Luke 22:37_—“_he was reckoned with
    transgressors_”; _cf._ _Lev. 16:21, 22_—“_and Aaron shall lay both
    his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all
    the iniquities of the children of Israel ... he shall put them
    upon the head of the goat ... and the goat shall bear upon him all
    their iniquities unto a solitary land_”; _Is. 53:5, 6_—“_he was
    wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities;
    the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes
    we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned
    every one to his own way; and Jehovah hath laid on him the
    iniquity of us all._” _John 10:11_—“_the good shepherd layeth down
    his life for the sheep_”; _Rom. 5:6-8_—“_while we were yet weak,
    in due season Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a
    righteous man will one die: for peradventure for the good man some
    one would even dare to die. But God commendeth his own love toward
    us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us_”; _1
    Pet. 3:18_—“_Christ also suffered for sins once, the righteous for
    the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God._”

    To these texts we must add all those mentioned under (_b_) above,
    in which Christ’s death is described as a ransom. Besides Meyer’s
    comment, there quoted, on _Mat. 20:28_—“_to give his life a ransom
    for many,_” λύτρον ἀντὶ πολλῶν—Meyer also says: “ἀντί denotes
    substitution. That which is given as a ransom takes the place of,
    is given instead of, those who are to be set free in consideration
    thereof. Ἀντί can only be understood in the sense of substitution
    in the act of which the ransom is presented as an equivalent, to
    secure the deliverance of those on whose behalf the ransom is
    paid,—a view which is only confirmed by the fact that, in other
    parts of the N. T., this ransom is usually spoken of as an
    expiatory sacrifice. That which they [those for whom the ransom is
    paid] are redeemed from, is the eternal ἀπώλεια in which, as
    having the wrath of God abiding upon them, they would remain
    imprisoned, as in a state of hopeless bondage, unless the guilt of
    their sins were expiated.”

    Cremer, N. T. Lex., says that “in both the N. T. texts, _Mat.
    16:26_ and _Mark 8:37_, the word ἀντάλλαγμα, like λύτρον, is akin
    to the conception of atonement: _cf._ _Is. 43:3, 4_; _51:11_;
    _Amos 5:12_. This is a confirmation of the fact that satisfaction
    and substitution essentially belong to the idea of atonement.”
    Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:515 (Syst. Doct., 3:414)—“_Mat. 20:28_
    contains the thought of a substitution. While the whole world is
    not of equal worth with the soul, and could not purchase it,
    Christ’s death and work are so valuable, that they can serve as a
    ransom.”

    The sufferings of the righteous were recognized in Rabbinical
    Judaism as having a substitutionary significance for the sins of
    others; see Weber, Altsynagog. Palestin. Theologie, 314; Schürer,
    Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes, 2:466 (translation, div. II, vol.
    2:186). But Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:225-262, says this idea of
    vicarious satisfaction was an addition of Paul to the teaching of
    Jesus. Wendt grants that both Paul and John taught substitution,
    but he denies that Jesus did. He claims that ἀντί in _Mat. 20:28_
    means simply that Jesus gave his life as a means whereby he
    obtains the deliverance of many. But this interpretation is a
    non-natural one, and violates linguistic usage. It holds that Paul
    and John misunderstood or misrepresented the words of our Lord. We
    prefer the frank acknowledgment by Pfleiderer that Jesus, as well
    as Paul and John, taught substitution, but that neither one of
    them was correct. Colestock, on Substitution as a Stage in
    Theological Thought, similarly holds that the idea of substitution
    must be abandoned. We grant that the idea of substitution needs to
    be supplemented by the idea of sharing, and so relieved of its
    external and mechanical implications, but that to abandon the
    conception itself is to abandon faith in the evangelists and in
    Jesus himself.

    Dr. W. N. Clarke, in his Christian Theology, rejects the doctrine
    of retribution for sin, and denies the possibility of penal
    suffering for another. A proper view of penalty, and of Christ’s
    vital connection with humanity, would make these rejected ideas
    not only credible but inevitable. Dr. Alvah Hovey reviews Dr.
    Clarke’s Theology, Am. Jour. Theology, Jan. 1899:205—“If we do not
    import into the endurance of penalty some degree of sinful feeling
    or volition, there is no ground for denying that a holy being may
    bear it in place of a sinner. For nothing but wrong-doing, or
    approval of wrong-doing, is impossible to a holy being. Indeed,
    for one to bear for another the just penalty of his sin, provided
    that other may thereby be saved from it and made a friend of God,
    is perhaps the highest conceivable function of love or good-will.”
    Denney, Studies, 126, 127, shows that “substitution means simply
    that man is dependent for his acceptance with God upon something
    which Christ has done for him, and which he could never have done
    and never needs to do for himself.... The forfeiting of his free
    life has freed our forfeited lives. This substitution can be
    preached, and it binds men to Christ by making them forever
    dependent on him. The condemnation of our sins in Christ upon his
    cross is the barb on the hook,—without it your bait will be taken,
    but you will not catch men; you will not annihilate pride, and
    make Christ the Alpha and Omega in man’s redemption.” On the
    Scripture proofs, see Crawford, Atonement, 1:1-193; Dale,
    Atonement, 65-256; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, iv. 2:243-342;
    Smeaton, Our Lord’s and the Apostles’ Doctrine of Atonement.


An examination of the passages referred to shows that, while the forms in
which the atoning work of Christ is described are in part derived from
moral, commercial, and legal relations, the prevailing language is that of
sacrifice. A correct view of the atonement must therefore be grounded upon
a proper interpretation of the institution of sacrifice, especially as
found in the Mosaic system.


    The question is sometimes asked: Why is there so little in Jesus’
    own words about atonement? Dr. R. W. Dale replies: Because Christ
    did not come to preach the gospel,—he came that there might be a
    gospel to preach. The Cross had to be endured, before it could be
    explained. Jesus came to be the sacrifice, not to _speak_ about
    it. But his reticence is just what he told us we should find in
    his words. He proclaimed their incompleteness, and referred us to
    a subsequent Teacher—the Holy Spirit. The testimony of the Holy
    Spirit we have in the words of the apostles. We must remember that
    the gospels were supplementary to the epistles, not the epistles
    to the gospels. The gospels merely fill out our knowledge of
    Christ. It is not for the Redeemer to magnify the cost of
    salvation, but for the redeemed. “None of the ransomed ever knew.”
    The doer of a great deed has the least to say about it.

    Harnack: “There is an inner law which compels the sinner to look
    upon God as a wrathful Judge.... Yet no other feeling is
    possible.” We regard this confession as a demonstration of the
    psychological correctness of Paul’s doctrine of a vicarious
    atonement. Human nature has been so constituted by God that it
    reflects the demand of his holiness. That conscience needs to be
    appeased is proof that God needs to be appeased. When Whiton
    declares that propitiation is offered only to our conscience,
    which is the wrath of that which is of God within us, and that
    Christ bore our sins, not in substitution for us, but in
    fellowship with us, to rouse our consciences to hatred of them, he
    forgets that God is not only immanent in the conscience but also
    transcendent, and that the verdicts of conscience are only
    indications of the higher verdicts of God: _1 John 3:20_—“_if our
    heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all
    things._” Lyman Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist, 57—“A people
    half emancipated from the paganism that imagines that God must be
    placated by sacrifice before he can forgive sins gave to the
    sacrificial system that Israel had borrowed from paganism the same
    divine authority which they gave to those revolutionary elements
    in the system which were destined eventually to sweep it entirely
    out of existence.” So Bowne, Atonement, 74—“The essential moral
    fact is that, if God is to forgive unrighteous men, some way must
    be found of making them righteous. The difficulty is not forensic,
    but moral.” Both Abbott and Bowne regard righteousness as a mere
    form of benevolence, and the atonement as only a means to a
    utilitarian end, namely, the restoration and happiness of the
    creature. A more correct view of God’s righteousness as the
    fundamental attribute of his being, as inwrought into the
    constitution of the universe, and as infallibly connecting
    suffering with sin, would have led these writers to see a divine
    wisdom and inspiration in the institution of sacrifice, and a
    divine necessity that God should suffer if man is to go free.


B. The Institution of Sacrifice, more especially as found in the Mosaic
system.


(_a_) We may dismiss as untenable, on the one hand, the theory that
sacrifice is essentially the presentation of a gift (Hofmann,
Baring-Gould) or a feast (Spencer) to the Deity; and on the other hand the
theory that sacrifice is a symbol of renewed fellowship (Keil), or of the
grateful offering to God of the whole life and being of the worshiper
(Bähr). Neither of these theories can explain the fact that the sacrifice
is a bloody offering, involving the suffering and death of the victim, and
brought, not by the simply grateful, but by the conscience-stricken soul.


    For the views of sacrifice here mentioned, see Hofmann,
    Schriftbeweis, II, 1:214-294; Baring-Gould, Origin and Devel. of
    Relig. Belief, 368-390; Spencer, De Legibus Hebræorum; Keil, Bib.
    Archäologie, sec. 43, 47; Bähr, Symbolik des Mosaischen Cultus,
    2:196, 269; also synopsis of Bähr’s view, in Bib. Sac., Oct.
    1870:593; Jan. 1871:171. _Per contra_, see Crawford, Atonement,
    228-240; Lange, Introd. to Com. on Exodus, 38—“The heathen change
    God’s symbols into myths (rationalism), as the Jews change God’s
    sacrifices into meritorious service (ritualism).” Westcott,
    Hebrews, 281-294, seems to hold with Spencer that sacrifice is
    essentially a feast made as an offering to God. So Philo: “God
    receives the faithful offerer to his own table, giving him back
    part of the sacrifice.” Compare with this the ghosts in Homer’s
    Odyssey, who receive strength from drinking the blood of the
    sacrifices. Bähr’s view is only half of the truth. Reunion
    presupposes Expiation. Lyttleton, in Lux Mundi, 281—“The sinner
    must first expiate his sin by suffering,—then only can he give to
    God the life thus purified by an expiatory death.” Jahn, Bib.
    Archæology, sec. 373, 378—“It is of the very idea of the sacrifice
    that the victim shall be presented directly to God, and in the
    presentation shall be destroyed.” Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 253,
    speaks of the delicate feeling of the Biblical critic who, with
    his mouth full of beef or mutton, professes to be shocked at the
    cruelty to animals involved in the temple sacrifices. Lord Bacon:
    “Hieroglyphics came before letters, and parables before
    arguments.” “The old dispensation was God’s great parable to man.
    The Theocracy was graven all over with divine hieroglyphics. Does
    there exist the Rosetta stone by which we can read these
    hieroglyphics? The shadows, that have been shortening up into
    definiteness of outline, pass away and vanish utterly under the
    full meridian splendor of the Sun of Righteousness.” On _Eph.
    1:7_—“_the blood of Christ,_” as an expiatory sacrifice which
    secures our justification, see Salmond, in Expositor’s Greek
    Testament.


(_b_) The true import of the sacrifice, as is abundantly evident from both
heathen and Jewish sources, embraced three elements,—first, that of
satisfaction to offended Deity, or propitiation offered to violated
holiness; secondly, that of substitution of suffering and death on the
part of the innocent, for the deserved punishment of the guilty; and,
thirdly, community of life between the offerer and the victim. Combining
these three ideas, we have as the total import of the sacrifice:
Satisfaction by substitution, and substitution by incorporation. The
bloody sacrifice among the heathen expressed the consciousness that sin
involves guilt; that guilt exposes man to the righteous wrath of God; that
without expiation of that guilt there is no forgiveness; and that through
the suffering of another who shares his life the sinner may expiate his
sin.


    Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 170, quotes from Nägelsbach,
    Nachhomerische Theologie, 338 _sq._—“The essence of punishment is
    retribution (Vergeltung), and retribution is a fundamental law of
    the world-order. In retribution lies the atoning power of
    punishment. This consciousness that the nature of sin demands
    retribution, in other words, this certainty that there is in Deity
    a righteousness that punishes sin, taken in connection with the
    consciousness of personal transgression, awakens the longing for
    atonement,”—which is expressed in the sacrifice of a slaughtered
    beast. The Greeks recognized representative expiation, not only in
    the sacrifice of beasts, but in human sacrifices. See examples in
    Tyler, Theol. Gk. Poets, 196, 197, 245-253; see also Virgil,
    Æneid, 5:815—“Unum pro multis dabitur caput”; Ovid, Fasti, vi—“Cor
    pro corde, precor; pro fibris sumite fibras. Hanc animam vobis pro
    meliore damus.”

    Stahl, Christliche Philosophie, 146—“Every unperverted conscience
    declares the eternal law of righteousness that punishment shall
    follow inevitably on sin. In the moral realm, there is another way
    of satisfying righteousness—that of atonement. This differs from
    punishment in its effect, that is, reconciliation,—the moral
    authority asserting itself, not by the destruction of the
    offender, but by taking him up into itself and uniting itself to
    him. But the offender cannot offer his own sacrifice,—that must be
    done by the priest.” In the Prometheus Bound, of Æschylus, Hermes
    says to Prometheus: “Hope not for an end to such oppression, until
    a god appears as thy substitute in torment, ready to descend for
    thee into the unillumined realm of Hades and the dark abyss of
    Tartarus.” And this is done by Chiron, the wisest and most just of
    the Centaurs, the son of Chronos, sacrificing himself for
    Prometheus, while Hercules kills the eagle at his breast and so
    delivers him from torment. This legend of Æschylus is almost a
    prediction of the true Redeemer. See article on Sacrifice, by
    Paterson, in Hastings, Bible Dictionary.

    Westcott, Hebrews, 282, maintains that the idea of expiatory
    offerings, answering to the consciousness of sin, does not belong
    to the early religion of Greece. We reply that Homer’s Iliad, in
    its first book, describes just such an expiatory offering made to
    Phœbus Apollo, so turning away his wrath and causing the plague
    that wastes the Greeks to cease. E. G. Robinson held that there is
    “no evidence that the Jews had any idea of the efficacy of
    sacrifice for the expiation of moral guilt.” But in approaching
    either the tabernacle or the temple the altar always presented
    itself before the laver. H. Clay Trumbull, S. S. Times, Nov. 30,
    1901:801—“The Passover was not a passing by of the houses of
    Israelites, but a passing over or crossing over by Jehovah to
    enter the homes of those who would welcome him and who had entered
    into covenant with him by sacrifice. The Oriental sovereign was
    accompanied by his executioner, who entered to smite the
    first-born of the house only when there was no covenanting at the
    door.” We regard this explanation as substituting an incidental
    result and effect of sacrifice for the sacrifice itself. This
    always had in it the idea of reparation for wrong-doing by
    substitutionary suffering.

    Curtis, Primitive Semitic Religion of To-day, on the Significance
    of Sacrifice, 218-237, tells us that he went to Palestine
    prepossessed by Robertson Smith’s explanation that sacrifice was a
    feast symbolizing friendly communion between man and his God. He
    came to the conclusion that the sacrificial meal was not the
    primary element, but that there was a substitutionary value in the
    offering. Gift and feast are not excluded; but these are sequences
    and incidentals. Misfortune is evidence of sin; sin needs to be
    expiated; the anger of God needs to be removed. The sacrifice
    consisted principally in the shedding of the blood of the victim.
    The “bursting forth of the blood” satisfied and bought off the
    Deity. George Adam Smith on _Isaiah 53_ (2:364)—“Innocent as he
    is, he gives his life as a satisfaction to the divine law for the
    guilt of his people. His death was no mere martyrdom or
    miscarriage of human justice: in God’s intent and purpose, but
    also by its own voluntary offering, it was an expiatory sacrifice.
    There is no exegete but agrees to this. 353—The substitution of
    the servant of Jehovah for the guilty people and the redemptive
    force of that substitution are no arbitrary doctrine.”

    _Satisfaction_ means simply that there is a principle in God’s
    being which not simply refuses sin passively, but also opposes it
    actively. The judge, if he be upright, must repel a bribe with
    indignation, and the pure woman must flame out in anger against an
    infamous proposal. R. W. Emerson: “Your goodness must have some
    edge to it,—else it is none.” But the judge and the woman do not
    enjoy this repelling,—they suffer rather. So God’s satisfaction is
    no gloating over the pain or loss which he is compelled to
    inflict. God has a wrath which is calm, judicial, inevitable—the
    natural reaction of holiness against unholiness. Christ suffers
    both as one with the inflicter and as one with those on whom
    punishment is inflicted: “_For Christ also pleased not himself;
    but, as it is written, The reproaches of them that reproached thee
    fell on me_” (_Rom. 15:3_; _cf._ _Ps. 69:9_).


(_c_) In considering the exact purport and efficacy of the Mosaic
sacrifices, we must distinguish between their theocratical, and their
spiritual, offices. They were, on the one hand, the appointed means
whereby the offender could be restored to the outward place and
privileges, as member of the theocracy, which he had forfeited by neglect
or transgression; and they accomplished this purpose irrespectively of the
temper and spirit with which they were offered. On the other hand, they
were symbolic of the vicarious sufferings and death of Christ, and
obtained forgiveness and acceptance with God only as they were offered in
true penitence, and with faith in God’s method of salvation.


    _Heb. 9:13, 14_—“_For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the
    ashes of a heifer sprinkling them that have been defiled, sanctify
    unto the cleanness of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of
    Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without
    blemish unto God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve
    the living God?_” _10:3, 4_—“_But in those sacrifices there is a
    remembrance made of sins year by year. For it is impossible that
    the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins._” Christ’s
    death also, like the O. T. sacrifices, works temporal benefit even
    to those who have no faith; see pages 771, 772.

    Robertson, Early Religion of Israel, 441, 448, answers the
    contention of the higher critics that, in the days of Isaiah,
    Micah, Hosea, Jeremiah, no Levitical code existed; that these
    prophets expressed disapproval of the whole sacrificial system, as
    a thing of mere human device and destitute of divine sanction. But
    the Book of the Covenant surely existed in their day, with its
    command: “_An altar of earth shalt thou make unto me, and shalt
    sacrifice thereon thy burnt-offerings_” (_Ex. 20:24_). Or, if it
    is maintained that Isaiah condemned even that early piece of
    legislation, it proves too much, for it would make the prophet
    also condemn the Sabbath as a piece of will-worship, and even
    reject prayer as displeasing to God, since in the same connection
    he says: “_new moon and Sabbath ... I cannot away with ... when ye
    spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you_” (_Is.
    1:13-15_). Isaiah was condemning simply _heartless_ sacrifice;
    else we make him condemn all that went on at the temple. _Micah
    6:8_—“_what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly?_” This
    does not exclude the offering of sacrifice, for Micah anticipates
    the time when “_the mountain of Jehovah’s house shall be
    established on the top of the mountains, ... And many nations
    shall go and say, Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of
    Jehovah_” (_Micah 4:1, 2_). _Hos. 6:6_—“_I desire goodness, and
    not sacrifice,_” is interpreted by what follows, “_and the
    knowledge of God more than burnt-offerings_.” Compare _Prov. 8:10;
    17:12_; and Samuel’s words: “_to obey is better than sacrifice_”
    (_1 Sam. 15:22_). What was the altar from which Isaiah drew his
    description of God’s theophany and from which was taken the live
    coal that touched his lips and prepared him to be a prophet? (_Is.
    6:1-8). Jer. 7:22_—“_I spake not ... concerning burnt-offerings or
    sacrifices ... but this thing ... Hearken unto my voice._”
    Jeremiah insists only on the worthlessness of sacrifice where
    there is no heart.


(_d_) Thus the Old Testament sacrifices, when rightly offered, involved a
consciousness of sin on the part of the worshiper, the bringing of a
victim to atone for the sin, the laying of the hand of the offerer upon
the victim’s head, the confession of sin by the offerer, the slaying of
the beast, the sprinkling or pouring-out of the blood upon the altar, and
the consequent forgiveness of the sin and acceptance of the worshiper. The
sin-offering and the scape-goat of the great day of atonement symbolized
yet more distinctly the two elementary ideas of sacrifice, namely,
satisfaction and substitution, together with the consequent removal of
guilt from those on whose behalf the sacrifice was offered.


    _Lev. 1:4_—“_And he shall lay his hand upon the head of the
    burnt-offering; and it shall be accepted for him, to make
    atonement for him_”; _4:20_—“_Thus shall he do with the bullock;
    as he did with the bullock of the sin-offering, so shall he do
    with this; and the priest shall make atonement for them, and they
    shall be forgiven_”; so _31_ and _35_—“_and the priest shall make
    atonement for him as touching his sin that he hath sinned, and he
    shall be forgiven_”; so _5:10, 16_; _6:7_. _Lev. 17:11_—“_For the
    life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon
    the altar to make atonement for your souls: for it is the blood
    that maketh atonement by reason of the life._”

    The patriarchal sacrifices were sin-offerings, as the sacrifice of
    Job for his friends witnesses: _Job 42:7-9_—“_My wrath is kindled
    against thee_ [Eliphaz] _... therefore, take unto you seven
    bullocks ... and offer up for yourselves a burnt-offering_”; _cf._
    _33:24_—“_Then God is gracious unto him, and saith, Deliver him
    from going down to the pit, I have found a ransom_”; _1:5_—Job
    offered burnt-offerings for his sons, for he said, “_It may be
    that my sons have sinned, and renounced God in their hearts_”;
    _Gen. 8:20_—Noah “_offered burnt-offerings on the altar_”;
    _21_—“_and Jehovah smelled the sweet savor; and Jehovah said in
    his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s
    sake._”

    That vicarious suffering is intended in all these sacrifices, is
    plain from _Lev. 16:1-34_—the account of the sin-offering and the
    scape-goat of the great day of atonement, the full meaning of
    which we give below; also from _Gen. 22:13_—“_Abraham went and
    took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt-offering in the stead
    of his son_”; _Ex. 32:30-32_—where Moses says: “_Ye have sinned a
    great sin: and now I will go up unto Jehovah; peradventure I shall
    make atonement for your sin. And Moses returned unto Jehovah, and
    said, Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them
    gods of gold. Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin—; and if
    not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast
    written._” See also _Deut. 21:1-9_—the expiation of an uncertain
    murder, by the sacrifice of a heifer,—where Oehler, O. T.
    Theology, 1:389, says: “Evidently the punishment of death incurred
    by the manslayer is executed symbolically upon the heifer.” In
    _Is. 53:1-12_—“_All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned
    every one to his own way; and Jehovah hath laid on him the
    iniquity of us all ... stripes ... offering for sin_”—the ideas of
    both satisfaction and substitution are still more plain.

    Wallace, Representative Responsibility: “The animals offered in
    sacrifice must be animals brought into direct relation to man,
    subject to him, his property. They could not be spoils of the
    chase. They must bear the mark and impress of humanity. Upon the
    sacrifice human hands must be laid—the hands of the offerer and
    the hands of the priest. The offering is the substitute of the
    offerer. The priest is the substitute of the offerer. The priest
    and the sacrifice were _one symbol_. [Hence, in the new
    dispensation, the priest and the sacrifice are one—both are found
    in Christ.] The high priest must enter the holy of holies with his
    own finger dipped in blood: the blood must be in contact with his
    own person,—another indication of the identification of the two.
    Life is nourished and sustained by life. All life lower than man
    may be sacrificed for the good of man. The blood must be spilled
    on the ground. ‘_In the blood is the life._’ The life is reserved
    by God. It is given _for_ man, but not _to_ him. Life for life is
    the law of the creation. So the life of Christ, also, for _our_
    life.—Adam was originally priest of the family and of the race.
    But he lost his representative character by the one act of
    disobedience, and his redemption was that of the individual, not
    that of the race. The race ceased to have a representative. The
    subjects of the divine government were henceforth to be, not the
    natural offspring of Adam as such, but the redeemed. That the body
    and the blood are both required, indicates the demand that the
    death should be by a violence that sheds blood. The sacrifices
    showed forth, not Christ himself [his character, his life], but
    Christ’s death.”

    This following is a tentative scheme of the JEWISH SACRIFICES. The
    general reason for sacrifice is expressed in _Lev. 17:11_ (quoted
    above). I. _For the individual_: 1. The sin-offering = sacrifice
    to expiate sins of ignorance (thoughtlessness and plausible
    temptation): _Lev. 4:14, 20, 31_. 2. The trespass-offering =
    sacrifice to expiate sins of omission: _Lev. 5:5, 6_. 3. The
    burnt-offering = sacrifice to expiate general sinfulness: _Lev.
    1:3_ (the offering of Mary, _Luke 2:24_). II. _For the family_:
    The Passover: _Ex. 12:27_. III. _For the people_: 1. The daily
    morning and evening sacrifice: _Ex. 29:38-46_. 2. The offering of
    the great day of atonement: _Lev. 16:6-10_. In this last, two
    victims were employed, one to represent the means—death, and the
    other to represent the result—forgiveness. One victim could not
    represent both the atonement—by shedding of blood, and the
    justification—by putting away sin.

    Jesus died for our sins at the Passover feast and at the hour of
    daily sacrifice. McLaren, in S. S. Times, Nov. 30,
    1901:801—“Shedding of blood and consequent safety were only a part
    of the teaching of the Passover. There is a double identification
    of the person offering with his sacrifice: first, in that he
    offers it as his representative, laying his hand on its head, or
    otherwise transferring his personality, as it were, to it; and
    secondly, in that, receiving it back again from God to whom he
    gave it, he feeds on it, so making it part of his life and
    nourishing himself thereby: ‘_My flesh ... which I will give ...
    for the life of the world ... he that eateth me, he also shall
    live because of me_’ (_John 6:51, 57_).”

    Chambers, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:22-34—On the great
    day of atonement “the double offering—one for Jehovah and the
    other for Azazel—typified not only the removing of the guilt of
    the people, but its transfer to the odious and detestable being
    who was the first cause of its existence,” _i. e._, Satan.
    Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 112, 113—“It was not
    the punishment which the goat bore away into the wilderness, for
    the idea of punishment is not directly associated with the
    scapegoat. It bears the sin—the whole unfaithfulness of the
    community which had defiled the holy places—out from them, so that
    henceforth they may be pure.... The sin-offering—representing the
    sinner by receiving the burden of his sin—makes expiation by
    yielding up and yielding back its life to God, under conditions
    which represent at once the wrath and the placability of God.”

    On the Jewish sacrifices, see Fairbairn, Typology, 1:209-223;
    Wünsche, Die Leiden des Messias; Jukes, O. T. Sacrifices; Smeaton,
    Apostle’s Doctrine of Atonement, 25-53; Kurtz, Sacrificial Worship
    of O. T., 120; Bible Com., 1:502-508, and Introd. to Leviticus;
    Candlish on Atonement, 123-142; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 161-180.
    On passages in Leviticus, see Com. of Knobel, in Exeg. Handb. d.
    Alt. Test.


(_e_) It is not essential to this view to maintain that a formal divine
institution of the rite of sacrifice, at man’s expulsion from Eden, can be
proved from Scripture. Like the family and the state, sacrifice may,
without such formal inculcation, possess divine sanction, and be ordained
of God. The well-nigh universal prevalence of sacrifice, however, together
with the fact that its nature, as a bloody offering, seems to preclude
man’s own invention of it, combines with certain Scripture intimations to
favor the view that it was a primitive divine appointment. From the time
of Moses, there can be no question as to its divine authority.


    Compare the origin of prayer and worship, for which we find no
    formal divine injunctions at the beginnings of history. _Heb.
    11:4_—“_By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice
    than Cain, through which he had witness borne to him that he was
    righteous, God bearing witness in respect of his gifts_”—here it
    may be argued that since Abel’s faith was not presumption, it must
    have had some injunction and promise of God to base itself upon.
    _Gen. 4:3, 4_—“_Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an
    offering unto Jehovah. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings
    of his flock and of the fat thereof. And Jehovah had respect unto
    Abel and to his offering: but unto Cain and to his offering he had
    not respect._”

    It has been urged, in corroboration of this view, that the
    previous existence of sacrifice is intimated in _Gen. 3:21_—“_And
    Jehovah God made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins, and
    clothed them._” Since the killing of animals for food was not
    permitted until long afterwards (_Gen. 9:3_—to Noah: “_Every
    moving thing that liveth shall be food for you_”), the inference
    has been drawn, that the skins with which God clothed our first
    parents were the skins of animals slain for sacrifice,—this
    clothing furnishing a type of the righteousness of Christ which
    secures our restoration to God’s favor, as the death of the
    victims furnished a type of the suffering of Christ which secures
    for us remission of punishment. We must regard this, however, as a
    pleasing and possibly correct hypothesis, rather than as a
    demonstrated truth of Scripture. Since the unperverted instincts
    of human nature are an expression of God’s will, Abel’s faith may
    have consisted in trusting these, rather than the promptings of
    selfishness and self-righteousness. The death of animals in
    sacrifice, like the death of Christ which it signified, was only
    the hastening of what belonged to them because of their connection
    with human sin. Faith recognized this connection. On the divine
    appointment of sacrifice, see Park, in Bib. Sac., Jan.
    1876:102-132. Westcott, Hebrews, 281—“There is no reason to think
    that sacrifice was instituted in obedience to a direct
    revelation.... It is mentioned in Scripture at first as natural
    and known. It was practically universal in prechristian times....
    In due time the popular practice of sacrifice was regulated by
    revelation as disciplinary, and also used as a vehicle for typical
    teaching.” We prefer to say that sacrifice probably originated in
    a fundamental instinct of humanity, and was therefore a divine
    ordinance as much as were marriage and government.

    On _Gen. 4:3, 4_, see C. H. M.—“The entire difference between Cain
    and Abel lay, not in their natures, but in their sacrifices. Cain
    brought to God the sin-stained fruit of a cursed earth. Here was
    no recognition of the fact that he was a sinner, condemned to
    death. All his toil could not satisfy God’s holiness, or remove
    the penalty. But Abel recognized his sin, condemnation,
    helplessness, death, and brought the bloody sacrifice—the
    sacrifice of another—the sacrifice provided by God, to meet the
    claims of God. He found a substitute, and he presented it in
    faith—the faith that looks away from self to Christ, or God’s
    appointed way of salvation. The difference was not in their
    persons, but in their gifts. Of Abel it is said, that God ‘_bore
    witness in respect of his gifts_’ (_Heb. 11:4_). To Cain it is
    said, ‘_if thou doest well_ (LXX.: ὀρθῶς προσενένκης—_if thou
    offerest correctly_) _shalt thou not be accepted?_’ But Cain
    desired to get away from God and from God’s way, and to lose
    himself in the world. This is ‘_the way of Cain_’ (_Jude 11_).”
    _Per contra_, see Crawford, Atonement, 259—“Both in Levitical and
    patriarchal times, we have no formal institution of sacrifice, but
    the regulation of sacrifice already existing. But Abel’s faith may
    have had respect, not to a revelation with regard to sacrificial
    worship, but with regard to the promised Redeemer; and his
    sacrifice may have expressed that faith. If so, God’s acceptance
    of it gave a divine warrant to future sacrifices. It was not
    will-worship, because it was not substituted for some other
    worship which God had previously instituted. It is not necessary
    to suppose that God gave an expressed command. Abel may have been
    moved by some inward divine monition. Thus Adam said to Eve,
    ‘_This is now bone of my bones...._’ (_Gen. 2:23_), before any
    divine command of marriage. No fruits were presented during the
    patriarchal dispensation. Heathen sacrifices were corruptions of
    primitive sacrifice.” Von Lasaulx, Die Sühnopfer der Griechen und
    Römer, und ihr Verhältniss zu dem einen auf Golgotha, 1—“The first
    word of the _original_ man was probably a prayer, the first action
    of _fallen_ man a sacrifice”; see translation in Bib. Sac., 1:
    368-408. Bishop Butler: “By the general prevalence of propitiatory
    sacrifices over the heathen world, the notion of repentance alone
    being sufficient to expiate guilt appears to be contrary to the
    general sense of mankind.”


(_f_) The New Testament assumes and presupposes the Old Testament doctrine
of sacrifice. The sacrificial language in which its descriptions of
Christ’s work are clothed cannot be explained as an accommodation to
Jewish methods of thought, since this terminology was in large part in
common use among the heathen, and Paul used it more than any other of the
apostles in dealing with the Gentiles. To deny to it its Old Testament
meaning, when used by New Testament writers to describe the work of
Christ, is to deny any proper inspiration both in the Mosaic appointment
of sacrifices and in the apostolic interpretations of them. We must
therefore maintain, as the result of a simple induction of Scripture
facts, that the death of Christ is a vicarious offering, provided by God’s
love for the purpose of satisfying an internal demand of the divine
holiness, and of removing an obstacle in the divine mind to the renewal
and pardon of sinners.


    “The epistle of James makes no allusion to sacrifice. But he would
    not have failed to allude to it, if he had held the moral view of
    the atonement; for it would then have been an obvious help to his
    argument against merely formal service. Christ protested against
    washing hands and keeping Sabbath days. If sacrifice had been a
    piece of human formality, how indignantly would he have inveighed
    against it! But instead of this he received from John the Baptist,
    without rebuke, the words: ‘_Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh
    away the sin of the world_’ (_John 1:29_).”

    A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 247—“The sacrifices of bulls and
    goats were like token-money, as our paper-promises to pay,
    accepted at their face-value till the day of settlement. But the
    sacrifice of Christ was the gold which absolutely extinguished all
    debt by its intrinsic value. Hence, when Christ died, the veil
    that separated man from God was rent from the top to the bottom by
    supernatural hands. When the real expiation was finished, the
    whole symbolical system representing it became _functum officio_,
    and was abolished. Soon after this, the temple was razed to the
    ground, and the ritual was rendered forever impossible.”

    For denial that Christ’s death is to be interpreted by heathen or
    Jewish sacrifices, see Maurice on Sac., 154—“The heathen
    signification of words, when applied to a Christian use, must be
    not merely modified, but inverted”; Jowett, Epistles of St. Paul,
    2:479—“The heathen and Jewish sacrifices rather show us what the
    sacrifice of Christ was not, than what it was.” Bushnell and Young
    do not doubt the expiatory nature of heathen sacrifices. But the
    main terms which the N. T. uses to describe Christ’s sacrifice are
    borrowed from the Greek sacrificial ritual, _e. g._, θυσία,
    προσφορά, ἰλασμός, ἁγιάζω, καθαίρω, ἰλάσκομαι. To deny that these
    terms, when applied to Christ, imply expiation and substitution,
    is to deny the inspiration of those who used them. See Cave,
    Scripture Doctrine of Sacrifice; art. on Sacrifice, in Smith’s
    Bible Dictionary.

    With all these indications of our dissent from the modern denial
    of expiatory sacrifice, we deem it desirable by way of contrast to
    present the clearest possible statement of the view from which we
    dissent. This may be found in Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion,
    1:238, 260, 261—“The gradual distinction of the moral from the
    ceremonial, the repression and ultimate replacement of ceremonial
    expiation by the moral purification of the sense and life, and
    consequently the transformation of the mystical conception of
    redemption into the corresponding ethical conception of education,
    may be designated as the kernel and the teleological principle of
    the development of the history of religion.... But to Paul the
    question in what sense the death of the Cross could be the means
    of the Messianic redemption found its answer simply from the
    presuppositions of the Pharisaic theology, which beheld in the
    innocent suffering, and especially in the martyr-death, of the
    righteous, an expiatory means compensating for the sins of the
    whole people. What would be more natural than that Paul should
    contemplate the death on the Cross in the same way, as an
    expiatory means of salvation for the redemption of the sinful
    world?

    “We are thus led to see in this theory the symbolical presentment
    of the truth that the new man suffers, as it were, vicariously,
    for the old man; for he takes upon himself the daily pain of
    self-subjugation, and bears guiltlessly in patience the evils
    which the old man could not but necessarily impute to himself as
    punishment. Therefore as Christ is the exemplification of the
    moral idea of man, so his death is the symbol of that moral
    process of painful self-subjugation in obedience and patience, in
    which the true inner redemption of man consists.... In like manner
    Fichte said that the only proper means of salvation is the death
    of selfhood, death _with_ Jesus, regeneration.

    “The defect in the Kant-Fichtean doctrine of redemption consisted
    in this, that it limited the process of ethical transformation to
    the individual, and endeavored to explain it from his subjective
    reason and freedom alone. How could the individual deliver himself
    from his powerlessness and become free? This question was
    unsolved. The Christian doctrine of redemption is that the moral
    liberation of the individual is not the effect of his own natural
    power, but the effect of the divine Spirit, who, from the
    beginning of human history, put forth his activity as the power
    educating to the good, and especially has created for himself in
    the Christian community a permanent organ for the education of the
    people and of individuals. It was the moral individualism of Kant
    which prevented him from finding in the historically realized
    common spirit of the good the real force available for the
    individual becoming good.”


C. Theories of the Atonement.


1st. The Socinian, or Example Theory of the Atonement.


This theory holds that subjective sinfulness is the sole barrier between
man and God. Not God, but only man, needs to be reconciled. The only
method of reconciliation is to better man’s moral condition. This can be
effected by man’s own will, through repentance and reformation. The death
of Christ is but the death of a noble martyr. He redeems us, only as his
human example of faithfulness to truth and duty has a powerful influence
upon our moral improvement. This fact the apostles, either consciously or
unconsciously, clothed in the language of the Greek and Jewish sacrifices.
This theory was fully elaborated by Lælius Socinus and Faustus Socinus of
Poland, in the 16th century. Its modern advocates are found in the
Unitarian body.


    The Socinian theory may be found stated, and advocated, in
    Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum, 1:566-600; Martineau, Studies of
    Christianity, 83-176; J. F. Clarke, Orthodoxy, Its Truths and
    Errors, 235-265; Ellis, Unitarianism and Orthodoxy; Sheldon, Sin
    and Redemption, 146-210. The text which at first sight most seems
    to favor this view is _1 Pet 2:21_—“_Christ also suffered for you,
    leaving you an example, that ye should follow his steps._” But see
    under (_e_) below. When Correggio saw Raphael’s picture of St.
    Cecilia, he exclaimed: “I too am a painter.” So Socinus held that
    Christ’s example roused our humanity to imitation. He regarded
    expiation as heathenish and impossible; every one must receive
    according to his deeds; God is ready to grant forgiveness on
    simple repentance.

    E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 277—“The theory first insists
    on the inviolability of moral sequences in the conduct of every
    moral agent; and then insists that, on a given condition, the
    consequences of transgression may be arrested by almighty fiat....
    Unitarianism errs in giving a transforming power to that which
    works beneficently only after the transformation has been
    wrought.” In ascribing to human nature a power of
    self-reformation, it ignores man’s need of regeneration by the
    Holy Spirit. But even this renewing work of the Holy Spirit
    presupposes the atoning work of Christ. “_Ye must be born anew_”
    (_John 3:7_) necessitates “_Even so must the Son of man be lifted
    up_” (_John 3:14_). It is only the Cross that satisfies man’s
    instinct of reparation. Harnack, Das Wesen des Christenthums,
    99—“Those who regarded Christ’s death soon ceased to bring any
    other bloody offering to God. This is true both in Judaism and in
    heathenism. Christ’s death put an end to all bloody offerings in
    religious history. The impulse to sacrifice found its satisfaction
    in the Cross of Christ.” We regard this as proof that the Cross is
    essentially a satisfaction to the divine justice, and not a mere
    example of faithfulness to duty. The Socinian theory is the first
    of six theories of the Atonement, which roughly correspond with
    our six previously treated theories of sin, and this first theory
    includes most of the false doctrine which appears in mitigated
    forms in several of the theories following.


To this theory we make the following objections:

(_a_) It is based upon false philosophical principles,—as, for example,
that will is merely the faculty of volitions; that the foundation of
virtue is in utility; that law is an expression of arbitrary will; that
penalty is a means of reforming the offender; that righteousness, in
either God or man, is only a manifestation of benevolence.


    If the will is simply the faculty of volitions, and not also the
    fundamental determination of the being to an ultimate end, then
    man can, by a single volition, effect his own reformation and
    reconciliation to God. If the foundation of virtue is in utility,
    then there is nothing in the divine being that prevents pardon,
    the good of the creature, and not the demands of God’s holiness,
    being the reason for Christ’s suffering. If law is an expression
    of arbitrary will, instead of being a transcript of the divine
    nature, it may at any time be dispensed with, and the sinner may
    be pardoned on mere repentance. If penalty is merely a means of
    reforming the offender, then sin does not involve objective guilt,
    or obligation to suffer, and sin may be forgiven, at any moment,
    to all who forsake it,—indeed, _must_ be forgiven, since
    punishment is out of place when the sinner is reformed. If
    righteousness is only a form or manifestation of benevolence, then
    God can show his benevolence as easily through pardon as through
    penalty, and Christ’s death is only intended to attract us toward
    the good by the force of a noble example.

    Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:218-264, is essentially Socinian in
    his view of Jesus’ death. Yet he ascribes to Jesus the idea that
    suffering is _necessary_, even for one who stands in perfect love
    and blessed fellowship with God, since earthly blessedness is not
    the true blessedness, and since a true piety is impossible without
    renunciation and stooping to minister to others. The earthly
    life-sacrifice of the Messiah was his necessary and greatest act,
    and was the culminating point of his teaching. Suffering made him
    a perfect example, and so ensured the success of his work. But why
    God should have made it necessary that the holiest must suffer,
    Wendt does not explain. This constitution of things we can
    understand only as a revelation of the holiness of God, and of his
    punitive relation to human sin. Simon, Reconciliation, 357, shows
    well that example might have sufficed for a race that merely
    needed leadership. But what the race needed most was energizing,
    the fulfilment of the conditions of restoration to God on their
    behalf by one of themselves, by one whose very essence they
    shared, who created them, in whom they consisted, and whose work
    was therefore their work. Christ condemned with the divine
    condemnation the thoughts and impulses arising from his
    subconscious life. Before the sin, which for the moment seemed to
    be his, could become his, he condemned it. He sympathized with,
    nay, he revealed, the very justice and sorrow of God. _Hebrews
    2:16-18_—“_For verily not to angels doth he give help, but he
    giveth help to the seed of Abraham. Wherefore it behooved him in
    all things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might become
    a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God,
    to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that he
    himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them
    that are tempted._”


(_b_) It is a natural outgrowth from the Pelagian view of sin, and
logically necessitates a curtailment or surrender of every other
characteristic doctrine of Christianity—inspiration, sin, the deity of
Christ, justification, regeneration, and eternal retribution.


    The Socinian theory requires a surrender of the doctrine of
    inspiration; for the idea of vicarious and expiatory sacrifice is
    woven into the very warp and woof of the Old and New Testaments.
    It requires an abandonment of the Scripture doctrine of sin; for
    in it all idea of sin as perversion of nature rendering the sinner
    unable to save himself, and as objective guilt demanding
    satisfaction to the divine holiness, is denied. It requires us to
    give up the deity of Christ; for if sin is a slight evil, and man
    can save himself from its penalty and power, then there is no
    longer need of either an infinite suffering or an infinite Savior,
    and a human Christ is as good as a divine. It requires us to give
    up the Scripture doctrine of justification, as God’s act of
    declaring the sinner just in the eye of the law, solely on account
    of the righteousness and death of Christ to whom he is united by
    faith; for the Socinian theory cannot permit the counting to a man
    of any other righteousness than his own. It requires a denial of
    the doctrine of regeneration; for this is no longer the work of
    God, but the work of the sinner; it is no longer a change of the
    affections below consciousness, but a self-reforming volition of
    the sinner himself. It requires a denial of eternal retribution;
    for this is no longer appropriate to finite transgression of
    arbitrary law, and to superficial sinning that does not involve
    nature.


(_c_) It contradicts the Scripture teachings, that sin involves objective
guilt as well as subjective defilement; that the holiness of God must
punish sin; that the atonement was a bearing of the punishment of sin for
men; and that this vicarious bearing of punishment was necessary, on the
part of God, to make possible the showing of favor to the guilty.


    The Scriptures do not make the main object of the atonement to be
    man’s subjective moral improvement. It is to God that the
    sacrifice is offered, and the object of it is to satisfy the
    divine holiness, and to remove from the divine mind an obstacle to
    the showing of favor to the guilty. It was something external to
    man and his happiness or virtue, that required that Christ should
    suffer. What Emerson has said of the martyr is yet more true of
    Christ: “Though love repine, and reason chafe, There comes a voice
    without reply, ’Tis man’s perdition to be safe, When for the truth
    he ought to die.” The truth for which Christ died was truth
    internal to the nature of God; not simply truth externalized and
    published among men. What the truth of God required, that Christ
    rendered—full satisfaction to violated justice. “Jesus paid it
    all”; and no obedience or righteousness of ours can be added to
    his work, as a ground of our salvation.

    E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 276—“This theory fails of a
    due recognition of that deep-seated, universal and innate sense of
    ill-desert, which in all times and everywhere has prompted men to
    aim at some expiation of their guilt. For this sense of guilt and
    its requirements the moral influence theory makes no adequate
    provision, either in Christ or in those whom Christ saves.
    Supposing Christ’s redemptive work to consist merely in winning
    men to the practice of righteousness, it takes no account of
    penalty, either as the sanction of the law, as the reaction of the
    divine holiness against sin, or as the upbraiding of the
    individual conscience.... The Socinian theory overlooks the fact
    that there must be some objective manifestation of God’s wrath and
    displeasure against sin.”


(_d_) It furnishes no proper explanation of the sufferings and death of
Christ. The unmartyrlike anguish cannot be accounted for, and the
forsaking by the Father cannot be justified, upon the hypothesis that
Christ died as a mere witness to truth. If Christ’s sufferings were not
propitiatory, they neither furnish us with a perfect example, nor
constitute a manifestation of the love of God.


    Compare Jesus’ feeling, in view of death, with that of Paul:
    “_having the desire to depart_” (_Phil 1:23_). Jesus was filled
    with anguish: “_Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say?
    Father, save me from this hour_” (_John 12:27_). If Christ was
    simply a martyr, then he is not a perfect example; for many a
    martyr has shown greater courage in prospect of death, and in the
    final agony has been able to say that the fire that consumed him
    was “a bed of roses.” Gethsemane, with its mental anguish, is
    apparently recorded in order to indicate that Christ’s sufferings
    even on the cross were not mainly physical sufferings. The Roman
    Catholic Church unduly emphasizes the physical side of our Lord’s
    passion, but loses sight of its spiritual element. The Christ of
    Rome indeed is either a babe or dead, and the crucifix presents to
    us not a risen and living Redeemer, but a mangled and lifeless
    body.

    Stroud, in his Physical Cause of our Lord’s Death, has made it
    probable that Jesus died of a broken heart, and that this alone
    explains _John 19:34_—“_one of the soldiers with a spear pierced
    his side, and straightway there came out blood and water_”—_i.
    e._, the heart had already been ruptured by grief. That grief was
    grief at the forsaking of the Father (_Mat. 27:46_—“_My God, my
    God, why hast thou forsaken me?_”), and the resulting death shows
    that that forsaking was no imaginary one. Did God make the holiest
    man of all to be the greatest sufferer of all the ages? This heart
    broken by the forsaking of the Father means more than martyrdom.
    If Christ’s death is not propitiatory, it fills me with terror and
    despair; for it presents me not only with a very imperfect example
    in Christ, but with a proof of measureless injustice on the part
    of God. _Luke 23:28_—“_weep not for me, but weep for
    yourselves_”—Jesus rejects all pity that forgets his suffering for
    others.

    To the above view of Stroud, Westcott objects that blood does not
    readily flow from an ordinary corpse. The separation of the red
    corpuscles of the blood from the serum, or water, would be the
    beginning of decomposition, and would be inconsistent with the
    statement in _Acts 2:31_—“_neither did his flesh see corruption._”
    But Dr. W. W. Keen of Philadelphia, in his article on The Bloody
    Sweat of our Lord (Bib. Sac., July, 1897:469-484) endorses
    Stroud’s view as to the physical cause of our Lord’s death.
    Christ’s being forsaken by the Father was only the culmination of
    that relative withdrawal which constituted the source of Christ’s
    loneliness through life. Through life he was a servant of the
    Spirit. On the cross the Spirit left him to the weakness of
    unassisted humanity, destitute of conscious divine resources.
    Compare the curious reading of _Heb. 2:9_—“_that he apart from
    God_ (χωρὶς Θεοῦ) _should taste death for every man._”

    If Christ merely supposed himself to be deserted by God, “not only
    does Christ become an erring man, and, so far as the predicate
    deity is applicable to him, an erring God; but, if he cherished
    unfounded distrust of God, how can it be possible still to
    maintain that his will was in abiding, perfect agreement and
    identity with the will of God?” See Kant, Lotze, and Ritschl, by
    Stählin, 219. Charles C. Everett, Gospel of Paul, says Jesus was
    not crucified because he was accursed, but he was accursed because
    he was crucified, so that, in wreaking vengeance upon him, Jewish
    law abrogated itself. This interpretation however contradicts _2
    Cor. 5:21_—“_Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our
    behalf_”—where the divine identification of Christ with the race
    of sinners antedates and explains his sufferings. _John
    1:29_—“_the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the
    world_”—does not refer to Jesus as a lamb for gentleness, but as a
    lamb for sacrifice. Maclaren: “How does Christ’s death prove God’s
    love? Only on one supposition, namely, that Christ is the
    incarnate Son of God, sent by the Father’s love and being his
    express image”; and, we may add, suffering vicariously for us and
    removing the obstacle in God’s mind to our pardon.


(_e_) The influence of Christ’s example is neither declared in Scripture,
nor found in Christian experience, to be the chief result secured by his
death. Mere example is but a new preaching of the law, which repels and
condemns. The cross has power to lead men to holiness, only as it first
shows a satisfaction made for their sins. Accordingly, most of the
passages which represent Christ as an example also contain references to
his propitiatory work.


    There is no virtue in simply setting an example. Christ did
    nothing, simply for the sake of example. Even his baptism was the
    symbol of his propitiatory death; see pages 761, 762. The
    apostle’s exhortation is not “abstain from all _appearance_ of
    evil” (_1 Thess. 5:22_, A. Vers.), but “_abstain from every form
    of evil_” (Rev. Vers.). Christ’s death is the payment of a real
    debt due to God; and the convicted sinner needs first to see the
    debt which he owes to the divine justice paid by Christ, before he
    can think hopefully of reforming his life. The hymns of the
    church: “I lay my sins on Jesus,” and “Not all the blood of
    beasts,” represent the view of Christ’s sufferings which
    Christians have derived from the Scriptures. When the sinner sees
    that the mortgage is cancelled, that the penalty has been borne,
    he can devote himself freely to the service of his Redeemer. _Rev.
    12:11_—“_they overcame him_ [Satan] _because of the blood of the
    Lamb_”—as Christ overcame Satan by his propitiatory sacrifice, so
    we overcome by appropriating to ourselves Christ’s atonement and
    his Spirit; _cf._ _1 John 5:4_—“_this is the victory that hath
    overcome the world, even our faith._” The very text upon which
    Socinians most rely, when it is taken in connection with the
    context, proves their theory to be a misrepresentation of
    Scripture, _1 Pet. 2:21_—“_Christ also suffered for you, leaving
    you an example, that ye should follow his steps_”—is succeeded by
    _verse 24_—“_who his own self bare our sins in his body upon the
    tree, that we, having died unto sins, might live unto
    righteousness; by whose stripes ye were healed_”—the latter words
    being a direct quotation from Isaiah’s description of the
    substitutionary sufferings of the Messiah (_Is. 53:5_).

    When a deeply convicted sinner was told that God could cleanse his
    heart and make him over anew, he replied with righteous
    impatience: “That is not what I want,—I have a debt to pay first!”
    A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 28, 89—“Nowhere in
    tabernacle or temple shall we ever find the laver placed before
    the altar. The altar is Calvary, and the laver is Pentecost,—one
    stands for the sacrificial blood, the other for the sanctifying
    Spirit.... So the oil which symbolised the sanctifying Spirit was
    always put ‘_upon the blood of the trespass-offering_’ (_Lev.
    14:17_).” The extremity of Christ’s suffering on the Cross was
    coincident with the extremest manifestation of the guilt of the
    race. The greatness of this he theoretically knew from the
    beginning of his ministry. His baptism was not intended merely to
    set an example. It was a recognition that sin deserved death; that
    he was numbered with the transgressors; that he was sent to die
    for the sin of the world. He was not so much a teacher, as he was
    the subject of all teaching. In him the great suffering of the
    holy God on account of sin is exhibited to the universe. The pain
    of a few brief hours saves a world, only because it sets forth an
    eternal fact in God’s being and opens to us God’s very heart.

    Shakespeare, Henry V, 4:1—“There is some soul of goodness in
    things evil. Would men observingly distil it out.” It is well to
    preach on Christ as an example. Lyman Abbott says that Jesus’
    blood purchases our pardon and redeems us to God, just as a
    patriot’s blood redeems his country from servitude and purchases
    its liberty. But even Ritschl, Just. and Recon., 2, goes beyond
    this, when he says: “Those who advocate the example theory should
    remember that Jesus withdraws himself from imitation when he sets
    himself over against his disciples as the Author of forgiveness.
    And they perceive that pardon must first be appropriated, before
    it is possible for them to imitate his piety and moral
    achievement.” This is a partial recognition of the truth that the
    removal of objective guilt by Christ’s atonement must precede the
    removal of subjective defilement by Christ’s regenerating and
    sanctifying Spirit. Lidgett, Spir. Princ. of Atonement, 265-280,
    shows that there is a fatherly demand for satisfaction, which must
    be met by the filial response of the child. Thomas Chalmers at the
    beginning of his ministry urged on his people the reformation of
    their lives. But he confesses: “I never heard of any such
    reformations being effected amongst them.” Only when he preached
    the alienation of men from God, and forgiveness through the blood
    of Christ, did he hear of their betterment.

    Gordon, Christ of To-day, 129—“The consciousness of sin is largely
    the creation of Christ.” Men like Paul, Luther, and Edwards show
    this impressively. Foster, Christian life and Theology,
    198-201—“There is of course a sense in which the Christian must
    imitate Christ’s death, for he is to ‘_take up his cross daily_’
    (_Luke 9:23_) and follow his Master; but in its highest meaning
    and fullest scope the death of Christ is no more an object set for
    our imitation than is the creation of the world.... Christ does
    for man in his sacrifice what man could not do for himself. We see
    in the Cross: 1. the magnitude of the guilt of sin; 2. our own
    self-condemnation; 3. the adequate remedy,—for the object of law
    is gained in the display of righteousness; 4. the objective ground
    of forgiveness.” Maclaren: “Christianity without a dying Christ is
    a dying Christianity.”


(_f_) This theory contradicts the whole tenor of the New Testament, in
making the life, and not the death, of Christ the most significant and
important feature of his work. The constant allusions to the death of
Christ as the source of our salvation, as well as the symbolism of the
ordinances, cannot be explained upon a theory which regards Christ as a
mere example, and considers his sufferings as incidents, rather than
essentials, of his work.


    Dr. H. B. Hackett frequently called attention to the fact that the
    recording in the gospels of only three years of Jesus’ life, and
    the prominence given in the record to the closing scenes of that
    life, are evidence that not his life, but his death, was the great
    work of our Lord. Christ’s death, and not his life, is the central
    truth of Christianity. The cross is _par excellence_ the Christian
    symbol. In both the ordinances—in Baptism as well as in the Lord’s
    Supper—it is the death of Christ that is primarily set forth.
    Neither Christ’s example, nor his teaching, reveals God as does
    his death. It is the death of Christ that links together all
    Christian doctrines. The mark of Christ’s blood is upon them all,
    as the scarlet thread running through every cord and rope of the
    British navy gives sign that it is the property of the crown.

    Did Jesus’ death have no other relation to our salvation than
    Paul’s death had? Paul was a martyr, but his death is not even
    recorded. Gould, Bib. Theol. N. T., 92—“Paul does not dwell in any
    way upon the life or work of our Lord, except as they are involved
    in his death and resurrection.” What did Jesus’ words: “_It is
    finished_” (_John 19:30_) mean? What was finished on the Socinian
    theory? The Socinian salvation had not yet begun. Why did not
    Jesus make the ordinances of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper to be
    memorials of his birth, rather than of his death? Why was not the
    veil of the temple rent at his baptism, or at the Sermon on the
    Mount? It was because only his death opened the way to God. In
    talking with Nicodemus, Jesus brushed aside the complimentary:
    “_we know that thou art a teacher come from God_” (_John 3:2_).
    Recognizing Jesus as teacher is not enough. There must be a
    renewal by the Spirit of God, so that one recognizes also the
    lifting up of the Son of man as atoning Savior (_John 3:14, 15_).
    And to Peter, Jesus said: “_If I wash thee not, thou hast no part
    with me_” (_John 13:8_). One cannot have part with Christ as
    Teacher, while one rejects him as Redeemer from sin. On the
    Socinian doctrine of the Atonement, see Crawford, Atonement,
    279-296; Shedd, History of Doctrine, 2:376-386; Doctrines of the
    Early Socinians, in Princeton Essays, 1:194-211; Philippi,
    Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:156-180; Fock, Socinianismus.


2nd. The Bushnellian, or Moral Influence Theory of the Atonement.


This holds, like the Socinian, that there is no principle of the divine
nature which is propitiated by Christ’s death; but that this death is a
manifestation of the love of God, suffering in and with the sins of his
creatures. Christ’s atonement, therefore, is the merely natural
consequence of his taking human nature upon him; and is a suffering, not
of penalty in man’s stead, but of the combined woes and griefs which the
living of a human life involves. This atonement has effect, not to satisfy
divine justice, but so to reveal divine love as to soften human hearts and
to lead them to repentance; in other words, Christ’s sufferings were
necessary, not in order to remove an obstacle to the pardon of sinners
which exists in the mind of God, but in order to convince sinners that
there exists no such obstacle. This theory, for substance, has been
advocated by Bushnell, in America; by Robertson, Maurice, Campbell, and
Young, in Great Britain; by Schleiermacher and Ritschl, in Germany.


    Origen and Abelard are earlier representatives of this view. It
    may be found stated in Bushnell’s Vicarious Sacrifice. Bushnell’s
    later work, Forgiveness and Law, contains a modification of his
    earlier doctrine, to which he was driven by the criticisms upon
    his Vicarious Sacrifice. In the later work, he acknowledges what
    he had so strenuously denied in the earlier, namely, that Christ’s
    death has effect upon God as well as upon man, and that God cannot
    forgive without thus “making cost to himself.” He makes open
    confession of the impotence of his former teaching to convert
    sinners, and, as the only efficient homiletic, he recommends the
    preaching of the very doctrine of propitiatory sacrifice which he
    had written his book to supersede. Even in Forgiveness and Law,
    however, there is no recognition of the true principle and ground
    of the Atonement in God’s punitive holiness. Since the original
    form of Bushnell’s doctrine is the only one which has met with
    wide acceptance, we direct our objections mainly to this.

    F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 1:163-178, holds that Christ’s
    sufferings were the necessary result of the position in which he
    had placed himself of conflict or collision with the evil that is
    in the world. He came in contact with the whirling wheel, and was
    crushed by it; he planted his heel upon the cockatrice’s den, and
    was pierced by its fang. Maurice, on Sacrifice, 209, and Theol.
    Essays, 141, 228, regards Christ’s sufferings as an illustration,
    given by the ideal man, of the self-sacrifice due to God from the
    humanity of which he is the root and head, all men being redeemed
    in him, irrespective of their faith, and needing only to have
    brought to them the news of this redemption. Young, Life and Light
    of Men, holds a view essentially the same with Robertson’s.
    Christ’s death is the necessary result of his collision with evil,
    and his sufferings extirpate sin, simply by manifesting God’s
    self-sacrificing love,

    Campbell, Atonement, 129-191, quotes from Edwards, to show that
    infinite justice might be satisfied in either one of two ways: (1)
    by an infinite punishment; (2) by an adequate repentance. This
    last, which Edwards passed by as impracticable, Campbell declares
    to have been the real atonement offered by Christ, who stands as
    the great Penitent, confessing the sin of the world. Mason, Faith
    of the Gospel, 160-210, takes substantially the view of Campbell,
    denying substitution, and emphasizing Christ’s oneness with the
    race and his confession of human sin. He grants indeed that our
    Lord bore penalty, but only in the sense that he realized how
    great was the condemnation and penalty of the race.

    Schleiermacher denies any satisfaction to God by substitution. He
    puts in its place an influence of Christ’s personality on men, so
    that they feel themselves reconciled and redeemed. The atonement
    is purely subjective. Yet it is the work of Christ, in that only
    _Christ’s_ oneness with God has taught men that _they_ can be one
    with God. Christ’s consciousness of his being in God and knowing
    God, and his power to impart this consciousness to others, make
    him a Mediator and Savior. The idea of reparation, compensation,
    satisfaction, substitution, is wholly Jewish. He regarded it as
    possible only to a narrow-minded people. He tells us that he hates
    in religion that kind of historic relation. He had no such sense
    of the holiness of God, or of the guilt of man, as would make
    necessary any suffering of punishment or offering to God for human
    sin. He desires to replace external and historical Christianity by
    a Christianity that is internal and subjective. See
    Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube, 2:94-161.

    Ritschl however is the most recent and influential representative
    of the Moral Influence theory in Germany. His view is to be found
    in his Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, or in English translation,
    Justification and Reconciliation. Ritschl is anti-Hegelian and
    libertarian, but like Schleiermacher he does not treat sin with
    seriousness; he regards the sense of guilt as an illusion which it
    is the part of Christ to dispel; there is an inadequate conception
    of Christ’s person, a practical denial of his pre-existence and
    work of objective atonement; indeed, the work of Christ is hardly
    put into any precise relation to sin at all; see Denney, Studies
    in Theology, 136-151. E. H. Johnson: “Many Ritschlians deny both
    the miraculous conception and the bodily resurrection of Jesus.
    Sin does not particularly concern God; Christ is Savior only as
    Buddha was, achieving lordship over the world by indifference to
    it; he is the Word of God, only as he reveals this divine
    indifference to things. All this does not agree with the N. T.
    teaching that Christ is the only begotten Son of God, that he was
    with the Father before the world was, that he made expiation of
    sins to God, and that sin is that abominable thing that God
    hates.” For a general survey of the Ritschlian theology, see Orr,
    Ritschlian Theology, 231-271; Presb. and Ref. Rev., July,
    1891:443-458 (art. by Zahn), and Jan. 1892:1-21 (art. by C. M.
    Mead); Andover Review, July, 1893:440-461; Am. Jour. Theology,
    Jan. 1899:22-44 (art. by H. R. Mackintosh); Lidgett, Spir. Prin.
    of Atonement, 190-207; Foster, Christ. Life and Theology; and the
    work of Garvie on Ritschl. For statement and criticism of other
    forms of the Moral Influence theory, see Crawford, Atonement,
    297-366; Watts, New Apologetic, 210-247.


To this theory we object as follows:

(_a_) While it embraces a valuable element of truth, namely, the moral
influence upon men _of_ the sufferings of the God-man, it is false by
defect, in that it substitutes a subordinate effect of the atonement for
its chief aim, and yet unfairly appropriates the name “vicarious,” which
belongs only to the latter. Suffering _with_ the sinner is by no means
suffering _in his stead_.


    Dale, Atonement, 137, illustrates Bushnell’s view by the loyal
    wife, who suffers exile or imprisonment with her husband; by the
    philanthropist, who suffers the privations and hardships of a
    savage people, whom he can civilize only by enduring the miseries
    from which he would rescue them; by the Moravian missionary, who
    enters for life the lepers’ enclosure, that he may convert its
    inmates. So Potwin says that suffering and death are the cost of
    the atonement, not the atonement _itself_.

    But we reply that such sufferings as these do not make Christ’s
    sacrifice _vicarious_. The word “vicarious” (from _vicis_) implies
    substitution, which this theory denies. The vicar of a parish is
    not necessarily one who performs service with, and in sympathy
    with, the rector,—he is rather one who stands in the rector’s
    place. A vice-president is one who acts in place of the president;
    “A. B., appointed consul, _vice_ C. D., resigned,” implies that A.
    B. is now to serve in the stead of C. D. If Christ is a “vicarious
    sacrifice,” then he makes atonement to God _in the place and
    stead_ of sinners. Christ’s suffering _in and with sinners_,
    though it is a most important and affecting fact, is not the
    suffering in their stead in which the atonement consists. Though
    suffering in and with sinners may be in part the _medium_ through
    which Christ was enabled to endure God’s wrath against sin, it is
    not to be confounded with the _reason_ why God lays this suffering
    upon him; nor should it blind us to the fact that this reason is
    his standing in the sinner’s place to answer for sin to the
    retributive holiness of God.


(_b_) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that righteousness
is identical with benevolence, instead of conditioning it; that God is
subject to an eternal law of love, instead of being himself the source of
all law; that the aim of penalty is the reformation of the offender.


    Hovey, God with Us, 181-271, has given one of the best replies to
    Bushnell. He shows that if God is subject to an eternal law of
    love, then God is necessarily a Savior; that he must have created
    man as soon as he could; that he makes men holy as fast as
    possible; that he does all the good he can; that he is no better
    than he should be. But this is to deny the transcendence of God,
    and reduce omnipotence to a mere nature-power. The conception of
    God as subject to law imperils God’s self-sufficiency and freedom.
    For Bushnell’s statements with regard to the identity of
    righteousness and love, and for criticisms upon them, see our
    treatment of the attribute of Holiness, vol. I, pages 268-275.

    Watts, New Apologetic, 277-280, points out that, upon Bushnell’s
    principles, there must be an atonement for fallen angels. God was
    bound to assume the angelic nature and to do for angels all that
    he has done for us. There is also no reason for restricting either
    the atonement or the offer of salvation to the present life. B. B.
    Warfield, in Princeton Review, 1903:81-92, shows well that all the
    forms of the Moral Influence theory rest upon the assumption that,
    God is only love, and that all that is required as ground of the
    sinner’s forgiveness is penitence, either Christ’s, or his own, or
    both together.

    Ignoring the divine holiness and minimizing the guilt of sin, many
    modern writers make atonement to be a mere incident of Christ’s
    incarnation. Phillips Brooks, Life, 2:350, 351—“Atonement by
    suffering is the result of the Incarnation; atonement being the
    necessary, and suffering the incidental element of that result.
    But sacrifice is an essential element, for sacrifice truly
    signifies here the consecration of human nature to its highest use
    and utterance, and does not necessarily involve the thought of
    pain. It is not the destruction but the fulfilment of human life.
    Inasmuch as the human life thus consecrated and fulfilled is the
    same in us as in Jesus, and inasmuch as his consecration and
    fulfilment makes morally possible for us the same consecration and
    fulfilment of it which he achieved, therefore his atonement and
    his sacrifice, and incidentally his suffering, become vicarious.
    It is not that they make unnecessary, but that they make possible
    and successful in us, the same processes which were perfect in
    him.”


(_c_) The theory furnishes no proper reason for Christ’s suffering. While
it shows that the Savior necessarily suffers from his contact with human
sin and sorrow, it gives no explanation of that constitution of the
universe which makes suffering the consequence of sin, not only to the
sinner, but also to the innocent being who comes into connection with sin.
The holiness of God, which is manifested in this constitution of things
and which requires this atonement, is entirely ignored.


    B. W. Lockhart, in a recent statement of the doctrine of the
    atonement, shows this defect of apprehension: “God in Christ
    reconciled the world to himself; Christ did not reconcile God to
    man, but man to God. Christ did not enable God to save men; God
    enabled Christ to save men. The sufferings of Christ were
    vicarious as the highest illustration of that spiritual law by
    which the good soul is impelled to suffer that others may not
    suffer, to die that others may not die. The vicarious sufferings
    of Jesus were also the great revelation to man of the vicarious
    nature of God; a revelation of the cross as eternal in his nature;
    that it is in the heart of God to bear the sin and sorrow of his
    creatures in his eternal love and pity; a revelation moreover that
    the law which saves the lost through the vicarious labors of
    godlike souls prevails wherever the godlike and the lost soul can
    influence each other.”

    While there is much in the above statement with which we agree, we
    charge it with misapprehending the reason for Christ’s suffering.
    That reason is to be found only in that holiness of God which
    expresses itself in the very constitution of the universe. Not
    love but holiness has made suffering invariably to follow sin, so
    that penalty falls not only upon the transgressor but upon him who
    is the life and sponsor of the transgressor. God’s holiness brings
    suffering to God, and to Christ who manifests God. Love bears the
    suffering, but it is holiness that necessitates it. The statement
    of Lockhart above gives account of the effect—reconciliation; but
    it fails to recognize the cause—propitiation. The words of E. G.
    Robinson furnish the needed complement: “The work of Christ has
    two sides, propitiatory and reconciling. Christ felt the pang of
    association with a guilty race. The divine displeasure rested on
    him as possessing the guilty nature. In his own person he redeems
    this nature by bearing its penalty. Propitiation must precede
    reconciliation. The Moral Influence theory recognizes the
    necessity of a subjective change in man, but makes no provision of
    an objective agency to secure it.”


(_d_) It contradicts the plain teachings of Scripture, that the atonement
is necessary, not simply to reveal God’s love, but to satisfy his justice;
that Christ’s sufferings are propitiatory and penal; and that the human
conscience needs to be propitiated by Christ’s sacrifice, before it can
feel the moral influence of his sufferings.


    That the atonement is primarily an offering to God, and not to the
    sinner, appears from _Eph. 5:2_—“_gave himself up for us, an
    offering and a sacrifice to God_”; _Heb. 9:14,_—“_offered himself
    without blemish unto God._” Conscience, the reflection of God’s
    holiness, can be propitiated only by propitiating holiness itself.
    Mere love and sympathy are maudlin, and powerless to move, unless
    there is a background of righteousness. Spear: “An appeal to man,
    without anything back of it to emphasize and enforce the appeal,
    will never touch the heart. The mere _appearance_ of an atonement
    has no moral influence.” Crawford, Atonement, 358-367—“Instead of
    delivering us from penalty, in order to deliver us from sin, this
    theory made Christ to deliver us from sin, in order that he may
    deliver us from penalty. But this reverses the order of Scripture.
    And Dr. Bushnell concedes, in the end, that the moral view of the
    atonement is morally powerless; and that the Objective view he
    condemns is, after all, indispensable to the salvation of
    sinners.”

    Some men are quite ready to forgive those whom they have offended.
    The Ritschlian school sees no guilt to be atoned for, and no
    propitiation to be necessary. Only man needs to be reconciled.
    Ritschlians are quite ready to forgive God. The only atonement is
    an atonement, made by repentance, to the human conscience. Shedd
    says well: “All that is requisite in order to satisfaction and
    peace of conscience in the sinful soul is also requisite in order
    to the satisfaction of God himself.” Walter Besant: “It is not
    enough to be forgiven,—one has also to forgive one’s self.” The
    converse proposition is yet more true: It is not enough to forgive
    one’s self,—one has also to be forgiven; indeed, one cannot
    rightly forgive one’s self, unless one has been first forgiven; _1
    John 3:20_—“_if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our
    heart, and knoweth all things._” A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the
    Spirit, 201—“As the high priest carried the blood into the Holy of
    Holies under the old dispensation, so does the Spirit take the
    blood of Christ into the inner sanctuary of our spirit in the new
    dispensation, in order that he may ‘_cleanse your conscience from
    dead works to serve the living God_’ (_Heb. 9:14_).”


(_e_) It can be maintained, only by wresting from their obvious meaning
those passages of Scripture which speak of Christ as suffering for our
sins; which represent his blood as accomplishing something for us in
heaven, when presented there by our intercessor; which declare forgiveness
to be a remitting of past offences upon the ground of Christ’s death; and
which describe justification as a pronouncing, not a making, just.


    We have seen that the forms in which the Scriptures describe
    Christ’s death are mainly drawn from sacrifice. Notice Bushnell’s
    acknowledgment that these “altar-forms” are the most vivid and
    effective methods of presenting Christ’s work, and that the
    preacher cannot dispense with them. Why he should not dispense
    with them, if the meaning has gone out of them, is not so clear.

    In his later work, entitled Forgiveness and Law, Bushnell appears
    to recognize this inconsistency, and represents God as affected by
    the atonement, after all; in other words, the atonement has an
    objective as well as a subjective influence. God can forgive, only
    by “making cost to himself.” He “works down his resentment, by
    suffering for us.” This verges toward the true view, but it does
    not recognize the demand of divine holiness for satisfaction; and
    it attributes passion, weakness, and imperfection to God. Dorner,
    Glaubenslehre, 2:591 (Syst. Doct., 4:59, 69), objects to this
    modified Moral Influence theory, that the love that can do good to
    an enemy is _already forgiving_ love; so that the benefit to the
    enemy cannot be, as Bushnell supposes, a _condition of the
    forgiveness_.

    To Campbell’s view, that Christ is the great Penitent, and that
    his atonement consists essentially in his confessing the sins of
    the world, we reply, that no confession or penitence is possible
    without responsibility. If Christ had no substitutionary office,
    the ordering of his sufferings on the part of God was manifest
    injustice. Such sufferings, moreover, are impossible upon grounds
    of mere sympathy. The Scripture explains them by declaring that he
    bore our curse, and became a ransom in our place. There was more
    therefore in the sufferings of Christ than “a perfect Amen in
    humanity to the judgment of God on the sin of man.” Not Phinehas’s
    zeal for God, but his execution of judgment, made an atonement
    (_Ps. 106:30_—“_executed judgment_”—LXX.: ἐξιλάσατο, “_made
    propitiation_”) and turned away the wrath of God. Observe here the
    contrast between the _priestly_ atonement of Aaron, who stood
    between the living and the dead, and the _judicial_ atonement of
    Phinehas, who executed righteous judgment, and so turned away
    wrath. In neither case did mere _confession_ suffice to take away
    sin. On Campbell’s view see further, on page 760.

    Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 98, has the great merit of
    pointing out that Christ shares our sufferings in virtue of the
    fact that our personality has its ground in him; but that this
    sharing of our penalty was necessitated by God’s righteousness he
    has failed to indicate. He tells us that “Christ sanctified the
    present and cancels the past. He offers to God a living holiness
    in human conditions and character; he makes the awful sacrifice in
    humanity of a perfect contrition. The one is the offering of
    obedience, the other the offering of atonement; the one the
    offering of the life, the other the offering of the death.” This
    modification of Campbell’s view can be rationally maintained only
    by connecting with it a prior declaration that the fundamental
    attribute of God is holiness; that holiness is self-affirming
    righteousness; that this righteousness necessarily expresses
    itself in the punishment of sin; that Christ’s relation to the
    race as its upholder and life made him the bearer of its guilt and
    justly responsible for its sin. Scripture declares the ultimate
    aim of the atonement to be that God “_might himself be just_”
    (_Rom. 3:26_), and no theory of the atonement will meet the
    demands of either reason or conscience that does not ground its
    necessity in God’s righteousness, rather than in his love.

    E. Y. Mullins: “If Christ’s union with humanity made it possible
    for him to be ‘the representative Penitent,’ and to be the Amen of
    humanity to God’s just condemnation of sin, his union with God
    made it also possible for him to be the representative of the
    Judge, and to be the Amen of the divine nature to suffering, as
    the expression of condemnation.” Denney, Studies in Theology, 102,
    103—“The serious element in sin is not man’s dislike, suspicion,
    alienation from God, nor the debilitating, corrupting effects of
    vice in human nature, but rather God’s condemnation of man. This
    Christ endured, and died that the condemnation might be removed.
    ‘Bearing shame and scoffing rude, In my place condemned he stood;
    Sealed my pardon with his blood; Hallelujah!’ ”

    Bushnell regards _Mat. 8:17_—“_Himself took our infirmities, and
    bare our diseases_”—as indicating the nature of Christ’s atoning
    work. The meaning then would be, that he sympathized so fully with
    all human ills that he made them his own. Hovey, however, has
    given a more complete and correct explanation. The words mean
    rather: “His deep sympathy with these effects of sin so moved him,
    that it typified his final bearing of the sins themselves, or
    constituted a preliminary and partial endurance of the suffering
    which was to expiate the sins of men.” His sighing when he cured
    the deaf man (_Mark 7:34_) and his weeping at the grave of Lazarus
    (_John 11:35_) were caused by the anticipatory realization that he
    was one with the humanity which was under the curse, and that he
    too had “_become a curse for us_” (_Gal. 3:13_). The great error
    of Bushnell is his denial of the objective necessity and effect of
    Jesus’ death, and all Scripture which points to an influence of
    the atonement outside of us is a refutation of his theory.


(_f_) This theory confounds God’s method of saving men with men’s
experience of being saved. It makes the atonement itself consist of its
effects in the believer’s union with Christ and the purifying influence of
that union upon the character and life.


    Stevens, in his Doctrine of Salvation, makes this mistake. He
    says: “The old forms of the doctrine of the atonement—that the
    suffering of Christ was necessary to appease the wrath of God and
    induce him to forgive; or to satisfy the law of God and enable him
    to forgive; or to move upon man’s heart to induce him to accept
    forgiveness; have all proved inadequate. Yet to reject the passion
    of Christ is to reject the chief element of power in
    Christianity.... To me the words ‘eternal atonement’ denote the
    dateless passion of God on account of sin; they mean that God is,
    by his very nature, a sin-bearer—that sin grieves and wounds his
    heart, and that he sorrows and suffers in consequence of it. It
    results from the divine love—alike from its holiness and from its
    sympathy—that ‘in our affliction he is afflicted.’ Atonement on
    its ‘Godward side’ is a name for the grief and pain inflicted by
    sin upon the paternal heart of God. Of this divine sorrow for sin,
    the afflictions of Christ are a revelation. In the bitter grief
    and anguish which he experienced on account of sin we see
    reflected the pain and sorrow which sin brings to the divine
    love.”

    All this is well said, with the exception that holiness is
    regarded as a form of love, and the primary offence of sin is
    regarded as the grieving of the Father’s heart. Dr. Stevens fails
    to consider that if love were supreme there would be nothing to
    prevent unholy tolerance of sin. Because holiness is supreme, love
    is conditioned thereby. It is holiness and not love that connects
    suffering with sin, and requires that the Redeemer should suffer.
    Dr. Stevens asserts that the theories hitherto current in
    Protestant churches and the theory for which he pleads are
    “forever irreconcilable”; they are “based on radically different
    conceptions of God.” The British Weekly, Nov. 16, 1905—“The
    doctrine of the atonement is not the doctrine that salvation is
    deliverance from sin, and that this deliverance is the work of
    God, a work the motive of which is God’s love for men; these are
    truths which every one who writes on the Atonement assumes. The
    doctrine of the Atonement has for its task to explain _how_ this
    work is done.... Dr. Stevens makes no contribution whatever to its
    fulfilment. He grants that we have in Paul ‘the theory of a
    substitutionary expiation.’ But he finds something else in Paul
    which he thinks a more adequate rendering of the apostle’s
    Christian experience—the idea, namely, of dying with Christ and
    rising with him; and on the strength of accepting this last he
    feels at liberty to drop the substitutionary expiation overboard
    as something to be explained from Paul’s controversial position,
    or from his Pharisaic inheritance, something at all events which
    has no permanent value for the Christian mind.... The experience
    is dependent on the method. Paul did not die with Christ as an
    alternative to having Christ die with him; he died with Christ
    wholly and solely because Christ died for him. It was the meaning
    carried by the last two words—the meaning unfolded in the theory
    of substitutionary expiation—which had the moral motive in it to
    draw Paul into union with his Lord in life and death.... On Dr.
    Stevens’ own showing, Paul held the two ideas side by side; for
    him the mystical union with Christ was only possible through the
    acceptance of truths with which Dr. Stevens does not know what to
    do.”


(_g_) This theory would confine the influence of the atonement to those
who have heard of it,—thus excluding patriarchs and heathen. But the
Scriptures represent Christ as being the Savior of all men, in the sense
of securing them grace, which, but for his atoning work, could never have
been bestowed consistently with the divine holiness.


    Hovey: “The manward influence of the atonement is far more
    extensive than the moral influence of it.” Christ is Advocate, not
    with the sinner, but with the Father. While the Spirit’s work has
    moral influence over the hearts of men, the Son secures, through
    the presentation of his blood, in heaven, the pardon which can
    come only from God (_1 John 2:1_—“_we have an advocate with the
    Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for
    our sins_”). Hence _1:9_—“_If we confess our sins, he_ [God] _is
    faithful and righteous [faithful to his promise and righteous to
    Christ] to forgive us our sins._” Hence the publican does not
    first pray for change of heart, but for mercy upon the ground of
    sacrifice (_Luke 18:13,_—“_God, be thou merciful to me a sinner,_”
    but literally: “_God be propitiated toward me the sinner_”). See
    Balfour, in Brit. and For. Ev. Rev., Apr. 1884:230-254; Martin,
    Atonement, 216-237; Theol. Eclectic, 4:364-409.

    Gravitation kept the universe stable, long before it was
    discovered by man. So the atonement of Christ was inuring to the
    salvation of men, long before they suspected its existence. The
    “_Light of the world_” (_John 8:12_) has many “X rays,” beyond the
    visible spectrum, but able to impress the image of Christ upon
    patriarchs or heathen. This light has been shining through all the
    ages, but “_the darkness apprehended it not_” (_John 1:5_). Its
    rays register themselves only where there is a sensitive heart to
    receive them. Let them shine through a man, and how much unknown
    sin, and unknown possibilities of good, they reveal! The Moral
    Influence theory does not take account of the preëxistent Christ
    and of his atoning work before his manifestation in the flesh. It
    therefore leads logically to belief in a second probation for the
    many imbeciles, outcasts, and heathen who in this world do not
    hear of Christ’s atonement. The doctrine of Bushnell in this way
    undermines the doctrine of future retribution.

    To Lyman Abbott, the atonement is the self-propitiation of God’s
    love, and its influence is exerted through education. In his
    Theology of an Evolutionist, 118, 190, he maintains that the
    atonement is “a true reconciliation between God and man, making
    them at one through the incarnation and passion of Jesus Christ,
    who lived and suffered, not to redeem men from future torment, but
    to purify and perfect them in God’s likeness by uniting them to
    God.... Sacrifice is not a penalty borne by an innocent sufferer
    for guilty men,—a doctrine for which there is no authority either
    in Scripture or in life (_1 Peter 3:18?_)—but a laying down of
    one’s life in love, that another may receive life.... Redemption
    is not restoration to a lost state of innocence, impossible to be
    restored, but a culmination of the long process when man shall be
    presented before his Father ‘_not having spot or wrinkle or any
    such thing_’ (_Eph. 5:27_).... We believe not in the propitiation
    of an angry God by another suffering to appease the Father’s
    wrath, but in the perpetual self-propitiation of the Father, whose
    mercy, going forth to redeem from sin, satisfies as nothing else
    could the divine indignation against sin, by abolishing it....
    Mercy is hate pitying; it is the pity of wrath. The pity conquers
    the hate only by lifting the sinner up from his degradation and
    restoring him to purity.” And yet in all this there is no mention
    of the divine righteousness as the source of the indignation and
    the object of the propitiation!

    It is interesting to note that some of the greatest advocates of
    the Moral Influence theory have reverted to the older faith when
    they came to die. In his dying moments, as L. W. Munhall tells us,
    Horace Bushnell said: “I fear what I have written and said upon
    the moral idea of the atonement is misleading and will do great
    harm;” and, as he thought of it further, he cried: “Oh Lord Jesus,
    I trust for mercy only in the shed blood that thou didst offer on
    Calvary!” Schleiermacher, on his deathbed, assembled his family
    and a few friends, and himself administered the Lord’s Supper.
    After praying and blessing the bread, and after pronouncing the
    words: “_This is my body, broken for you_,” he added: “This is our
    foundation!” As he started to bless the cup, he cried: “Quick,
    quick, bring the cup! I am so happy!” Then he sank quietly back,
    and was no more; see life of Rothe, by Nippold, 2:53, 54. Ritschl,
    in his History of Pietism, 2:65, had severely criticized Paul
    Gerhardt’s hymn: “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden,” as describing
    physical suffering; but he begged his son to repeat the two last
    verses of that hymn: “O sacred head now wounded!” when he came to
    die. And in general, the convicted sinner finds peace most quickly
    and surely when he is pointed to the Redeemer who died on the
    Cross and endured the penalty of sin in his stead.


3d. The Grotian, or Governmental Theory of the Atonement.


This theory holds that the atonement is a satisfaction, not to any
internal principle of the divine nature, but to the necessities of
government. God’s government of the universe cannot be maintained, nor can
the divine law preserve its authority over its subjects, unless the pardon
of offenders is accompanied by some exhibition of the high estimate which
God sets upon his law, and the heinous guilt of violating it. Such an
exhibition of divine regard for the law is furnished in the sufferings and
death of Christ. Christ does not suffer the precise penalty of the law,
but God graciously accepts his suffering as a substitute for the penalty.
This bearing of substituted suffering on the part of Christ gives the
divine law such hold upon the consciences and hearts of men, that God can
pardon the guilty upon their repentance, without detriment to the
interests of his government. The author of this theory was Hugo Grotius,
the Dutch jurist and theologian (1583-1645). The theory is characteristic
of the New England theology, and is generally held by those who accept the
New School view of sin.


    Grotius was a precocious genius. He wrote good Latin verses at
    nine years of age; was ripe for the University at twelve: edited
    the encyclopædic work of Marcianus Capella at fifteen. Even thus
    early he went with an embassy to the court of France, where he
    spent a year. Returning home, he took the degree of doctor of
    laws. In literature he edited the remains of Aratus, and wrote
    three dramas in Latin. At twenty he was appointed historiographer
    of the United Provinces; then advocate-general of the fisc for
    Holland and Zealand. He wrote on international law; was appointed
    deputy to England; was imprisoned for his theological opinions;
    escaped to Paris; became ambassador of Sweden to France. He wrote
    commentaries on Scripture, also history, theology, and poetry. He
    was indifferent to dogma, a lover of peace, a compromiser, an
    unpartisan believer, dealing with doctrine more as a statesman
    than as a theologian. Of Grotius, Dr. E. G. Robinson used to say:
    “It is ordained of almighty God that the man who dips into
    everything never gets to the bottom of anything.”

    Grotius, the jurist, conceived of law as a mere matter of
    political expediency—a device to procure practical governmental
    results. The text most frequently quoted in support of his theory,
    is _Is. 42:21_—“_It pleased Jehovah, for his righteousness’ sake,
    to magnify the law, and make it honorable._” Strangely enough, the
    explanation is added: “even when its demands are unfulfilled.”
    Park: “Christ satisfied the law, by making it desirable and
    consistent for God not to come up to the demands of the law.
    Christ suffers a divine chastisement in consequence of our sins.
    Christ was cursed for Adam’s sin, just as the heavens and the
    earth were cursed for Adam’s sin,—that is, he bore pains and
    sufferings on account of it.”

    Grotius used the word _acceptilatio_, by which he meant God’s
    sovereign provision of a suffering which was not itself penalty,
    but which he had determined to accept as a substitute for penalty.
    Here we have a virtual denial that there is anything in God’s
    nature that requires Christ to suffer; for if penalty may be
    remitted in part, it may be remitted in whole, and the reason why
    Christ suffers at all is to be found, not in any demand of God’s
    holiness, but solely in the beneficial influence of these
    sufferings upon man; so that in principle this theory is allied to
    the Example theory and the Moral Influence theory, already
    mentioned.

    Notice the difference between holding to a _substitute for
    penalty_, as Grotius did, and holding to an _equivalent
    substituted penalty_, as the Scriptures do. Grotius’s own
    statement of his view may be found in his Defensio Fidei Catholicæ
    de Satisfactione (Works, 4:297-338). More modern statements of it
    are those of Wardlaw, in his Systematic Theology, 2:358-395, and
    of Albert Barnes, on the Atonement. The history of New England
    thought upon the subject is given in Discourses and Treatises on
    the Atonement, edited by Prof. Park, of Andover. President
    Woolsey: “Christ’s suffering was due to a deep and awful sense of
    responsibility, a conception of the supreme importance to man of
    his standing firm at this crisis. He bore, not the wrath of God,
    but suffering, as the only way of redemption so far as men’s own
    feeling of sin was concerned, and so far as the government of God
    was concerned.” This unites the Governmental and the Moral
    Influence theories.

    Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 226, 227—“Grotius emphasized
    the idea of law rather than that of justice, and made the
    sufferings of Christ a legal example and the occasion of the
    relaxation of the law, and not the strict penalty demanded by
    justice. But this view, however it may have been considered and
    have served in the clarification of the thinking of the times, met
    with no general reception, and left little trace of itself among
    those theologians who maintained the line of evangelical
    theological descent.”


To this theory we urge the following objections:

(_a_) While it contains a valuable element of truth, namely, that the
sufferings and death of Christ secure the interests of God’s government,
it is false by defect, in substituting for the chief aim of the atonement
one which is only subordinate and incidental.


    In our discussion of Penalty (pages 655, 656), we have seen that
    the object of punishment is not primarily the security of
    government. It is not right to punish a man for the beneficial
    effect on society. Ill-desert must go before punishment, or the
    punishment can have no beneficial effect on society. No punishment
    can work good to society, that is not just and right in itself.


(_b_) It rests upon false philosophical principles,—as, that utility is
the ground of moral obligation; that law is an expression of the will,
rather than of the nature, of God; that the aim of penalty is to deter
from the commission of offences; and that righteousness is resolvable into
benevolence.


    Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:573-581; 3:188, 189—“For God to take that
    as satisfaction which is not really such, is to say that there is
    no truth in anything. God may take a part for the whole, error for
    truth, wrong for right. The theory really denies the necessity for
    the work of Christ. If every created thing offered to God is worth
    just so much as God accepts it for, then the blood of bulls and
    goats might take away sins, and Christ is dead in vain.” Dorner,
    Glaubenslehre, 2:570, 571 (Syst. Doct., 4:38-40)—“_Acceptilatio_
    implies that nothing is good and right in itself. God is
    indifferent to good or evil. Man is bound by authority and force
    alone. There is no necessity of punishment or atonement. The
    doctrine of indulgences and of supererogation logically follows.”


(_c_) It ignores and virtually denies that immanent holiness of God of
which the law with its threatened penalties, and the human conscience with
its demand for punishment, are only finite reflections. There is something
back of government; if the atonement satisfies government, it must be by
satisfying that justice of God of which government is an expression.


    No deeply convicted sinner feels that his controversy is with
    government. Undone and polluted, he feels himself in antagonism to
    the purity of a personal God. Government is not greater than God,
    but less. What satisfies God must satisfy government. Hence the
    sinner prays: “_Against thee, thee only, have I sinned_” (_Ps.
    51:4_); “_God be propitiated toward me the sinner_” (literal
    translation of _Luke 18:13_),—propitiated through God’s own
    appointed sacrifice whose smoke is ascending in his behalf even
    while he prays.

    In the divine government this theory recognizes no constitution,
    but only legislative enactment; even this legislative enactment is
    grounded in no necessity of God’s nature, but only in expediency
    or in God’s arbitrary will; law may be abrogated for merely
    economic reasons, if any incidental good may be gained thereby. J.
    M. Campbell, Atonement, 81, 144—“No awakened sinner, into whose
    spirit the terrors of the law have entered, ever thinks of
    rectoral justice, but of absolute justice, and of absolute justice
    only.... Rectoral justice so presupposes absolute justice, and so
    throws the mind back on that absolute justice, that the idea of an
    atonement that will satisfy the one, though it might not the
    other, is a delusion.”

    N. W. Taylor’s Theology was entitled: “Moral Government,” and C.
    G. Finney’s Systematic Theology was a treatise on Moral
    Government, although it called itself by another name. But because
    New England ideas of government were not sufficiently grounded in
    God’s holiness, but were rather based upon utility, expediency, or
    happiness, the very idea of government has dropped out of the New
    School theology, and its advocates with well-nigh one accord have
    gone over to the Moral Influence theory of the atonement, which is
    only a modified Socinianism. Both the Andover atonement and that
    of Oberlin have become purely subjective. For this reason the
    Grotian or Governmental theory has lost its hold upon the
    theological world and needs to have no large amount of space
    devoted to it.


(_d_) It makes that to be an exhibition of justice which is not an
exercise of justice; the atonement being, according to this theory, not an
execution of law, but an exhibition of regard for law, which will make it
safe to pardon the violators of law. Such a merely scenic representation
can inspire respect for law, only so long as the essential unreality of it
is unsuspected.


    To teach that sin will be punished, there must be punishment.
    Potwin: “How the exhibition of what sin deserves, but does not
    get, can satisfy justice, is hard to see.” The Socinian view of
    Christ as an example of virtue is more intelligible than the
    Grotian view of Christ as an example of chastisement. Lyman
    Abbott: “If I thought that Jesus suffered and died to produce a
    moral impression on me, it would not produce a moral impression on
    me.” William Ashmore: “A stage tragedian commits a mock murder in
    order to move people to tears. If Christ was in no sense a
    substitute, or if he was not co-responsible with the sinner he
    represents, then God and Christ are participants in a real tragedy
    the most awful that ever darkened human history, simply for the
    sake of its effect on men to move their callous sensibilities—a
    stage-trick for the same effect.”

    The mother pretends to cry in order to induce her child to obey.
    But the child will obey only while it thinks the mother’s grief a
    reality, and the last state of that child is worse than the first.
    Christ’s atonement is no passion-play. Hell cannot be cured by
    homœopathy. The sacrifice of Calvary is no dramatic exhibition of
    suffering for the purpose of producing a moral impression on
    awe-stricken spectators. It is an object-lesson, only because it
    is a reality. All God’s justice and all God’s love are focused in
    the Cross, so that it teaches more of God and his truth than all
    space and time beside.

    John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 5, speaks of “mist, the common
    gloss of theologians.” Such mist is the legal fiction by which
    Christ’s suffering is taken in place of legal penalty, while yet
    it is not the legal penalty itself. B. G. Robinson: “Atonement is
    not an arbitrary contrivance, so that if one person will endure a
    certain amount of suffering, a certain number of others may go
    scot-free.” Mercy never cheats justice. Yet the New School theory
    of atonement admits that Christ cheated justice by a trick. It
    substituted the penalty of Christ for the penalty of the redeemed,
    and then substituted something else for the penalty of Christ.


(_e_) The intensity of Christ’s sufferings in the garden and on the cross
is inexplicable upon the theory that the atonement was a histrionic
exhibition of God’s regard for his government, and can be explained only
upon the view that Christ actually endured the wrath of God against human
sin.


    Christ refused the “_wine mingled with myrrh_” (_Mark 15:23_),
    that he might to the last have full possession of his powers and
    speak no words but words of truth and soberness. His cry of agony:
    “_My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?_” (_Mat. 27:46_), was
    not an ejaculation of thoughtless or delirious suffering. It
    expressed the deepest meaning of the crucifixion. The darkening of
    the heavens was only the outward symbol of the hiding of the
    countenance of God from him who was “_made to be sin on our
    behalf_” (_2 Cor. 5:21_). In the case of Christ, above that of all
    others, _finis coronat_, and dying words are undying words. “The
    tongues of dying men Enforce attention like deep harmony; When
    words are scarce they’re seldom spent in vain, For they breathe
    truth that breathe their words in pain.” _Versus_ Park,
    Discourses, 328-355.

    A pure woman needs to meet an infamous proposition with something
    more than a mild refusal. She must flame up and be angry. _Ps.
    97:10_—“_O ye that love Jehovah, hate evil_”; _Eph. 4:26_—“_Be ye
    angry, and sin not._” So it belongs to the holiness of God not to
    let sin go unchallenged. God not only _shows_ anger, but he _is_
    angry. It is the wrath of God which sin must meet, and which
    Christ must meet when he is numbered with the transgressors. Death
    was the cup of which he was to drink (_Mat. 20:22_; _John 18:11_),
    and which he drained to the dregs. Mason, Faith of the Gospel,
    196—“Jesus alone of all men truly ‘_tasted death_’ (_Heb. 2:9_).
    Some men are too stolid and unimaginative to taste it. To
    Christians the bitterness of death is gone, just because Christ
    died and rose again. But to Jesus its terrors were as yet
    undiminished. He resolutely set all his faculties to sound to the
    depths the dreadfulness of dying.”

    We therefore cannot agree with either Wendt or Johnson in the
    following quotations. Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:249, 250—“The
    forsaking of the Father was not an absolute one, since Jesus still
    called him ‘_My God_’ (_Mat. 27:46_). Jesus felt the failing of
    that energy of spirit which had hitherto upheld him, and he
    expresses simply his ardent desire and prayer that God would once
    more grant him his power and assistance.” E. H. Johnson, The Holy
    Spirit, 143, 144—“It is not even necessary to believe that God hid
    his face from Christ at the last moment. It is necessary only to
    admit that Christ no longer saw the Father’s face.... He felt that
    it was so; but it was not so.” These explanations make Christ’s
    sufferings and Christ’s words unreal, and to our mind they are
    inconsistent with both his deity and his atonement.


(_f_) The actual power of the atonement over the human conscience and
heart is due, not to its exhibiting God’s regard for law, but to its
exhibiting an actual execution of law, and an actual satisfaction of
violated holiness made by Christ in the sinner’s stead.


    Whiton, Gloria Patri, 143, 144, claims that Christ is the
    propitiation for our sins only by bringing peace to the conscience
    and satisfying the divine demand that is felt therein. Whiton
    regards the atonement not as a governmental work outside of us,
    but as an educational work within. Aside from the objection that
    this view merges God’s transcendence in his immanence, we urge the
    words of Matthew Henry: “Nothing can satisfy an offended
    conscience but that which satisfied an offended God.” C. J.
    Baldwin: “The lake spread out has no moving power; it turns the
    mill-wheel only when contracted into the narrow stream and pouring
    over the fall. So the wide love of God moves men, only when it is
    concentrated into the sacrifice of the cross.”


(_g_) The theory contradicts all those passages of Scripture which
represent the atonement as necessary; as propitiating God himself; as
being a revelation of God’s righteousness; as being an execution of the
penalty of the law; as making salvation a matter of debt to the believer,
on the ground of what Christ has done; as actually purging our sins,
instead of making that purging possible; as not simply assuring the sinner
that God may now pardon him on account of what Christ has done, but that
Christ has actually wrought out a complete salvation, and will bestow it
upon all who come to him.


    John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, chapter vi—“Upon that place stood
    a Cross, and a little below, in the bottom, a Sepulchre. So I saw
    in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the Cross, his
    burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back,
    and began to tumble, and so continued to do, till it came to the
    mouth of the Sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more.
    Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry
    heart, He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death.
    Then he stood still awhile to look and wonder; for it was very
    surprising to him that the sight of the Cross should thus ease him
    of his burden.”

    John Bunyan’s story is truer to Christian experience than is the
    Governmental theory. The sinner finds peace, not by coming to God
    with a distant respect to Christ, but by coming directly to the
    “_Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world_” (_John
    1:29_). Christ’s words to every conscious sinner are simply:
    “_Come unto me_” (_Mat. 11:28_). Upon the ground of what Christ
    has done, salvation is a matter of debt to the believer. _1 John
    1:9_—“_If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to
    forgive us our sins_”—faithful to his promise, and righteous to
    Christ. The Governmental theory, on the other hand, tends to
    discourage the sinner’s direct access to Christ, and to render the
    way to conscious acceptance with God more circuitous and less
    certain.

    When The Outlook says: “Not even to the Son of God must we come
    instead of coming to God,” we can see only plain denial of the
    validity of Christ’s demands and promises, for he demands
    immediate submission when he bids the sinner follow him, and he
    promises immediate salvation when he assures all who come to him
    that he will not cast them out. The theory of Grotius is legal and
    speculative, but it is not Scriptural, nor does it answer the
    needs of human nature. For criticism of Albert Barnes’s doctrine,
    see Watts, New Apologetic, 210-300. For criticism of the Grotian
    theory in general, see Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:347-369; Crawford,
    Atonement, 367; Cunningham, Hist. Theology, 2:355; Princeton
    Essays, 1:259-292; Essay on Atonement, by Abp. Thomson, in Aids to
    Faith; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 194-196; S. H. Tyng,
    Christian Pastor; Charles Hodge, Essays, 129-184; Lidgett, Spir.
    Prin. of Atonement, 151-154.


4th. The Irvingian Theory, or Theory of Gradually Extirpated Depravity.


This holds that, in his incarnation, Christ took human nature as it was in
Adam, not before the Fall, but after the Fall,—human nature, therefore,
with its inborn corruption and predisposition to moral evil; that,
notwithstanding the possession of this tainted and depraved nature,
Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, or of his divine nature, not
only kept his human nature from manifesting itself in any actual or
personal sin, but gradually purified it, through struggle and suffering,
until in his death he completely extirpated its original depravity, and
reunited it to God. This subjective purification of human nature in the
person of Jesus Christ constitutes his atonement, and men are saved, not
by any objective propitiation, but only by becoming through faith
partakers of Christ’s new humanity. This theory was elaborated by Edward
Irving, of London (1792-1834), and it has been held, in substance, by
Menken and Dippel in Germany.


    Irving was in this preceded by Felix of Urgella, in Spain († 818),
    whom Alcuin opposed. Felix said that the Logos united with human
    nature, without sanctifying it beforehand. Edward Irving, in his
    early life colleague of Dr. Chalmers, at Glasgow, was in his later
    years a preacher, in London, of the National Church of Scotland.
    For his own statement of his view of the Atonement, see his
    Collected Works, 5:9-398. See also Life of Irving, by Mrs.
    Oliphant; Menken, Schriften, 3:279-404; 6:351 _sq._; Guericke, in
    Studien und Kritiken, 1843: Heft 2; David Brown, in Expositor,
    Oct. 1887:264 _sq._, and letter of Irving to Marcus Dods, in
    British Weekly, Mch. 25, 1887. For other references, see
    Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:496-498.

    Irving’s followers differ in their representation of his views.
    Says Miller, Hist. and Doct. of Irvingism, 1:85—“If indeed we made
    Christ a sinner, then indeed all creeds are at an end and we are
    worthy to die the death of blasphemers.... The miraculous
    conception depriveth him of human personality, and it also
    depriveth him of original sin and guilt needing to be atoned for
    by another, but it doth not deprive him of the substance of sinful
    flesh and blood,—that is, flesh and blood the same with the flesh
    and blood of his brethren.” 2:14—Freer says: “So that, despite it
    was fallen flesh he had assumed, he was, through the Eternal
    Spirit, born into the world ‘the Holy Thing’.” 11-15,
    282-305—“Unfallen humanity needed not redemption, therefore, Jesus
    did not take it. He took fallen humanity, but purged it in the act
    of taking it. The nature of which he took part was sinful in the
    lump, but in his person most holy.”

    So, says an Irvingian tract, “Being part of the very nature that
    had incurred the penalty of sin, though in his person never having
    committed or even thought it, part of the common humanity could
    suffer that penalty, and did so suffer, to make atonement for that
    nature, though he who took it knew no sin.” Dr. Curry, quoted in
    McClintock and Strong, Encyclopædia, 4:663, 664—“The Godhead came
    into vital union with humanity fallen and under the law. The last
    thought carried, to Irving’s realistic mode of thinking, the
    notion of Christ’s participation in the fallen character of
    humanity, which he designated by terms that implied a real
    sinfulness in Christ. He attempted to get rid of the odiousness of
    that idea, by saying that this was overborne, and at length wholly
    expelled, by the indwelling Godhead.”

    We must regard the later expounders of Irvingian doctrine as
    having softened down, if they have not wholly expunged, its most
    characteristic feature, as the following notation from Irving’s
    own words will show: Works, 5:115—“That Christ took our fallen
    nature, is most manifest, because there was no other in existence
    to take.” 123—“The human nature is thoroughly fallen; the mere
    apprehension of it by the Son doth not make it holy.” 128—“His
    soul did mourn and grieve and pray to God continually, that it
    might be delivered from the mortality, corruption, and temptation
    which it felt in its fleshly tabernacle.” 152—“These sufferings
    came not by imputation merely, but by actual participation of the
    sinful and cursed thing.” Irving frequently quoted _Heb.
    2:10_—“_make the author of their salvation perfect through
    sufferings._”

    Irving’s followers deny Christ’s sinfulness, only by assuming that
    inborn infirmity and congenital tendencies to evil are not sin,—in
    other words, that not native depravity, but only actual
    transgression, is to be denominated sin. Irving, in our judgment,
    was rightly charged with asserting the sinfulness of Christ’s
    human nature, and it was upon this charge that he was deposed from
    the ministry by the Presbytery in Scotland.

    Irving was of commanding stature, powerful voice, natural and
    graceful oratory. He loved the antique and the grand. For a time
    in London he was the great popular sensation. But shortly after
    the opening of his new church in Regent’s Square in 1827, he found
    that fashion had taken its departure and that his church was no
    longer crowded. He concluded that the world was under the reign of
    Satan; he became a fanatical millennarian; he gave himself wholly
    to the study of prophecy. In 1830 he thought the apostolic gifts
    were revived, and he held to the hope of a restoration of the
    primitive church, although he himself was relegated to a
    comparatively subordinate position. He exhausted his energies, and
    died at the age of forty-two. “If I had married Irving,” said Mrs.
    Thomas Carlyle, “there would have been no tongues.”


To this theory we offer the following objections:

(_a_) While it embraces an important element of truth, namely, the fact of
a new humanity in Christ of which all believers become partakers, it is
chargeable with serious error in denying the objective atonement which
makes the subjective application possible.


    Bruce, in his Humiliation of Christ, calls this a theory of
    “redemption by sample.” It is a purely subjective atonement which
    Irving has in mind. Deliverance from sin, in order to deliverance
    from penalty, is an exact reversal of the Scripture order. Yet
    this deliverance from sin, to Irving’s view, was to be secured in
    an external and mechanical way. He held that it was the Old
    Testament economy which should abide, while the New Testament
    economy should pass away. This is Sacramentarianism, or dependence
    upon the external rite, rather than upon the internal grace, as
    essential to salvation. The followers of Irving are
    Sacramentarians. The crucifix and candles, incense and gorgeous
    vestments, a highly complicated and symbolic ritual, they regard
    as a necessary accompaniment of religion. They feel the need of
    external authority, visible and permanent, but one that rests upon
    inspiration and continual supernatural help. They do not find this
    authority, as the Romanists do, in the Pope,—they find it in their
    new Apostles and Prophets. The church can never be renewed, as
    they think, except by the restoration of all the ministering
    orders mentioned in _Eph. 4:11_—“_apostles ... prophets ...
    evangelists ... pastors ... teachers._” But the N. T. mark of an
    apostle is that Christ has appeared to him. Irving’s apostles
    cannot stand this test. See Luthardt, Erinnerungen aus vergangenen
    Tagen, 237.


(_b_) It rests upon false fundamental principles,—as, that law is
identical with the natural order of the universe, and as such, is an
exhaustive expression of the will and nature of God; that sin is merely a
power of moral evil within the soul, instead of also involving an
objective guilt and desert of punishment; that penalty is the mere
reaction of law against the transgressor, instead of being also the
revelation of a personal wrath against sin; that the evil taint of human
nature can be extirpated by suffering its natural consequences,—penalty in
this way reforming the transgressor.


    Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:463 (Syst. Doct., 3:361, 362)—“On
    Irving’s theory, evil inclinations are not sinful. Sinfulness
    belongs only to evil acts. The loose connection between the Logos
    and humanity savors of Nestorianism. It is the work of the
    _person_ to rid itself of something in the humanity which does not
    render it really sinful. If Jesus’ sinfulness of nature did not
    render his person sinful, this must be true of us,—which is a
    Pelagian element, revealed also in the denial that for our
    redemption we need Christ as an atoning sacrifice. It is not
    necessary to a complete incarnation for Christ to take a _sinful_
    nature, unless sin is _essential_ to human nature. In Irving’s
    view, the death of Christ’s body works the regeneration of his
    sinful nature. But this is to make sin a merely physical thing,
    and the body the only part of man needing redemption.” Penalty
    would thus become a reformer, and death a Savior.

    Irving held that there are two kinds of sin: 1. guiltless sin; 2.
    guilty sin. Passive depravity is not guilty; it is a part of man’s
    sensual nature; without it we would not be human. But the moment
    this fallen nature expresses itself in action, it becomes guilty.
    Irving near the close of his life claimed a sort of sinless
    perfection; for so long as he could keep this sinful nature
    inactive, and be guided by the Holy Spirit, he was free from sin
    and guilt. Christ took this passive sin, that he might be like
    unto his brethren, and that he might be able to suffer.


(_c_) It contradicts the express and implicit representations of
Scripture, with regard to Christ’s freedom from all taint of hereditary
depravity; misrepresents his life as a growing consciousness of the
underlying corruption of his human nature, which culminated at Gethsemane
and Calvary; and denies the truth of his own statements, when it declares
that he must have died on account of his own depravity, even though none
were to be saved thereby.


    “I shall maintain until death,” said Irving, “that the flesh of
    Christ was as rebellious as ours, as fallen as ours.... Human
    nature was corrupt to the core and black as hell, and this is the
    human nature the Son of God took upon himself and was clothed
    with.” The Rescuer must stand as deep in the mire as the one he
    rescues. There was no substitution. Christ waged war with the sin
    of his own flesh and he expelled it. His glory was not in saving
    others, but in saving himself, and so demonstrating the power of
    man through the Holy Spirit to cast out sin from his heart and
    life. Irving held that his theory was the only one taught in
    Scripture and held from the first by the church.

    Nicoll, Life of Christ, 183—“All others, as they grow in holiness,
    grow in their sense of sin. But when Christ is forsaken of the
    Father, he asks ‘Why?’ well knowing that the reason is not in his
    sin. He never makes confession of sin. In his longest prayer, the
    preface is an assertion of righteousness: ‘_I glorified thee_’
    (_John 17:4_). His last utterance from the cross is a quotation
    from _Ps. 31:5_—‘_Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit_’
    (_Luke 23:46_), but he does not add, as the Psalm does, ‘_thou
    hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth_,’ for he needed no
    redemption, being himself the Redeemer.”


(_d_) It makes the active obedience of Christ, and the subjective
purification of his human nature, to be the chief features of his work,
while the Scriptures make his death and passive bearing of penalty the
centre of all, and ever regard him as one who is personally pure and who
vicariously bears the punishment of the guilty.


    In Irving’s theory there is no imputation, or representation, or
    substitution. His only idea of sacrifice is that sin itself shall
    be sacrificed, or annihilated. The many subjective theories of the
    atonement show that the offence of the cross has not ceased (_Gal.
    5:11_—“_then hath the stumbling-block of the cross been done
    away_”). Christ crucified is still a stumbling-block to modern
    speculation. Yet it is, as of old, “_the power of God unto
    salvation_” (_Rom. 1:16_; _cf._ _1 Cor. 1:23, 24_—“_we preach
    Christ crucified, unto Jews a stumbling-block and unto Gentiles
    foolishness; but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks,
    Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God_”).

    As the ocean receives the impurities of the rivers and purges
    them, so Irving represented Christ as receiving into himself the
    impurities of humanity and purging the race from its sin. Here is
    the sense of defilement, but no sense of guilt; subjective
    pollution, but no objective condemnation. We take precisely
    opposite ground from that of Irving, namely, that Christ had, not
    hereditary depravity, but hereditary guilt; that he was under
    obligation to suffer for the sins of the race to which he had
    historically united himself, and of which he was the creator, the
    upholder, and the life. He was “_made to be sin on our behalf_”
    (_2 Cor. 5:21_), not in the sense of one defiled, as Irving
    thought, but in the sense of one condemned to bear our iniquities
    and to suffer their penal consequences. The test of a theory of
    the atonement, as the test of a religion, is its power to “cleanse
    that red right hand” of Lady Macbeth; in other words, its power to
    satisfy the divine justice of which our condemning conscience is
    only the reflection. The theory of Irving has no such power. Dr.
    E. G. Robinson verged toward Irving’s view, when he claimed that
    “Christ took human nature as he found it.”


(_e_) It necessitates the surrender of the doctrine of justification as a
merely declaratory act of God; and requires such a view of the divine
holiness, expressed only through the order of nature, as can be maintained
only upon principles of pantheism.


    Thomas Aquinas inquired whether Christ was slain by himself, or by
    another. The question suggests a larger one—whether God has
    constituted other forces than his own, personal and impersonal, in
    the universe, over against which he stands in his transcendence;
    or whether all his activity is merged in, and identical with, the
    activity of the creature. The theory of a merely subjective
    atonement is more consistent with the latter view than the former.
    For criticism of Irvingian doctrine, see Studien und Kritiken.
    1845:319; 1877:354-374; Princeton Rev., April 1863:207; Christian
    Rev., 28:234 sq.; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 219-232.


5th. The Anselmic, or Commercial Theory of the Atonement.


This theory holds that sin is a violation of the divine honor or majesty,
and, as committed against an infinite being, deserves an infinite
punishment; that the majesty of God requires him to execute punishment,
while the love of God pleads for the sparing of the guilty; that this
conflict of divine attributes is eternally reconciled by the voluntary
sacrifice of the God-man, who bears in virtue of the dignity of his person
the intensively infinite punishment of sin, which must otherwise have been
suffered extensively and eternally by sinners; that this suffering of the
God-man presents to the divine majesty an exact equivalent for the
deserved sufferings of the elect; and that, as the result of this
satisfaction of the divine claims, the elect sinners are pardoned and
regenerated. This view was first broached by Anselm of Canterbury
(1033-1109) as a substitute for the earlier patristic view that Christ’s
death was a ransom paid to Satan, to deliver sinners from his power. It is
held by many Scotch theologians, and, in this country, by the Princeton
School.


    The old patristic theory, which the Anselmic view superseded, has
    been called the Military theory of the Atonement. Satan, as a
    captor in war, had a right to his captives, which could be bought
    off only by ransom. It was Justin Martyr who first propounded this
    view that Christ paid a ransom to Satan. Gregory of Nyssa added
    that Christ’s humanity was the bait with which Satan was attracted
    to the hidden hook of Christ’s deity, and so was caught by
    artifice. Peter Lombard, Sent., 3:19—“What did the Redeemer to our
    captor? He held out to him his cross as a mouse-trap; in it he
    set, as a bait, his blood.” Even Luther compares Satan to the
    crocodile which swallows the ichneumon, only to find that the
    little animal eats its insides out.

    These metaphors show this, at least, that no age of the church has
    believed in a merely subjective atonement. Nor was this relation
    to Satan the only aspect in which the atonement was regarded even
    by the early church. So early as the fourth century, we find a
    great church Father maintaining that the death of Christ was
    required by the truth and goodness of God. See Crippen, History of
    Christian Doctrine, 129—“Athanasius (325-373) held that the death
    of Christ was the payment of a debt due to God. His argument is
    briefly this: God, having threatened death as the punishment of
    sin, would be untrue if he did not fulfil his threatening. But it
    would be equally unworthy of the divine goodness to permit
    rational beings, to whom he had imparted his own Spirit, to incur
    this death in consequence of an imposition practiced on them by
    the devil. Seeing then that nothing but death could solve this
    dilemma, the Word, who could not die, assumed a mortal body, and,
    offering his human nature a sacrifice for all, fulfilled the law
    by his death.” Gregory Nazianzen (390) “retained the figure of a
    ransom, but, clearly perceiving that the analogy was incomplete,
    he explained the death of Christ as an expedient to reconcile the
    divine attributes.”

    But, although many theologians had recognized a relation of
    atonement to God, none before Anselm had given any clear account
    of the nature of this relation. Anselm’s acute, brief, and
    beautiful treatise entitled “Cur Deus Homo” constitutes the
    greatest single contribution to the discussion of this doctrine.
    He shows that “whatever man owes, he owes to God, not to the
    devil.... He who does not yield due honor to God, withholds from
    him what is his, and dishonors him; and this is sin.... It is
    necessary that either the stolen honor be restored, or that
    punishment follow.” Man, because of original sin, cannot make
    satisfaction for the dishonor done to God,—“a sinner cannot
    justify a sinner.” Neither could an angel make this satisfaction.
    None can make it but God. “If then none can make it but God, and
    none owes it but man, it must needs be wrought out by God, made
    man.” The God-man, to make satisfaction for the sins of all
    mankind, must “give to God, of his own, something that is more
    valuable than all that is under God.” Such a gift of infinite
    value was his death. The reward of his sacrifice turns to the
    advantage of man, and thus the justice and love of God are
    reconciled.

    The foregoing synopsis is mainly taken from Crippen, Hist. Christ.
    Doct., 134, 135. The Cur Deus Homo of Anselm is translated in Bib.
    Sac., 11:729; 12:52. A synopsis of it is given in Lichtenberger’s
    Encyclopédie des Sciences Religieuses, vol. 1, art.: Anselm. The
    treatises on the Atonement by Symington, Candlish, Martin,
    Smeaton, in Great Britain, advocate for substance the view of
    Anselm, as indeed it was held by Calvin before them. In America,
    the theory is represented by Nathanael Emmons, A. Alexander, and
    Charles Hodge (Syst. Theol., 2:470-540).


To this theory we make the following objections:

(_a_) While it contains a valuable element of truth, in its representation
of the atonement as satisfying a principle of the divine nature, it
conceives of this principle in too formal and external a manner,—making
the idea of the divine honor or majesty more prominent than that of the
divine holiness, in which the divine honor and majesty are grounded.


    The theory has been called the “Criminal theory” of the Atonement,
    as the old patristic theory of a ransom paid to Satan has been
    called the “Military theory.” It had its origin in a time when
    exaggerated ideas prevailed respecting the authority of popes and
    emperors, and when dishonor done to their majesty (_crimen læsæ
    majestatis_) was the highest offence known to law. See article by
    Cramer, in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:7, on Wurzeln des
    Anselm’schen Satisfactionsbegriffes.

    Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 88, 89—“From the point of view of
    Sovereignty, there could be no necessity for atonement. In
    Mohammedanism, where sovereignty is the supreme and sole
    theological principle, no need is felt for satisfying the divine
    justice. God may pardon whom he will, on whatever grounds his
    sovereign will may dictate. It therefore constituted a great
    advance in Latin theology, as also an evidence of its immeasurable
    superiority to Mohammedanism, when Anselm for the first time, in a
    clear and emphatic manner, had asserted an inward necessity in the
    being of God that his justice should receive satisfaction for the
    affront which had been offered to it by human sinfulness.”

    Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 481—“In the days of feudalism,
    men thought of heaven as organized on a feudal basis, and ranked
    the first and second Persons of the Trinity as Suzerain and
    Tenant-in-Chief.” William James, Varieties of Religious
    Experience, 329, 830—“The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for
    example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our forefathers,
    that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their Deity seems
    positively to have been required by their imagination. They called
    the cruelty ‘retributive justice,’ and a God without it would
    certainly not have struck them as sovereign enough. But to-day we
    abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that
    arbitrary dealing out of salvation and damnation to selected
    individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that
    he had not only a conviction, but a ‘delightful conviction,’ as of
    a doctrine ‘exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,’ appears to us,
    if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean.”


(_b_) In its eagerness to maintain the atoning efficacy of Christ’s
passive obedience, the active obedience, quite as clearly expressed in
Scripture, is insufficiently emphasized and well nigh lost sight of.


    Neither Christ’s active obedience alone, nor Christ’s obedient
    passion alone, can save us. As we shall see hereafter, in our
    examination of the doctrine of Justification, the latter was
    needed as the ground upon which our penalty could be remitted; the
    former as the ground upon which we might be admitted to the divine
    favor. Calvin has reflected the passive element in Anselm’s view,
    in the following passages of his Institutes: II, 17:3—“God, to
    whom we were hateful through sin, was appeased by the death of his
    Son, and was made propitious to us.”... II, 16:7—“It is necessary
    to consider how he substituted himself in order to pay the price
    of our redemption. Death held us under its yoke, but he, in our
    place, delivered himself into its power, that he might exempt us
    from it.”... II, 16:2—“Christ interposed and bore what, by the
    just judgment of God, was impending over sinners; with his own
    blood expiated the sin which rendered them hateful to God; by this
    expiation satisfied and duly propitiated the Father; by this
    intercession appeased his anger; on this basis founded peace
    between God and men; and by this tie secured the divine
    benevolence toward them.”

    It has been said that Anselm regarded Christ’s death not as a
    vicarious punishment, but as a voluntary sacrifice in compensation
    for which the guilty were released and justified. So Neander,
    Hist. Christ. Dogmas (Bohn), 2:517, understands Anselm to teach
    “the necessity of a satisfactio vicaria activa,” and says: “We do
    not find in his writings the doctrine of a satisfactio passiva: he
    nowhere says that Christ had endured the punishment of men.”
    Shedd, Hist. Christ. Doctrine, 2:282, thinks this a
    misunderstanding of Anselm. The Encyclopædia Britannica takes the
    view of Shedd, when it speaks of Christ’s sufferings as penalty:
    “The justice of man demands satisfaction; and as an insult to
    infinite honor is itself infinite, the satisfaction must be
    infinite, _i. e._, it must outweigh all that is not God. Such a
    penalty can only be paid by God himself, and, as a penalty for
    man, must be paid under the form of man. Satisfaction is only
    possible through the God-man. Now this God-man, as sinless, is
    exempt from the punishment of sin; his passion is therefore
    voluntary, not given as due. The merit of it is therefore
    infinite; God’s justice is thus appeased, and his mercy may extend
    to man.” The truth then appears to be that Anselm held Christ’s
    obedience to be passive, in that he satisfied God’s justice by
    enduring punishment which the sinner deserved; but that he held
    this same obedience of Christ to be active, in that he endured
    this penalty voluntarily, when there was no obligation upon him so
    to do.

    Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:431, 461, 462—“Christ not only
    suffered the penalty, but obeyed the precept, of the law. In this
    case law and justice get their whole dues. But when lost man only
    suffers the penalty, but does not obey the precept, the law is
    defrauded of a part of its dues. No law is completely obeyed, if
    only its penalty is endured.... Consequently, a sinner can never
    completely and exhaustively satisfy the divine law, however much
    or long he may suffer, because he cannot at one and the same time
    endure the penalty and obey the precept. He owes ‘_ten thousand
    talents_’ and has ‘_not wherewith to pay_’ (_Mat. 18:24, 25_), But
    Christ did both, and therefore he ‘_magnified the law and made it
    honorable_’ (_Is. 42:21_), in an infinitely higher degree than the
    whole human family would have done, had they all personally
    suffered for their sins.” _Cf._ Edwards, Works, 1:406.


(_c_) It allows disproportionate weight to those passages of Scripture
which represent the atonement under commercial analogies, as the payment
of a debt or ransom, to the exclusion of those which describe it as an
ethical fact, whose value is to be estimated not quantitatively, but
qualitatively.


    Milton, Paradise Lost, 3:209-212—“Die he, or justice must, unless
    for him Some other, able and as willing, pay The rigid
    satisfaction, death for death.” The main text relied upon by the
    advocates of the Commercial theory is _Mat. 20:28_—“_give his life
    a ransom for many._” Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion,
    1:257—“The work of Christ, as Anselm construed it, was in fact
    nothing else than the prototype of the meritorious performances
    and satisfactions of the ecclesiastical saints, and was therefore,
    from the point of view of the mediæval church, thought out quite
    logically. All the more remarkable is it that the churches of the
    Reformation could be satisfied with this theory, notwithstanding
    that it stood in complete contradiction to their deeper moral
    consciousness. If, according to Protestant principles generally,
    there are no supererogatory meritorious works, then one would
    suppose that such cannot be accepted even in the case of Jesus.”

    E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 258—“The Anselmic theory was
    rejected by Abelard for grounding the atonement in justice instead
    of benevolence, and for taking insufficient account of the power
    of Christ’s sufferings and death in procuring a subjective change
    in man.” Encyc. Brit., 2:93 (art.: Anselm)—“This theory has
    exercised immense influence on the form of church doctrine. It is
    certainly an advance on the older patristic theory, in so far as
    it substitutes for a contest between God and Satan, a contest
    between the goodness and justice of God; but it puts the whole
    relation on a merely legal footing, gives it no ethical bearing,
    and neglects altogether the consciousness of the individual to be
    redeemed. In this respect it contrasts unfavorably with the later
    theory of Abelard.”


(_d_) It represents the atonement as having reference only to the elect,
and ignores the Scripture declarations that Christ died for all.


    Anselm, like Augustine, limited the atonement to the elect. Yet
    Leo the Great, in 461, had affirmed that “so precious is the
    shedding of Christ’s blood for the unjust, that if the whole
    universe of captives would believe in the Redeemer, no chain of
    the devil could hold them” (Crippen, 132). Bishop Gailor, of the
    Episcopal Church, heard General Booth at Memphis say in 1903:
    “Friends, Jesus shed his blood to pay the price, and he bought
    from God enough salvation to go round.” The Bishop says: “I felt
    that his view of salvation was different from mine. Yet such
    teaching, partial as it is, lifts men by the thousand from the
    mire and vice of sin into the power and purity of a new life in
    Jesus Christ.”

    Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 221—“Anselm does not clearly
    connect the death of Christ with the punishment of sin, since he
    makes it a supererogatory work voluntarily done, in consequence of
    which it is ‘fitting’ that forgiveness should be bestowed on
    sinners.... Yet his theory served to hand down to later
    theologians the great idea of the objective atonement.”


(_e_) It is defective in holding to a merely external transfer of the
merit of Christ’s work, while it does not clearly state the internal
ground of that transfer, in the union of the believer with Christ.


    This needed supplement, namely, the doctrine of the Union of the
    Believer with Christ, was furnished by Thomas Aquinas, Summa, pars
    3, quæs. 8. The Anselmic theory is Romanist in its tendency, as
    the theory next to be mentioned is Protestant in its tendency. P.
    S. Moxom asserts that salvation is not by substitution, but by
    incorporation. We prefer to say that salvation is by substitution,
    but that the substitution is by incorporation. Incorporation
    involves substitution, and another’s pain inures to my account.
    Christ being incorporate with humanity, all the exposures and
    liabilities of humanity fell upon him. Simon, Reconciliation by
    Incarnation, is an attempt to unite the two elements of the
    doctrine.

    Lidgett, Spir. Prin. of Atonement, 182-189—“As Anselm represents
    it, Christ’s death is not ours in any such sense that we can enter
    into it. Bushnell justly charges that it leaves no moral dynamic
    in the Cross.” For criticism of Anselm, see John Caird, Fund.
    Ideas of Christianity, 2:172-193: Thomasius, Christi Person und
    Werk, III, 2:230-241; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:70 sq.; Baur,
    Dogmengeschichte, 2:416 _sq._; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 2:273-286;
    Dale, Atonement, 279-292; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture,
    196-199; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 176-178.


6th. The Ethical Theory of the Atonement.


In propounding what we conceive to be the true theory of the atonement, it
seems desirable to divide our treatment into two parts. No theory can be
satisfactory which does not furnish a solution of the two problems: 1.
What did the atonement accomplish? or, in other words, what was the object
of Christ’s death? The answer to this question must be a description of
the atonement in its relation to holiness in God. 2. What were the means
used? or, in other words, how could Christ justly die? The answer to this
question must be a description of the atonement as arising from Christ’s
relation to humanity. We take up these two parts of the subject in order.


    Edwards, Works, 1:609, says that two things make Christ’s
    sufferings a satisfaction for human guilt: (1) their equality or
    equivalence to the punishment that the sinner deserves; (2) the
    union between him and them, or the propriety of his being
    accepted, in suffering, as the representative of the sinner.
    Christ bore God’s wrath: (1) by the sight of sin and punishment;
    (2) by enduring the effects of wrath ordered by God. See also
    Edwards, Sermon on the Satisfaction of Christ. These statements of
    Edwards suggest the two points of view from which we regard the
    atonement; but they come short of the Scriptural declarations, in
    that they do not distinctly assert Christ’s endurance of penalty
    itself. Thus they leave the way open for the New School theories
    of the atonement, propounded by the successors of Edwards.

    Adolphe Monod said well: “Save first the holy law of my God,—after
    that you shall save me.” Edwards felt the first of these needs,
    for he says, in his Mysteries of Scripture, Works, 3:542—“The
    necessity of Christ’s satisfaction to divine justice is, as it
    were, the centre and hinge of all doctrines of pure revelation.
    Other doctrines are comparatively of little importance, except as
    they have respect to this.” And in his Work of Redemption, Works,
    1:412—“Christ was born to the end that he might die; and therefore
    he did, as it were, begin to die as soon as he was born.” See
    _John 12:32_—“_And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw
    all men unto myself. But this he said, signifying by what manner
    of death he should die._” Christ was “_lifted up_”: 1. as a
    propitiation to the holiness of God, which makes suffering to
    follow sin, so affording the only ground for pardon without and
    peace within; 2. as a power to purify the hearts and lives of men,
    Jesus being as “_the serpent lifted up in the wilderness_” (_John
    3:14_), and we overcoming “_because of the blood of the Lamb_”
    (_Rev. 12:11_).


_First_,—the Atonement as related to Holiness in God.

The Ethical theory holds that the necessity of the atonement is grounded
in the holiness of God, of which conscience in man is a finite reflection.
There is an ethical principle in the divine nature, which demands that sin
shall be punished. Aside from its results, sin is essentially
ill-deserving. As we who are made in God’s image mark our growth in purity
by the increasing quickness with which we detect impurity, and the
increasing hatred which we feel toward it, so infinite purity is a
consuming fire to all iniquity. As there is an ethical demand in our
natures that not only others’ wickedness, but our own wickedness, be
visited with punishment, and a keen conscience cannot rest till it has
made satisfaction to justice for its misdeeds, so there is an ethical
demand of God’s nature that penalty follow sin.


    The holiness of God has conscience and penalty for its correlates
    and consequences. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 216—“In old Athens,
    the rock on whose top sat the Court of the Areopagus, representing
    the highest reason and the best character of the Athenian state,
    had underneath it the Cave of the Furies.” Shakespeare knew human
    nature and he bears witness to its need of atonement. In his last
    Will and Testament he writes: “First, I commend my soul into the
    hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through
    the only merits of Jesus Christ my Savior, to be made partaker of
    life everlasting.” Richard III, 1:4—“I charge you, as you hope to
    have redemption By Christ’s dear blood shed for our grievous sins,
    That you depart and lay no hands on me.” Richard II, 4:1—“The
    world’s Ransom, blessed Mary’s Son.” Henry VI, 2d part, 3:2—“That
    dread King took our state upon him, To free us from his Father’s
    wrathful curse.” Henry IV, 1st part, 1:1—“Those holy fields, Over
    whose acres walked those blessed feet, Which fourteen hundred
    years ago were nailed For our advantage on the bitter Cross.”
    Measure for Measure, 2:2—“Why, all the souls that are were forfeit
    once; And he that might the vantage best have took Found out the
    remedy.” Henry VI, 2d part, 1:1—“Now, by the death of him that
    died for all!” All’s Well that Ends Well, 3:4—“What angel shall
    Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive Unless her prayers,
    whom heaven delights to hear And loves to grant, reprieve him from
    the wrath Of greatest justice.” See a good statement of the
    Ethical theory of the Atonement in its relation to God’s holiness,
    in Denney, Studies in Theology, 100-124.


Punishment is the constitutional reaction of God’s being against moral
evil—the self-assertion of infinite holiness against its antagonist and
would-be destroyer. In God this demand is devoid of all passion, and is
consistent with infinite benevolence. It is a demand that cannot be
evaded, since the holiness from which it springs is unchanging. The
atonement is therefore a satisfaction of the ethical demand of the divine
nature, by the substitution of Christ’s penal sufferings for the
punishment of the guilty.


    John Wessel, a Reformer before the Reformation (1419-1489): “Ipse
    deus, ipse sacerdos, ipse hostia, pro se, de se, sibi
    satisfecit”—“Himself being at the same time God, priest, and
    sacrificial victim, he made satisfaction to himself, for himself
    [_i. e._, for the sins of men to whom he had united himself], and
    by himself [by his own sinless sufferings].” Quarles’s Emblems: “O
    groundless deeps! O love beyond degree! The Offended dies, to set
    the offender free!”

    Spurgeon, Autobiography, 1:98—“When I was in the hand of the Holy
    Spirit, under conviction of sin, I had a clear and sharp sense of
    the justice of God. Sin, whatever it might be to other people,
    became to me an intolerable burden. It was not so much that I
    feared hell, as that I feared sin; and all the while I had upon my
    mind a deep concern for the honor of God’s name and the integrity
    of his moral government. I felt that it would not satisfy my
    conscience if I could be forgiven unjustly. But then there came
    the question: ‘How could God be just, and yet justify me who had
    been so guilty?’... The doctrine of the atonement is to my mind
    one of the surest proofs of the inspiration of Holy Scripture. Who
    would or could have thought of the just Ruler dying for the unjust
    rebel?”


This substitution is unknown to mere law, and above and beyond the powers
of law. It is an operation of grace. Grace, however, does not violate or
suspend law, but takes it up into itself and fulfils it. The righteousness
of law is maintained, in that the source of all law, the judge and
punisher, himself voluntarily submits to bear the penalty, and bears it in
the human nature that has sinned.


    Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 221—“In conscience, man condemns
    and is condemned. Christ was God in the flesh, both priest and
    sacrificial victim (_Heb. 9:12_). He is ‘_full of
    grace_’—forgiving grace—but he is ‘_full of truth_’ also, and so
    ‘_the only-begotten from the Father_’ (_John 1:14_). Not
    forgiveness that ignores sin, not justice that has no mercy. He
    forgave the sinner, because he bore the sin.” Kaftan, referring to
    some modern theologians who have returned to the old doctrine but
    who have said that the basis of the atonement is, not the
    juridical idea of punishment, but the ethical idea of
    propitiation, affirms as follows: “On the contrary the highest
    ethical idea of propitiation is just that of punishment. Take this
    away, and propitiation becomes nothing but the inferior and
    unworthy idea of appeasing the wrath of an incensed deity.
    Precisely the idea of the vicarious suffering of punishment is the
    idea which must in some way be brought to a full expression for
    the sake of the ethical consciousness.

    “The conscience awakened by God can accept no forgiveness which is
    not experienced as at the same time a condemnation of sin....
    Jesus, though he was without sin and deserved no punishment, took
    upon himself all the evils which have come into the world as the
    consequence and punishment of sin, even to the shameful death on
    the Cross at the hand of sinners.... Consequently for the good of
    man he bore all that which man had deserved, and thereby has man
    escaped the final eternal punishment and has become a child of
    God.... This is not merely a subjective conclusion upon the
    related facts, but it is as objective and real as anything which
    faith recognizes and knows.”


Thus the atonement answers the ethical demand of the divine nature that
sin be punished if the offender is to go free. The interests of the divine
government are secured as a first subordinate result of this satisfaction
to God himself, of whose nature the government is an expression; while, as
a second subordinate result, provision is made for the needs of human
nature,—on the one hand the need of an objective satisfaction to its
ethical demand of punishment for sin, and on the other the need of a
manifestation of divine love and mercy that will affect the heart and move
it to repentance.


    The great classical passage with reference to the atonement is
    _Rom. 3:25, 26_—“_whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through
    faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the
    passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of
    God; for the showing, I say, of his righteousness at this present
    season: that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him
    that hath faith is Jesus._” Or, somewhat more freely translated,
    the passage would read:—“_whom God hath set forth in his blood as
    a propitiatory sacrifice, through faith, to show forth his
    righteousness on account of the pretermission of past offenses in
    the forbearance of God; to declare his righteousness in the time
    now present, so that he may be just and yet may justify him who
    believeth in Jesus_.”

    EXPOSITION OF ROM. 3:25, 26.—These verses are an expanded
    statement of the subject of the epistle—the revelation of the
    “_righteousness of God_” (= the righteousness which God provides
    and which God accepts)—which had been mentioned in _1:17_, but
    which now has new light thrown upon it by the demonstration, in
    _1:18-3:20_, that both Gentiles and Jews are under condemnation,
    and are alike shut up for salvation to some other method than that
    of works. We subjoin the substance of Meyer’s comments upon this
    passage.

    “_Verse 25._ ‘_God has set forth Christ as an effectual
    propitiatory offering, through faith, by means of his blood_,’ _i.
    e._, in that he caused him to shed his blood. ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι
    belongs to προέθετο, not to πίστεως. The purpose of this setting
    forth in his blood is εἰς ἔνδειξιν τῆς δικαιοσύνης αὐτοῦ, ‘_for
    the display of his_ [judicial and punitive] _righteousness_,’
    which received its satisfaction in the death of Christ as a
    propitiatory offering, and was thereby practically demonstrated
    and exhibited. ‘_On account of the passing-by of sins that had
    previously taken place_,’ _i. e._, because he had allowed the
    pre-Christian sins to go without punishment, whereby his
    righteousness had been lost sight of and obscured, and had come to
    need an ἔνδειξις, or exhibition to men. Omittance is not
    acquittance. πάρεσις, passing-by, is intermediate between pardon
    and punishment. ‘_In virtue of the forbearance of God_’ expresses
    the motive of the πάρεσις. Before Christ’s sacrifice, God’s
    administration was a scandal,—it needed vindication. The atonement
    is God’s answer to the charge of freeing the guilty.

    “_Verse 26._ εἰς τὸ εἶναι is not epexegetical of εἰς ἔνδειξιν, but
    presents the teleology of the ἱλαστήριον, the final aim of the
    whole affirmation from ὂν προέθετο to καιρῷ—namely, first, God’s
    _being just_, and secondly, his _appearing just_ in consequence of
    this. _Justus et justificans_, instead of _justus et condemnans_,
    this is the _summum paradoxon evangelicum_. Of this revelation of
    righteousness, not through condemnation, but through atonement,
    grace is the determining ground.”

    We repeat what was said on pages 719, 720, with regard to the
    teaching of the passage, namely, that it shows: (1) that Christ’s
    death is a propitiatory sacrifice; (2) that its first and main
    effect is upon God; (3) that the particular attribute in God which
    demands the atonement in his justice, or holiness; (4) that the
    satisfaction of this holiness is the necessary condition of God’s
    justifying the believer. It is only incidentally and subordinately
    that the atonement is a necessity to man; Paul speaks of it here
    mainly as a necessity to God. Christ suffers, indeed, that God may
    _appear_ righteous; but behind the appearance lies the reality;
    the main object of Christ’s suffering is that God may _be_
    righteous, while he pardons the believing sinner; in other words,
    the ground of the atonement is something internal to God himself.
    See _Heb. 2:10_—it “_became_” God = it was morally fitting in God,
    to make Christ suffer; _cf._ _Zech. 6:8_—“_they that go toward the
    north country have quieted my spirit in the north country_”—the
    judgments inflicted on Babylon have satisfied my justice.

    Charnock: “He who once ‘_quenched the violence of fire_’ for those
    Hebrew children, has also quenched the fires of God’s anger
    against the sinner, hotter than furnace heated seven times.” The
    same God who is a God of holiness, and who in virtue of his
    holiness must punish human sin, is also a God of mercy, and in
    virtue of his mercy himself bears the punishment of human sin.
    Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theologie, 98—“Christ is not only mediator
    between God and man, but between the just God and the merciful
    God”—_cf._ _Ps. 85:10_—“_Mercy and truth are met together;
    righteousness and peace have kissed each other,_” “Conscience
    demands vicariousness, for conscience declares that a gratuitous
    pardon would not be just”; see Knight, Colloquia Peripatetica, 88.

    Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 219, 304—“The Atonement
    1. has Godward significance; 2. consists in our Lord’s endurance
    of death on our behalf; 3. the spirit in which he endured death is
    of vital importance to the efficacy of his sacrifice, namely,
    obedience.... God gives repentance, yet requires it; he gives
    atonement, yet requires it. ‘_Thanks be to God for his unspeakable
    gift_’ (_2 Cor. 9:15_).” Simon, in Expositor, 6:321-334 (for
    substance)—“As in prayer we ask God to energize us and enable us
    to obey his law, and he answers by entering our hearts and obeying
    in us and for us: as we pray for strength in affliction, and find
    him helping us by putting his Spirit into us, and suffering in us
    and for us; so in atonement, Christ, the manifested God, obeys and
    suffers in our stead. Even the moral theory implies substitution
    also. God in us obeys his own law and bears the sorrows that sin
    has caused. Why can he not, in human nature, also endure the
    penalty of sin? The possibility of this cannot be consistently
    denied by any who believe in divine help granted in answer to
    prayer. The doctrine of the atonement and the doctrine of prayer
    stand or fall together.”

    See on the whole subject, Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 272-324,
    Philosophy of History, 65-69, and Dogmatic Theology, 2:401-463;
    Magee, Atonement and Sacrifice, 27, 53, 258; Edwards’s Works,
    4:140 sq.; Weber, Vom Zorne Gottes, 214-334; Owen, on Divine
    Justice, in Works, 10:500-512; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV,
    2:27-114; Hopkins, Works, 1:319-368; Schöberlein, in Studien und
    Kritiken, 1845:267-318, and 1847:7-70, also in Herzog,
    Encyclopädie, art.: Versöhnung; Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 3:713, and
    8:213; Macdonnell, Atonement, 115-214; Luthardt, Saving Truths,
    114-138; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 605-637; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac.,
    20:332-339; Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre; Waffle, in Bap. Rev.,
    1882:263-286; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:641-662 (Syst. Doct.,
    4:107-124); Remensnyder, The Atonement and Modern Thought.


_Secondly_,—the Atonement as related to Humanity in Christ.

The Ethical theory of the atonement holds that Christ stands in such
relation to humanity, that what God’s holiness demands Christ is under
obligation to pay, longs to pay, inevitably does pay, and pays so fully,
in virtue of his two-fold nature, that every claim of justice is
satisfied, and the sinner who accepts what Christ has done in his behalf
is saved.


    Dr. R. W. Dale, in his work on The Atonement, states the question
    before us: “What must be Christ’s relation to men, in order to
    make it possible that he should die for them?” We would change the
    form of the question, so that it should read: “What must be
    Christ’s relation to men, in order to make it not only possible,
    but just and necessary, that he should die for them?” Dale
    replies, for substance, that Christ must have had an original and
    central relation to the human race and to every member of it; see
    Denney, Death of Christ, 318. In our treatment of Ethical Monism,
    of the Trinity, and of the Person of Christ, we have shown that
    Christ, as Logos, as the immanent God, is the Life of humanity,
    laden with responsibility for human sin, while yet he personally
    knows no sin. Of this race-responsibility and race-guilt which
    Christ assumed, and for which he suffered so soon as man had
    sinned, Christ’s obedience and suffering in the flesh were the
    visible reflection and revelation. Only in Christ’s organic union
    with the race can we find the vital relation which will make his
    vicarious sufferings either possible or just. Only when we regard
    Calvary as revealing eternal principles of the divine nature, can
    we see how the sufferings of those few hours upon the Cross could
    suffice to save the millions of mankind.

    Dr. E. Y. Mullins has set forth the doctrine of the Atonement in
    five propositions: “1. In order to atonement Christ became vitally
    united to the human race. It was only by assuming the nature of
    those he would redeem that he could break the power of their
    captor.... The human race may be likened to many sparrows who had
    been caught in the snare of the fowler, and were hopelessly
    struggling against their fate. A great eagle swoops down from the
    sky, becomes entangled with the sparrows in the net, and then
    spreading his mighty wings he soars upward bearing the snare and
    captives and breaking its meshes he delivers himself and them....
    Christ the fountain head of life imparting his own vitality to the
    redeemed, and causing them to share in the experiences of
    Gethsemane and Calvary, breaking thus for them the power of sin
    and death—this is the atonement, by virtue of which sin is put
    away and man is united to God.”

    Dr. Mullins properly regards this view of atonement as too narrow,
    inasmuch as it disregards the differences between Christ and men
    arising from his sinlessness and his deity. He adds therefore that
    “2. Christ became the substitute for sinners; 3. became the
    representative of men before God; 4. gained power over human
    hearts to win them from sin and reconcile them to God; and 5.
    became a propitiation and satisfaction, rendering the remission of
    sins consistent with the divine holiness.” If Christ’s union with
    the race be one which begins with creation and antedates the Fall,
    all of the later points in the above scheme are only natural
    correlates and consequences of the first,—substitution,
    representation, reconciliation, propitiation, satisfaction, are
    only different aspects of the work which Christ does for us, by
    virtue of the fact that he is the immanent God, the Life of
    humanity, priest and victim, condemning and condemned, atoning and
    atoned.


We have seen how God can justly demand satisfaction; we now show how
Christ can justly make it; or, in other words, how the innocent can justly
suffer for the guilty. The solution of the problem lies in Christ’s union
with humanity. The first result of that union is obligation to suffer for
men; since, being one with the race, Christ had a share in the
responsibility of the race to the law and the justice of God. In him
humanity was created; at every stage of its existence humanity was upheld
by his power; as the immanent God he was the life of the race and of every
member of it. Christ’s sharing of man’s life justly and inevitably
subjected him to man’s exposures and liabilities, and especially to God’s
condemnation on account of sin.


    In the seventh chapter of Elsie Venner, Oliver Wendell Holmes
    makes the Reverend Mr. Honeywood lay aside an old sermon on Human
    Nature, and write one on The Obligations of an infinite Creator to
    a finite Creature. A. J. F. Behrends grounded our Lord’s
    representative relation not in his human nature but in his divine
    nature. “He is our representative not because he was in the loins
    of Adam, but because we, Adam included, were in his loins.
    Personal created existence is grounded in the Logos, so that God
    must deal with him as well as with every individual sinner, and
    sin and guilt and punishment must smite the Logos as well as the
    sinner, and that, whether the sinner is saved or not. This is not,
    as is often charged, a denial of grace or of freedom in grace, for
    it is no denial of freedom or grace to show that they are
    eternally rational and conformable to eternal law. In the ideal
    sphere, necessity and freedom, law and grace, coalesce.” J. C. C.
    Clarke, Man and his Divine Father, 387—“Vicarious atonement does
    not consist in any single act.... No one act embraces it all, and
    no one definition can compass it.” In this sense we may adopt the
    words of Forsyth: “In the atonement the Holy Father dealt with a
    world’s sin on (not _in_) a world-soul.”

    G. B. Foster, on _Mat. 26:53, 54_—“_Thinkest thou that I cannot
    beseech my Father, and he shall even now send me more than twelve
    legions of angels? How then should the Scriptures be fulfilled,
    that thus it must be?_” “On this ‘_must be_’ the Scripture is
    based, not this ‘_must be_’ on the Scripture. The ‘_must be_’ was
    the ethical demand of his connection with the race. It would have
    been immoral for him to break away from the organism. The law of
    the organism is: From each according to ability; to each according
    to need. David in song, Aristotle in logic, Darwin in science, are
    under obligation to contribute to the organism the talent they
    have. Shall they be under obligation, and Jesus go scot-free? But
    Jesus can contribute atonement, and because he can, he must.
    Moreover, he is a member, not only of the whole, but of each
    part,—_Rom. 12:5_—‘_members one of another._’ As membership of the
    whole makes him liable for the sin of the whole, so his being a
    member of the part makes him liable for the sin of that part.”

    Fairbairn, Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 483, 484—“There is
    a sense in which the Patripassian theory is right; the Father did
    suffer; though it was not as the Son that he suffered, but in
    modes distinct and different.... Through his pity the misery of
    man became his sorrow.... There is a disclosure of his suffering
    in the surrender of the Son. This surrender represented the
    sacrifice and passion of the whole Godhead. Here degree and
    proportion are out of place; were it not, we might say that the
    Father suffered more in giving than the Son in being given. He who
    gave to duty had not the reward of him who rejoiced to do it....
    One member of the Trinity could not suffer without all
    suffering.... The visible sacrifice was that of the Son; the
    invisible sacrifice was that of the Father.” The Andover Theory,
    represented in Progressive Orthodoxy, 43-53, affirms not only the
    Moral Influence of the Atonement, but also that the whole race of
    mankind is naturally in Christ and was therefore punished in and
    by his suffering and death; quoted in Hovey, Manual of Christian
    Theology, 269; see Hovey’s own view, 270-276, though he does not
    seem to recognize the atonement as existing before the
    incarnation.


Christ’s share in the responsibility of the race to the law and justice of
God was not destroyed by his incarnation, nor by his purification in the
womb of the virgin. In virtue of the organic unity of the race, each
member of the race since Adam has been born into the same state into which
Adam fell. The consequences of Adam’s sin, both to himself and to his
posterity, are: (1) depravity, or the corruption of human nature; (2)
guilt, or obligation to make satisfaction for sin to the divine holiness;
(3) penalty, or actual endurance of loss or suffering visited by that
holiness upon the guilty.


    Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 117—“Christ had taken upon
    him, as the living expression of himself, a nature which was
    weighed down, not merely by present incapacities, but by present
    incapacities as part of the judicial necessary result of accepted
    and inherent sinfulness. Human nature was not only disabled but
    guilty, and the disabilities were themselves a consequence and
    aspect of the guilt”; see review of Moberly by Rashdall, in Jour.
    Theol. Studies, 3:198-211. Lidgett, Spir. Princ. of Atonement,
    166-168, criticizes Dr. Dale for neglecting the fatherly purpose
    of the Atonement to serve the moral training of the
    child—punishment marking ill-desert in order to bring this
    ill-desert to the consciousness of the offender,—and for
    neglecting also the positive assertion in the atonement that the
    law is holy and just and good—something more than the negative
    expression of sin’s ill-desert. See especially Lidgett’s chapter
    on the relation of our Lord to the human race, 351-378, in which
    he grounds the atonement in the solidarity of mankind, its organic
    union with the Son of God, and Christ’s immanence in humanity.

    Bowne, The Atonement, 101—“Something like this work of grace was a
    moral necessity with God. It was an awful responsibility that was
    taken when our human race was launched with its fearful
    possibilities of good and evil. God thereby put himself under
    infinite obligation to care for his human family; and reflections
    upon his position as Creator and Ruler, instead of removing only
    make more manifest this obligation. So long as we conceive of God
    as sitting apart in supreme ease and self-satisfaction, he is not
    love at all, but only a reflex of our selfishness and vulgarity.
    So long as we conceive him as bestowing upon us out of his
    infinite fulness but at no real cost to himself, he sinks before
    the moral heroes of the race. There is ever a higher thought
    possible, until we see God taking the world upon his heart,
    entering into the fellowship of our sorrow, and becoming the
    supreme burdenbearer and leader in all self-sacrifice. Then only
    are the possibilities of grace and love and moral heroism and
    condescension filled up, so that nothing higher remains. And the
    work of Christ himself, so far as it was an historical event, must
    be viewed, not merely as a piece of history, but also as a
    manifestation of that Cross which was hidden in the divine love
    from the foundation of the world, and which is involved in the
    existence of the human world at all.”

    John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:90, 91—“Conceive of the
    ideal of moral perfection incarnate in a human personality, and at
    the same time one who loves us with a love so absolute that he
    identifies himself with us and makes our good and evil his
    own—bring together these elements in a living, conscious human
    spirit, and you have in it a capacity of shame and anguish, a
    possibility of bearing the burden of human guilt and wretchedness,
    which lost and guilty humanity can never bear for itself.”


If Christ had been born into the world by ordinary generation, he too
would have had depravity, guilt, penalty. But he was not so born. In the
womb of the Virgin, the human nature which he took was purged from its
depravity. But this purging away of depravity did not take away guilt, or
penalty. There was still left the just exposure to the penalty of violated
law. Although Christ’s nature was purified, his obligation to suffer yet
remained. He might have declined to join himself to humanity, and then he
need not have suffered. He might have sundered his connection with the
race, and then he need not have suffered. But once born of the Virgin,
once possessed of the human nature that was under the curse, he was bound
to suffer. The whole mass and weight of God’s displeasure against the race
fell on him, when once he became a member of the race.


    Because Christ is essential humanity, the universal man, the life
    of the race, he is the central brain to which and through which
    all ideas must pass. He is the central heart to which and through
    which all pains must be communicated. You cannot telephone to your
    friend across the town without first ringing up the central
    office. You cannot injure your neighbor without first injuring
    Christ. Each one of us can say of him: “_Against thee, thee only,
    have I sinned_” (_Ps. 51:4_). Because of his central and
    all-inclusive humanity, he must bear in his own person all the
    burdens of humanity, and must be “_the Lamb of God, that_” taketh,
    and so “_taketh away, the sin of the world_” (_John 1:29_). Simms
    Reeves, the great English tenor, said that the passion-music was
    too much for him; he was found completely overcome after singing
    the prophet’s words in _Lam. 1:12_—“_Is it nothing to you, all ye
    that pass by? Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my
    sorrow, which is brought upon me, Wherewith Jehovah hath afflicted
    me in the day of his fierce anger._”

    Father Damien gave his life in ministry to the lepers’ colony of
    the Hawaiian Islands. Though free from the disease when he
    entered, he was at last himself stricken with the leprosy, and
    then wrote: “I must now stay with my own people.” Once a leper,
    there was no release. When Christ once joined himself to humanity,
    all the exposures and liabilities of humanity fell upon him.
    Through himself personally without sin, he was made sin for us.
    Christ inherited guilt and penalty. _Heb. 2:14, 15_—“_Since then
    the children are sharers in flesh and blood, he also himself in
    like manner partook of the same; that through death he might bring
    to naught him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and
    might deliver all them who through fear of death were all their
    life-time subject to bondage._”

    Only God can forgive sin, because only God can feel it in its true
    heinousness and rate it at its true worth. Christ could forgive
    sin because he added to the divine feeling with regard to sin the
    anguish of a pure humanity on account of it. Shelley, Julian and
    Maddolo: “Me, whose heart a stranger’s tear might wear, As
    water-drops the sandy fountain-stone; Me, who am as a nerve o’er
    which do creep The Else unfelt oppressions of the earth.” S. W.
    Culver: “We cannot be saved, as we are taught geometry, by lecture
    and diagram. No person ever yet saved another from drowning by
    standing coolly by and telling him the importance of rising to the
    surface and the necessity of respiration. No, he must plunge into
    the destructive element, and take upon himself the very condition
    of the drowning man, and by the exertion of his own strength, by
    the vigor of his own life, save him from the impending death. When
    your child is encompassed by the flames that consume your
    dwelling, you will not save him by calling to him from without.
    You must make your way through the devouring flame, till you come
    personally into the very conditions of his peril and danger, and,
    thence returning, bear him forth to freedom and safety.”


Notice, however, that this guilt which Christ took upon himself by his
union with humanity was: (1) not the guilt of personal sin—such guilt as
belongs to every adult member of the race; (2) not even the guilt of
inherited depravity—such guilt as belongs to infants, and to those who
have not come to moral consciousness; but (3) solely the guilt of Adam’s
sin, which belongs, prior to personal transgression, and apart from
inherited depravity, to every member of the race who has derived his life
from Adam. This original sin and inherited guilt, but without the
depravity that ordinarily accompanies them, Christ takes, and so takes
away. He can justly bear penalty, because he inherits guilt. And since
this guilt is not his personal guilt, but the guilt of that one sin in
which “all sinned”—the guilt of the common transgression of the race in
Adam, the guilt of the root-sin from which all other sins have sprung—he
who is personally pure can vicariously bear the penalty due to the sin of
all.


    Christ was conscious of innocence in his personal relations, but
    not in his race relations. He gathered into himself all the
    penalties of humanity, as Winkelried gathered into his own bosom
    at Sempach the pikes of the Austrians and so made a way for the
    victorious Swiss. Christ took to himself the shame of humanity, as
    the mother takes upon her the daughter’s shame, repenting of it
    and suffering on account of it. But this could not be in the case
    of Christ unless there had been a tie uniting him to men far more
    vital, organic, and profound than that which unites mother and
    daughter. Christ is naturally the life of all men, before he
    becomes spiritually the life of true believers. Matheson, Spir.
    Devel. of St. Paul, 197-215, 244, speaks of Christ’s secular
    priesthood, of an outer as well as an inner membership in the body
    of Christ. He is sacrificial head of the world as well as
    sacrificial head of the church. In Paul’s latest letters, he
    declares of Christ that he is “_the Savior of all men, specially
    of them that believe_” (_1 Tim. 4:10_). There is a grace that
    “_hath appeared, bringing salvation to all men_” (_Tit. 2:11_). He
    “_gave gifts unto men_” (_Eph. 4:8_), “_Yea, among the rebellious
    also, that Jehovah God might dwell with them_” (_Ps. 68:18_).
    “_Every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected_”
    (_1 Tim. 4:4_).

    Royce, World and Individual, 2:408—“Our sorrows are identically
    God’s own sorrows.... I sorrow, but the sorrow is not only mine.
    This same sorrow, just as it is for me, is God’s sorrow.... The
    divine fulfilment can be won only through the sorrows of time....
    Unless God knows sorrow, he knows not the highest good, which
    consists in the overcoming of sorrow.” Godet, in The Atonement,
    331-351—“Jesus condemned sin as God condemned it. When he felt
    forsaken on the Cross, he performed that act by which the offender
    himself condemns his sin, and by that condemnation, so far as it
    depends on himself, makes it to disappear. There is but one
    conscience in all moral beings. This echo in Christ of God’s
    judgment against sin was to re-echo in all other human
    consciences. This has transformed God’s love of compassion into a
    love of satisfaction. Holiness joins suffering to sin. But the
    element of reparation in the Cross was not in the suffering but in
    the submission. The child who revolts against its punishment has
    made no reparation at all. We appropriate Christ’s work when we by
    faith ourselves condemn sin and accept him.”


If it be asked whether this is not simply a suffering for his own sin, or
rather for his own share of the sin of the race, we reply that his own
share in the sin of the race is not the sole reason why he suffers; it
furnishes only the subjective reason and ground for the proper laying upon
him of the sin of all. Christ’s union with the race in his incarnation is
only the outward and visible expression of a prior union with the race
which began when he created the race. As “in him were all things created,”
and as “in him all things consist,” or hold together (Col. 1:16, 17), it
follows that he who is the life of humanity must, though personally pure,
be involved in responsibility for all human sin, and “it was necessary
that the Christ should suffer” (Acts 17:3). This suffering was an enduring
of the reaction of the divine holiness against sin and so was a bearing of
penalty (Is. 53:6; Gal. 3:13), but it was also the voluntary execution of
a plan that antedated creation (Phil. 2:6, 7), and Christ’s sacrifice in
time showed what had been in the heart of God from eternity (Heb. 9:14;
Rev. 13:8).


    Our treatment is intended to meet the chief modern objection to
    the atonement. Greg, Creed of Christendom, 2:222, speaks of “the
    strangely inconsistent doctrine that God is so _just_ that he
    could not let sin go unpunished, yet so _unjust_ that he could
    punish it in the person of the innocent.... It is for orthodox
    dialectics to explain how the divine justice can be _impugned_ by
    pardoning the guilty, and yet _vindicated_ by punishing the
    innocent” (quoted in Lias, Atonement, 16). In order to meet this
    difficulty, the following accounts of Christ’s identification with
    humanity have been given:

    1. That of Isaac Watts (see Bib. Sac., 1875:421). This holds that
    the humanity of Christ, both in body and soul, preëxisted before
    the incarnation, and was manifested to the patriarchs. We reply
    that Christ’s human nature is declared to be derived from the
    Virgin.

    2. That of R. W. Dale (Atonement, 265-440). This holds that Christ
    is responsible for human sin because, as the Upholder and Life of
    all, he is naturally one with all men, and is spiritually one with
    all believers (_Acts 17:28_—“_in him we live, and move, and have
    our being_”; _Col. 1:17_—“_in him all things consist_”; _John
    14:20_—“_I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you_”). If
    Christ’s bearing our sins, however, is to be explained by the
    union of the believer with Christ, the effect is made to explain
    the cause, and Christ could have died only for the elect (see a
    review of Dale, in Brit. Quar. Rev., Apr., 1876:221-225). The
    union of Christ with the race by creation—a union which recognizes
    Christ’s purity and man’s sin—still remains as a most valuable
    element of truth in the theory of Dr. Dale.

    3. That of Edward Irving. Christ has a corrupted nature, an inborn
    infirmity and depravity, which he gradually overcomes. But the
    Scriptures, on the contrary, assert his holiness and separateness
    from sinners. (See references, on pages 744-747.)

    4. That of John Miller, Theology, 114-128; also in his chapter:
    Was Christ in Adam? in Questions Awakened by the Bible. Christ, as
    to his human nature, although created pure, was yet, as one of
    Adam’s posterity, conceived of as a sinner in Adam. To him
    attached “the guilt of the act in which all men stood together in
    a federal relation.... He was decreed to be guilty for the sins of
    all mankind.” Although there is a truth contained in this
    statement, it is vitiated by Miller’s federalism and creatianism.
    Arbitrary imputation and legal fiction do not help us here. We
    need such an actual union of Christ with humanity, and such a
    derivation of the substance of his being, by natural generation
    from Adam, as will make him not simply the constructive heir, but
    the natural heir, of the guilt of the race. We come, therefore, to
    what we regard as the true view, namely:

    5. That the humanity of Christ was not a new creation, but was
    derived from Adam, through Mary his mother; so that Christ, so far
    as his humanity was concerned, was in Adam just as we were, and
    had the same race-responsibility with ourselves. As Adam’s
    descendant, he was responsible for Adam’s sin, like every other
    member of the race; the chief difference being, that while we
    inherit from Adam both guilt and depravity, he whom the Holy
    Spirit purified, inherited not the depravity, but only the guilt.
    Christ took to himself, not sin (depravity), but the consequences
    of sin. In him there was abolition of sin, without abolition of
    obligation to suffer for sin; while in the believer, there is
    abolition of obligation to suffer, without abolition of sin
    itself.

    The justice of Christ’s sufferings has been imperfectly
    illustrated by the obligation of the silent partner of a business
    firm to pay debts of the firm which he did not personally
    contract; or by the obligation of the husband to pay the debts of
    his wife; or by the obligation of a purchasing country to assume
    the debts of the province which it purchases (Wm. Ashmore). There
    have been men who have spent the strength of a lifetime in
    clearing off the indebtedness of an insolvent father, long since
    deceased. They recognized an organic unity of the family, which
    morally, if not legally, made their father’s liabilities their
    own. So, it is said, Christ recognized the organic unity of the
    race, and saw that, having become one of that sinning race, he had
    involved himself in all its liabilities, even to the suffering of
    death, the great penalty of sin.

    The fault of all the analogies just mentioned is that they are
    purely commercial. A transference of pecuniary obligation is
    easier to understand than a transference of criminal liability. I
    cannot justly bear another’s penalty, unless I can in some way
    share his guilt. The theory we advocate shows how such a sharing
    of our guilt on the part of Christ was possible. All believers in
    substitution hold that Christ bore our guilt: “My soul looks back
    to see The burdens thou didst bear When hanging on the accursed
    tree, And hopes her guilt was there.” But we claim that, by virtue
    of Christ’s union with humanity, that guilt was not only an
    imputed, but also an imparted, guilt.

    With Christ’s obligation to suffer, there were connected two
    other, though minor, results of his assumption of humanity: first,
    the longing to suffer; and secondly, the inevitableness of his
    suffering. He felt the longing to suffer which perfect love to God
    must feel, in view of the demands upon the race, of that holiness
    of God which he loved more than he loved the race itself; which
    perfect love to man must feel, in view of the fact that bearing
    the penalty of man’s sin was the only way to save him. Hence we
    see Christ pressing forward to the cross with such majestic
    determination that the disciples were amazed and afraid (_Mark
    10:32_). Hence we hear him saying: “_With desire have I desired to
    eat this passover_” (_Luke 23:15_); “_I have a baptism to be
    baptised with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!_”
    (_Luke 12:50_).

    Here is the truth in Campbell’s theory of the atonement. Christ is
    the great Penitent before God, making confession of the sin of the
    race, which others of that race could neither see nor feel. But
    the view we present is a larger and completer one than that of
    Campbell, in that it makes this confession and reparation
    obligatory upon Christ, as Campbell’s view does not, and
    recognizes the penal nature of Christ’s sufferings, which
    Campbell’s view denies. Lias, Atonement, 79—“The head of a clan,
    himself intensely loyal to his king, finds that his clan have been
    involved in rebellion. The more intense and perfect his loyalty,
    the more thorough his nobleness of heart and affection for his
    people, the more inexcusable and flagrant the rebellion of those
    for whom he pleads,—the more acute would be his agony, as their
    representative and head. Nothing would be more true to human
    nature, in the best sense of those words, than that the conflict
    between loyalty to his king and affection for his vassals should
    induce him to offer his life for theirs, to ask that the
    punishment they deserved should be inflicted on him.”

    The second minor consequence of Christ’s assumption of humanity
    was, that, being such as he was, he could not help suffering; in
    other words, the obligatory and the desired were also the
    inevitable. Since he was a being of perfect purity, contact with
    the sin of the race, of which he was a member, necessarily
    involved an actual suffering, of an intenser kind than we can
    conceive. Sin is self-isolating, but love and righteousness have
    in them the instinct of human unity. In Christ all the nerves and
    sensibilities of humanity met. He was the only healthy member of
    the race. When life returns to a frozen limb, there is pain. So
    Christ, as the only sensitive member of a benumbed and stupefied
    humanity, felt all the pangs of shame and suffering which
    rightfully belonged to sinners; but which they could not feel,
    simply because of the depth of their depravity. Because Christ was
    pure, yet had united himself to a sinful and guilty race,
    therefore “_it must needs be that Christ should suffer_” (A. V.)
    or, “_it behooved the Christ to suffer_” (Rev. Vers., _Acts
    17:3_); see also _John 3:14_—“_so must the Son of man be lifted
    up_”—“The Incarnation, under the actual circumstances of humanity,
    carried with it the necessity of the Passion” (Westcott, in Bib.
    Com., _in loco_).

    Compare John Woolman’s Journal, 4, 5—“O Lord, my God, the amazing
    horrors of darkness were gathered about me, and covered me all
    over, and I saw no way to go forth; I felt the depth and extent of
    the misery of my fellow creatures, separated from the divine
    harmony, and it was greater than I could bear, and I was crushed
    down under it; I lifted up my head, I stretched out my arm, but
    there was none to help me; I looked round about, and was amazed.
    In the depths of misery, I remembered that thou art omnipotent and
    that I had called thee Father.” He had vision of a “dull, gloomy
    mass,” darkening half the heavens, and he was told that it was
    “human beings, in as great misery as they could be and live; and
    he was mixed with them, and henceforth he might not consider
    himself a distinct and separate being.”

    This suffering in and with the sins of men, which Dr. Bushnell
    emphasized so strongly, though it is not, as he thought, the
    principal element, is notwithstanding an indispensable element in
    the atonement of Christ. Suffering in and with the sinner is one
    way, though not the only way, in which Christ is enabled to bear
    the wrath of God which constitutes the real penalty of sin.

    EXPOSITION OF 2 COR. 5:21.—It remains for us to adduce the
    Scriptural proof of this natural assumption of human guilt by
    Christ. We find it in _2 Cor. 5:21_—“_Him who knew no sin he made
    to be sin on our behalf; that we might become the righteousness of
    God in him._” “_Righteousness_” here cannot mean subjective
    purity, for then “_made to be sin_” would mean that God made
    Christ to be subjectively depraved. As Christ was not made
    _unholy_, the meaning cannot be that we are made _holy_ persons in
    him. Meyer calls attention to this parallel between
    “_righteousness_” and “_sin_”:—“_That we might become the
    righteousness of God in him_” = that we might become justified
    persons. Correspondingly, “_made to be sin on our behalf_” must =
    made to be a condemned person. “_Him who knew no sin_” = Christ
    had no experience of sin—this was the necessary postulate of his
    work of atonement. “_Made sin for us_,” therefore, is the abstract
    for the concrete, and = made a sinner, in the sense that the
    penalty of sin fell upon him. So Meyer, for substance.

    We must, however, regard this interpretation of Meyer’s as coming
    short of the full meaning of the apostle. As justification is not
    simply remission of _actual_ punishment, but is also deliverance
    from the _obligation_ to suffer punishment,—in other words, as
    “_righteousness_” in the text = persons delivered from the _guilt_
    as well as from the _penalty_ of sin,—so the contrasted term
    “_sin_,” in the text,—a person not only _actually_ punished, but
    also under _obligation_ to suffer punishment;—in other words,
    Christ is “_made sin_,” not only in the sense of being put under
    _penalty_, but also in the sense of being put under _guilt_.
    (_Cf._ Symington, Atonement, 17.)

    In a note to the last edition of Meyer, this is substantially
    granted. “It is to be noted,” he says, “that ἁμαρτίαν, like κατάρα
    in _Gal. 3:13_, necessarily includes in itself the notion of
    guilt.” Meyer adds, however: “The guilt of which Christ appears as
    bearer was not his own (μὴ γνόντα ἁμαρτίαν); hence the guilt of
    men was transferred to him; consequently the justification of men
    is imputative.” Here the implication that the guilt which Christ
    bears is his simply by imputation seems to us contrary to the
    analogy of faith. As Adam’s sin is ours only because we are
    actually one with Adam, and as Christ’s righteousness is imputed
    to us only as we are actually united to Christ, so our sins are
    imputed to Christ only as Christ is actually one with the race. He
    was “_made sin_” by being made one with the sinners; he took our
    guilt by taking our nature. He who “_knew no sin_” came to be
    “_sin for us_” by being born of a sinful stock; by inheritance the
    common guilt of the race became his. Guilt was not simply
    _imputed_ to Christ; it was _imparted_ also.

    This exposition may be made more clear by putting the two
    contrasted thoughts in parallel columns, as follows:

    Made righteousness in him =      Made sin for us =
    righteous persons;               a sinful person;
    justified persons;               a condemned person;
    freed from guilt, or             put under guilt, or obligation
    obligation to suffer;            to suffer;
    by spiritual union with          by natural union with the
    Christ.                          race.

    For a good exposition of _2 Cor. 5:21_, _Gal. 3:13_, and _Rom.
    3:25, 26_, see Denney, Studies in Theology, 109-124.


The Atonement, then, on the part of God, has its ground (1) in the
holiness of God, which must visit sin with condemnation, even though this
condemnation brings death to his Son; and (2) in the love of God, which
itself provides the sacrifice, by suffering in and with his Son for the
sins of men, but through that suffering opening a way and means of
salvation.

The Atonement, on the part of man, is accomplished through (1) the
solidarity of the race; of which (2) Christ is the life, and so its
representative and surety; (3) justly yet voluntarily bearing its guilt
and shame and condemnation as his own.


    Melanchthon: “Christ was made sin for us, not only in respect to
    punishment, but primarily by being chargeable with guilt also
    (_culpæ et reatus_)”—quoted by Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk,
    3:95, 102, 103, 107; also 1:307, 314 _sq._ Thomasius says that
    “Christ bore the guilt of the race by imputation; but as in the
    case of the imputation of Adam’s sin to us, imputation of our sins
    to Christ presupposes a real relationship. Christ appropriated our
    sin. He sank himself into our guilt.” Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:442
    (Syst. Doct., 3:350, 351), agrees with Thomasius, that “Christ
    entered into our natural mortality, which for us is a penal
    condition, and into the state of collective guilt, so far as it is
    an evil, a burden to be borne; not that he had personal guilt, but
    rather that he entered into our guilt-laden common life, not as a
    stranger, but as one actually belonging to it—put under its law,
    according to the will of the Father and of his own love.”

    When, and how, did Christ take this guilt and this penalty upon
    him? With regard to penalty, we have no difficulty in answering
    that, as his whole life of suffering was propitiatory, so penalty
    rested upon him from the very beginning of his life. This penalty
    was inherited, and was the consequence of Christ’s taking human
    nature (_Gal. 4:4, 5_—“_born of a woman, born under the law_”).
    But penalty and guilt are correlates; if Christ inherited penalty,
    it must have been because he inherited guilt. This subjection to
    the common guilt of the race was intimated in Jesus’ circumcision
    (_Luke 2:21_); in his ritual purification (_Luke 2:22_—“_their
    purification_”—_i. e._, the purification of Mary and the babe; see
    Lange, Life of Christ; Commentaries of Alford, Webster and
    Wilkinson; and An. Par. Bible); in his legal redemption (_Luke
    2:23, 24_; _cf._ _Ex. 13:2, 13_); and in his baptism (_Mat.
    3:15_—“_thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness_”). The
    baptized person went down into the water, as one laden with sin
    and guilt, in order that this sin and guilt might be buried
    forever, and that he might rise from the typical grave to a new
    and holy life. (Ebrard: “Baptism = death.”) So Christ’s submission
    to John’s baptism of repentance was not only a consecration to
    death, but also a recognition and confession of his implication in
    that guilt of the race for which death was the appointed and
    inevitable penalty (_cf._ _Mat. 10:38_; _Luke 12:50_; _Mat.
    26:39_); and, as his baptism was a prefiguration of his death, we
    may learn from his baptism something with regard to the meaning of
    his death. See further, under The Symbolism of Baptism.

    As one who had had guilt, Christ was “_justified in the spirit_”
    (_1 Tim. 3:16_); and this justification appears to have taken
    place after he “_was manifested in the flesh_” (_1 Tim. 3:16_),
    and when “_he was raised for our justification_” (_Rom. 4:25_).
    Compare _Rom. 1:4_—“_declared to be the Son of God with power,
    according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the
    dead_”; _6:7-10_—“_he that hath died is justified from sin. But if
    we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him;
    knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more;
    death no more hath dominion over him. For the death that he died,
    he died unto sin once; but the life that he liveth, he liveth unto
    God_”—here all Christians are conceived of as ideally justified in
    the justification of Christ, when Christ died for our sins and
    rose again. _8:3_—“_God, sending his own Son in the likeness of
    sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh_”—here Meyer
    says: “The sending does not precede the condemnation; but the
    condemnation is effected in and with the sending.” _John
    16:10_—“_of righteousness, because I go to the Father_”;
    _19:30_—“_It is finished._” On _1 Tim. 3:16_, see the Commentary
    of Bengel.

    If it be asked whether Jesus, then, before his death, was an
    unjustified person, we answer that, while personally pure and
    well-pleasing to God (_Mat. 3:17_), he himself was conscious of a
    race-responsibility and a race-guilt which must be atoned for
    (_John 12:27_—“_Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say?
    Father, save me from this hour. But for this cause came I unto
    this hour_”); and that guilty human nature in him endured at the
    last the separation from God which constitutes the essence of
    death, sin’s penalty (_Mat. 27:46_—“_My God, my God, why hast thou
    forsaken me?_”). We must remember that, as even the believer must
    “_be judged according to man in the flesh_” (_1 Pet. 4:6_), that
    is, must suffer the death which to unbelievers is the penalty of
    sin, although he “_live according to God in the Spirit_,” so
    Christ, in order that we might be delivered from both guilt and
    penalty, was “_put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the
    spirit_” (_3:18_);—in other words, as Christ was man, the penalty
    due to human guilt belonged to him to bear; but, as he was God, he
    could exhaust that penalty, and could be a proper substitute for
    others.

    If it be asked whether he, who from the moment of the conception
    “_sanctified himself_” (_John 17:19_), did not from that moment
    also justify himself, we reply that although, through the
    retroactive efficacy of his atonement and upon the ground of it,
    human nature in him was purged of its depravity from the moment
    that he took that nature; and although, upon the ground of that
    atonement, believers before his advent were both sanctified and
    justified; yet his own justification could not have proceeded upon
    the ground of his atonement, and also his atonement have proceeded
    upon the ground of his justification. This would be a vicious
    circle; somewhere we must have a beginning. That beginning was in
    the cross, where guilt was first purged (_Heb. 1:3_—“_when he had
    made purification of sins, sat down on the right hand of the
    Majesty on high_”; _Mat. 27:42_—“_He saved others; himself he
    cannot save_”; _cf._ _Rev. 13:8_—“_the Lamb that hath been slain
    from the foundation of the world_”).

    If it be said that guilt and depravity are practically
    inseparable, and that, if Christ had guilt, he must have had
    depravity also, we reply that in civil law we distinguish between
    them,—the conversion of a murderer would not remove his obligation
    to suffer upon the gallows; and we reply further, that in
    justification we distinguish between them,—depravity still
    remaining, though guilt is removed. So we may say that Christ
    takes guilt without depravity, in order that we may have depravity
    without guilt. See page 645; also Böhl, Incarnation des göttlichen
    Wortes; Pope, Higher Catechism, 118; A. H. Strong, on the
    Necessity of the Atonement, in Philosophy and Religion, 213-219.
    _Per contra_, see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:59 note, 82.


Christ therefore, as incarnate, rather revealed the atonement than made
it. The historical work of atonement was finished upon the Cross, but that
historical work only revealed to men the atonement made both before and
since by the extra-mundane Logos. The eternal Love of God suffering the
necessary reaction of his own Holiness against the sin of his creatures
and with a view to their salvation—this is the essence of the Atonement.


    Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 252, 253—“Christ, as God’s atonement,
    is the revelation and discovery of the fact that sacrifice is as
    deep in God as his being. He is a holy Creator.... He must take
    upon himself the shame and pain of sin.” The earthly tabernacle
    and its sacrifices were only the shadow of those in the heavens,
    and Moses was bidden to make the earthly after the pattern which
    he saw in the mount. So the historical atonement was but the
    shadowing forth to dull and finite minds of an infinite demand of
    the divine holiness and an infinite satisfaction rendered by the
    divine love. Godet, S. S. Times, Oct. 16, 1886—“Christ so
    identified himself with the race he came to save, by sharing its
    life or its very blood, that when the race itself was redeemed
    from the curse of sin, his resurrection followed as the first
    fruits of that redemption”; _Rom. 4:25_—“_delivered up for our
    trespasses ... raised for our justification._”

    Simon, Redemption of Man, 322—“If the Logos is generally the
    Mediator of the divine immanence in Creation, especially in man;
    if men are differentiations of the effluent divine energy; and if
    the Logos is the immanent controlling principle of all
    differentiation, _i. e._, the principle of all _form_—must not the
    self-perversion of these human differentiations necessarily react
    on him who is their constitutive principle? 339—Remember that men
    have not first to engraft themselves into Christ, the living
    whole.... They subsist naturally in him, and they have to separate
    themselves, cut themselves off from him, if they are to be
    separate. This is the mistake made in the ‘Life in Christ’ theory.
    Men are treated as in some sense out of Christ, and as having to
    get into connection with Christ.... It is not that we have to
    create the relation,—we have simply to accept, to recognize, to
    ratify it. Rejecting Christ is not so much refusal to _become_ one
    with Christ, as it is refusal to _remain_ one with him, refusal to
    let him be our life.”

    A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 33, 172—“When God breathed into
    man’s nostrils the breath of life, he communicated freedom, and
    made possible the creature’s self-chosen alienation from himself,
    the giver of that life. While man could never break the natural
    bond which united him to God, he could break the spiritual bond,
    and could introduce even into the life of God a principle of
    discord and evil. Tie a cord tightly about your finger; you
    partially isolate the finger, diminish its nutrition, bring about
    atrophy and disease. Yet the life of the whole system rouses
    itself to put away the evil, to untie the cord, to free the
    diseased and suffering member. The illustration is far from
    adequate; but it helps at a single point. There has been given to
    each intelligent and moral agent the power, spiritually, to
    isolate himself from God, while yet he is naturally joined to God,
    and is wholly dependent upon God for the removal of the sin which
    has so separated him from his Maker. Sin is the act of the
    creature, but salvation is the act of the Creator.

    “If you could imagine a finger endowed with free will and trying
    to sunder its connection with the body by tying a string around
    itself, you would have a picture of man trying to sunder his
    connection with Christ. What is the result of such an attempt?
    Why, pain, decay; possible, nay, incipient death, to the finger.
    By what law? By the law of the organism, which is so constituted
    as to maintain itself against its own disruption by the revolt of
    the members. The pain and death of the finger is the reaction of
    the whole against the treason of the part. The finger suffers
    pain. But are there no results of pain to the body? Does not the
    body feel pain also? How plain it is that no such pain can be
    confined to the single part! The heart feels, aye, the whole
    organism feels, because all the parts are members one of another.
    It not only suffers, but that suffering tends to remedy the evil
    and to remove its cause. The body summons its forces, pours new
    tides of life into the dying member, strives to rid the finger of
    the ligature that binds it. So through all the course of history,
    Christ, the natural life of the race, has been afflicted in the
    affliction of humanity and has suffered for human sin. This
    suffering has been an atoning suffering, since it has been due to
    righteousness. If God had not been holy, if God had not made all
    nature express the holiness of his being, if God had not made pain
    and loss the necessary consequences of sin, then Christ would not
    have suffered. But since these things are sin’s penalty and Christ
    is the life of the sinful race, it must needs be that Christ
    should suffer. There is nothing arbitrary in laying upon him the
    iniquities of us all. Original grace, like original sin, is only
    the ethical interpretation of biological facts.” See also Ames, on
    Biological Aspects of the Atonement, in Methodist Review, Nov.
    1905:943-953.


In favor of the Substitutionary or Ethical view of the atonement we may
urge the following considerations:

(_a_) It rests upon correct philosophical principles with regard to the
nature of will, law, sin, penalty, righteousness.


    This theory holds that there are permanent states, as well as
    transient acts, of the will; and that the will is not simply the
    faculty of volitions, but also the fundamental determination of
    the being to an ultimate end. It regards law as having its basis,
    not in arbitrary will or in governmental expediency, but rather in
    the nature of God, and as being a necessary transcript of God’s
    holiness. It considers sin to consist not simply in acts, but in
    permanent evil states of the affections and will. It makes the
    object of penalty to be, not the reformation of the offender, or
    the prevention of evil doing, but the vindication of justice,
    outraged by violation of law. It teaches that righteousness is not
    benevolence or a form of benevolence, but a distinct and separate
    attribute of the divine nature which demands that sin should be
    visited with punishment, apart from any consideration of the
    useful results that will flow therefrom.


(_b_) It combines in itself all the valuable elements in the theories
before mentioned, while it avoids their inconsistencies, by showing the
deeper principle upon which each of these elements is based.


    The Ethical theory admits the indispensableness of Christ’s
    example, advocated by the Socinian theory; the moral influence of
    his suffering, urged by the Bushnellian theory; the securing of
    the safety of government, insisted on by the Grotian theory; the
    participation of the believer in Christ’s new humanity, taught by
    the Irvingian theory; the satisfaction to God’s majesty for the
    elect, made so much of by the Anselmic theory. But the Ethical
    theory claims that all these other theories require, as a
    presupposition for their effective working, that ethical
    satisfaction to the holiness of God which is rendered in guilty
    human nature by the Son of God who took that nature to redeem it.


(_c_) It most fully meets the requirements of Scripture, by holding that
the necessity of the atonement is absolute, since it rests upon the
demands of immanent holiness, the fundamental attribute of God.


    _Acts 17:3_—“_it behooved the Christ to suffer, and to rise again
    from the dead_”—lit.: “_it was necessary for the Christ to
    suffer_”; _Luke 24:26_—“_Behooved it not the Christ to suffer
    these things, and to enter into his glory?_”—lit.: “_Was it not
    necessary that the Christ should suffer these things?_” It is not
    enough to say that Christ must suffer in order that the prophecies
    might be fulfilled. Why was it prophesied that he should suffer?
    Why did God purpose that he should suffer? The ultimate necessity
    is a necessity in the nature of God.

    Plato, Republic, 2:361—“The righteous man who is thought to be
    unrighteous will be scourged, racked, bound; will have his eyes
    put out; and finally, having endured all sorts of evil, will be
    impaled.” This means that, as human society is at present
    constituted, even a righteous person must suffer for the sins of
    the world. “Mors mortis Morti mortem nisi morte dedisset, Æternæ
    vitæ janua clausa foret”—“Had not the Death-of-death to Death his
    death-blow given, Forever closed were the gate, the gate of life
    and heaven.”


(_d_) It shows most satisfactorily how the demands of holiness are met;
namely, by the propitiatory offering of one who is personally pure, but
who by union with the human race has inherited its guilt and penalty.


    “_Quo non ascendam?_”—“Whither shall I not rise?” exclaimed the
    greatest minister of modern kings, in a moment of intoxication.
    “Whither shall I not stoop?” says the Lord Jesus. King Humbert,
    during the scourge of cholera in Italy: “In Castellammare they
    make merry; in Naples they die: I go to Naples.”

    Wrightnour: “The illustration of Powhatan raising his club to slay
    John Smith, while Pocahontas flings herself between the uplifted
    club and the victim, is not a good one. God is not an angry being,
    bound to strike something, no matter what. If Powhatan could have
    taken the blow himself, out of a desire to spare the victim, it
    would be better. The Father and the Son are one. Bronson Alcott,
    in his school at Concord, when punishment was necessary, sometimes
    placed the rod in the hand of the offender and bade him strike his
    (Alcott’s) hand, rather than that the law of the school should be
    broken without punishment following. The result was that very few
    rules were broken. So God in Christ bore the sins of the world,
    and endured the penalty for man’s violation of his law.”


(_e_) It furnishes the only proper explanation of the sacrificial language
of the New Testament, and of the sacrificial rites of the Old, considered
as prophetic of Christ’s atoning work.


    Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 207-211—“The imposition of
    hands on the head of the victim is entirely unexplained, except in
    the account of the great day of Atonement, when by the same
    gesture and by distinct confession the sins of the people were
    ‘_put upon the head of the goat_’ (_Lev. 16:21_) to be borne away
    into the wilderness. The blood was sacred and was to be poured out
    before the Lord, evidently in place of the forfeited life of the
    sinner which should have been rendered up.” Watts, New
    Apologetics, 205—“ ‘_The Lord will provide_’ was the truth taught
    when Abraham found a ram provided by God which he ‘_offered up as
    a burnt offering in the stead of his son_’ (_Gen. 22:13, 14_). As
    the ram was not Abraham’s ram, the sacrifice of it could not teach
    that all Abraham had belonged to God, and should, with entire
    faith in his goodness, be devoted to him; but it did teach that
    ‘_apart from shedding of blood there is no remission_’ (_Heb.
    9:22_).” _2 Chron. 29:27_—“_when the burnt offering began, the
    song of Jehovah began also._”


(_f_) It alone gives proper place to the death of Christ as the central
feature of his work,—set forth in the ordinances, and of chief power in
Christian experience.


    Martin Luther, when he had realized the truth of the Atonement,
    was found sobbing before a crucifix and moaning: “Für mich! für
    mich!”—“For me! for me!” Elisha Kane, the Arctic explorer, while
    searching for signs of Sir John Franklin and his party, sent out
    eight or ten men to explore the surrounding region. After several
    days three returned, almost crazed with the cold—thermometer fifty
    degrees below zero—and reported that the other men were dying
    miles away. Dr. Kane organized a company of ten, and though
    suffering himself with an old heart-trouble, led them to the
    rescue. Three times he fainted during the eighteen hours of
    marching and suffering; but he found the men. “We knew you would
    come! we knew you would come, brother!” whispered one of them,
    hardly able to speak. Why was he sure Dr. Kane would come? Because
    he knew the stuff Dr. Kane was made of, and knew that he would
    risk his life for any one of them. It is a parable of Christ’s
    relation to our salvation. He is our elder brother, bone of our
    bone and flesh of our flesh, and he not only risks death, but he
    endures death, in order to save us.


(_g_) It gives us the only means of understanding the sufferings of Christ
in the garden and on the cross, or of reconciling them with the divine
justice.


    Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre: “Man has a guilt that demands the
    punitive sufferings of a mediator. Christ shows a suffering that
    cannot be justified except by reference to some other guilt than
    his own. Combine these two facts, and you have the problem of the
    atonement solved.” J. G. Whittier: “Through all the depths of sin
    and loss Drops the plummet of the Cross; Never yet abyss was found
    Deeper than the Cross could sound.” Alcestis purchased life for
    Admetus her husband by dying in his stead; Marcus Curtius saved
    Rome by leaping into the yawning chasm; the Russian servant threw
    himself to the wolves to rescue his master. Berdoe, Robert
    Browning, 47—“To know God as the theist knows him may suffice for
    pure spirits, for those who have never sinned, suffered, nor felt
    the need of a Savior; but for fallen and sinful men the Christ of
    Christianity is an imperative necessity; and those who have never
    surrendered themselves to him have never known what it is to
    experience the rest he gives to the heavy-laden soul.”


(_h_) As no other theory does, this view satisfies the ethical demand of
human nature; pacifies the convicted conscience; assures the sinner that
he may find instant salvation in Christ; and so makes possible a new life
of holiness, while at the same time it furnishes the highest incentives to
such a life.


    Shedd: “The offended party (1) permits a substitution; (2)
    provides a substitute; (3) substitutes himself.” George Eliot:
    “Justice is like the kingdom of God; it is not without us, as a
    fact; it is ‘within us,’ as a great yearning.” But it is both
    without and within, and the inward is only the reflection of the
    outward; the subjective demands of conscience only reflect the
    objective demands of holiness.

    And yet, while this view of the atonement exalts the holiness of
    God, it surpasses every other view in its moving exhibition of
    God’s love—a love that is not satisfied with suffering in and with
    the sinner, or with making that suffering a demonstration of God’s
    regard for law; but a love that sinks itself into the sinner’s
    guilt and bears his penalty,—comes down so low as to make itself
    one with him in all but his depravity—makes every sacrifice but
    the sacrifice of God’s holiness—a sacrifice which God could not
    make, without ceasing to be God; see _1 John 4:10_—“_Herein is
    love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his
    Son to be the propitiation for our sins._” The soldier who had
    been thought reprobate was moved to complete reform when he was
    once forgiven. William Huntington, in his Autobiography, says that
    one of his sharpest sensations of pain, after he had been
    quickened by divine grace, was that he felt such pity for God.
    Never was man abused as God has been. _Rom. 2:4_—“_the goodness of
    God leadeth thee to repentance_”; _12:1_—“_the mercies of God_”
    lead you “_to present your bodies a living sacrifice_”; _2 Cor.
    5:14, 15_—“_the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus
    judge, that one died for all, therefore all died; and he died for
    all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves,
    but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again._” The effect
    of Christ’s atonement on Christian character and life may be
    illustrated from the proclamation of Garabaldi: “He that loves
    Italy, let him follow me! I promise him hardship, I promise him
    suffering, I promise him death. But he that loves Italy, let him
    follow me!”


D. Objections to the Ethical Theory of the Atonement.


    On the general subject of these objections, Philippi,
    Glaubenslehre, iv, 2:156-180, remarks: (1) that it rests with God
    alone to say whether he will pardon sin, and in what way he will
    pardon it; (2) that human instincts are a very unsafe standard by
    which to judge the procedure of the Governor of the universe; and
    (3) that one plain declaration of God, with regard to the plan of
    salvation, proves the fallacy and error of all reasonings against
    it. We must correct our watches and clocks by astronomic
    standards.


(_a_) That a God who does not pardon sin without atonement must lack
either omnipotence or love.—We answer, on the one hand, that God’s
omnipotence is the revelation of his nature, and not a matter of arbitrary
will; and, on the other hand, that God’s love is ever exercised
consistently with his fundamental attribute of holiness, so that while
holiness demands the sacrifice, love provides it. Mercy is shown, not by
trampling upon the claims of justice, but by vicariously satisfying them.


    Because man does not need to avenge personal wrongs, it does not
    follow that God must not. In fact, such avenging is forbidden to
    us upon the ground that it belongs to God; _Rom. 12:19_—“_Avenge
    not yourselves, beloved, but give place unto wrath: for it is
    written, Vengeance belongeth unto me; I will recompense, saith the
    Lord._” But there are limits even to our passing over of offences.
    Even the father must sometimes chastise; and although this
    chastisement is not properly punishment, it becomes punishment,
    when the father becomes a teacher or a governor. Then, other than
    personal interests come in. “Because a father can forgive without
    atonement, it does not follow that the state can do the same”
    (Shedd). But God is more than Father, more than Teacher, more than
    Governor. In him, person and right are identical. For him to let
    sin go unpunished is to approve of it; which is the same as a
    denial of holiness.

    Whatever pardon is granted, then, must be pardon through
    punishment. Mere repentance never expiates crime, even under civil
    government. The truly penitent man never feels that his repentance
    constitutes a ground of acceptance; the more he repents, the more
    he recognizes his need of reparation and expiation. Hence God
    meets the demand of man’s conscience, as well as of his own
    holiness, when he provides a substituted punishment. God shows his
    love by meeting the demands of holiness, and by meeting them with
    the sacrifice of himself. See Mozley on Predestination, 390.

    The publican prays, not that God may be merciful without
    sacrifice, but: “_God be propitiated toward me, the sinner!_”
    (_Luke 18:13_); in other words, he asks for mercy only through and
    upon the ground of, sacrifice. We cannot atone to others for the
    wrong we have done them, nor can we even atone to our own souls. A
    third party, and an infinite being, must make atonement, as we
    cannot. It is only upon the ground that God himself has made
    provision for satisfying the claims of justice, that we are bidden
    to forgive others. Should Othello then forgive Iago? Yes, if Iago
    repents; _Luke 17:3_—“_If thy brother sin, rebuke him; and if he
    repent, forgive him._” But if he does not repent? Yes, so far as
    Othello’s own disposition is concerned. He must not hate Iago, but
    must wish him well; _Luke 6:27_—“_Love your enemies, do good to
    them that hate you, bless them that curse you, pray for them that
    despitefully use you._” But he cannot receive Iago to his
    fellowship till he repents. On the duty and ground of forgiving
    one another, see Martineau, Seat of Authority, 613, 614; Straffen,
    Hulsean Lectures on the Propitiation for Sin.


(_b_) That satisfaction and forgiveness are mutually exclusive.—We answer
that, since it is not a third party, but the Judge himself, who makes
satisfaction to his own violated holiness, forgiveness is still optional,
and may be offered upon terms agreeable to himself. Christ’s sacrifice is
not a pecuniary, but a penal, satisfaction. The objection is valid against
the merely commercial view of the atonement, not against the ethical view
of it.


    Forgiveness is something beyond the mere taking away of penalty.
    When a man bears the penalty of his crime, has the community no
    right to be indignant with him? There is a distinction between
    pecuniary and penal satisfaction. Pecuniary satisfaction has
    respect only to the thing due; penal satisfaction has respect also
    to the person of the offender. If pardon is a matter of justice in
    God’s government, it is so only as respects Christ. To the
    recipient it is only mercy. “_Faithful and righteous to forgive us
    our sins_” (_1 John 1:9_)—faithful to his promise, and righteous
    to Christ. Neither the atonement, nor the promise, gives the
    offender any personal claim.

    Philemon must forgive Onesimus the pecuniary _debt_, when Paul
    pays it; not so with the personal _injury_ Onesimus has done to
    Philemon; there is no forgiveness of this, until Onesimus repents
    and asks pardon. An amnesty may be offered to all, but upon
    conditions. Instance Amos Lawrence’s offering to the forger the
    forged paper he had bought up, upon condition that he would
    confess himself bankrupt, and put all his affairs into the hands
    of his benefactor. So the fact that Christ has paid our debts does
    not preclude his offering to us the benefit of what he has done,
    upon condition of our repentance and faith. The equivalent is not
    furnished by man, but by God. God may therefore offer the results
    of it upon his own terms. Did then the entire race fairly pay its
    penalty when one suffered, just as all incurred the penalty when
    one sinned? Yes,—all who receive their life from each—Adam on the
    one hand, and Christ on the other. See under Union with Christ—its
    Consequences; see also Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 295 note,
    321, and Dogm. Theol., 2:383-389; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:614-615
    (Syst. Doct., 4:82, 83). _Versus_ Current Discussions in Theology,
    5:281.

    Hovey calls Christ’s relation to human sin a vice-penal one. Just
    as vice-regal position carries with it all the responsibility,
    care, and anxiety of regal authority, so does a vice-penal
    relation to sin carry with it all the suffering and loss of the
    original punishment. The person on whom it falls is different, but
    his punishment is the same, at least in penal value. As vice-regal
    authority may be superseded by regal, so vice-penal suffering, if
    despised, may be superseded by the original penalty. Is there a
    waste of vice-penal suffering when any are lost for whom it was
    endured? On the same principle we might object to any suffering on
    the part of Christ for those who refuse to be saved by him. Such
    suffering may benefit others, if not those for whom it was in the
    first instance endured.

    If compensation is made, it is said, there is nothing to forgive;
    if forgiveness is granted, no compensation can be required. This
    reminds us of Narvaez, who saw no reason for forgiving his enemies
    until he had shot them all. When the offended party furnishes the
    compensation, he can offer its benefits upon his own terms. Dr.
    Pentecost: “A prisoner in Scotland was brought before the Judge.
    As the culprit entered the box, he looked into the face of the
    Judge to see if he could discover mercy there. The Judge and the
    prisoner exchanged glances, and then there came a mutual
    recognition. The prisoner said to himself: ‘It is all right this
    time,’ for the Judge had been his classmate in Edinburgh
    University twenty-five years before. When sentence was pronounced,
    it was five pounds sterling, the limit of the law for the
    misdemeanor charged, and the culprit was sorely disappointed as he
    was led away to prison. But the Judge went at once and paid the
    fine, telling the clerk to write the man’s discharge. This the
    Judge delivered in person, explaining that the demands of the law
    must be met, and having been met, the man was free.”


(_c_) That there can be no real propitiation, since the judge and the
sacrifice are one.—We answer that this objection ignores the existence of
personal relations within the divine nature, and the fact that the God-man
is distinguishable from God. The satisfaction is grounded in the
distinction of persons in the Godhead; while the love in which it
originates belongs to the unity of the divine essence.


    The satisfaction is not rendered to a _part_ of the Godhead, for
    the whole Godhead is in the Father, in a certain manner; as
    omnipresence = _totus in omni parte_. So the offering is perfect,
    because the whole Godhead is also in Christ (_2 Cor. 5:19_—“_God
    was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself_”). Lyman Abbott
    says that the word “propitiate” is used in the New Testament only
    in the middle voice, to show that God propitiates himself.
    Lyttelton, in Lux Mundi, 302—“The Atonement is undoubtedly a
    mystery, but all forgiveness is a mystery. It avails to lift the
    load of guilt that presses upon an offender. A change passes over
    him that can only be described as regenerative, life-giving; and
    thus the assurance of pardon, however conveyed, may be said to
    obliterate in some degree the consequences of the past. 310—Christ
    bore sufferings, not that we might be freed from them, for we have
    deserved them, but that we might be enabled to bear them, as he
    did, victoriously and in unbroken union with God.”


(_d_) That the suffering of the innocent for the guilty is not an
execution of justice, but an act of manifest injustice.—We answer, that
this is true only upon the supposition that the Son bears the penalty of
our sins, not voluntarily, but compulsorily; or upon the supposition that
one who is personally innocent can in no way become involved in the guilt
and penalty of others,—both of them hypotheses contrary to Scripture and
to fact.


    The mystery of the atonement lies in the fact of unmerited
    sufferings on the part of Christ. Over against this stands the
    corresponding mystery of unmerited pardon to believers. We have
    attempted to show that, while Christ was personally innocent, he
    was so involved with others in the consequences of the Fall, that
    the guilt and penalty of the race belonged to him to bear. When we
    discuss the doctrine of Justification, we shall see that, by a
    similar union of the believer with Christ, Christ’s justification
    becomes ours.

    To one who believes in Christ as the immanent God, the life of
    humanity, the Creator and Upholder of mankind, the bearing by
    Christ of the just punishment of human sin seems inevitable. The
    very laws of nature are only the manifestation of his holiness,
    and he who thus reveals God is also subject to God’s law. The
    historical process which culminated on Calvary was the
    manifestation of an age-long suffering endured by Christ on
    account of his connection with the race from the very first moment
    of their sin. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 80-83—“A God of
    love and holiness must be a God of suffering just so certainly as
    there is sin. Paul declares that he fills up ‘_that which is
    lacking of the afflictions of Christ ... for his body’s sake,
    which is the church_’ (_Col. 1:24_); in other words, Christ still
    suffers in the believers who are his body. The historical
    suffering indeed is ended; the agony of Golgotha is finished; the
    days when joy was swallowed up in sorrow are past; death has no
    more dominion over our Lord. But sorrow for sin is not ended; it
    still continues and will continue so long as sin exists. But it
    does not now militate against Christ’s blessedness, because the
    sorrow is overbalanced and overborne by the infinite knowledge and
    glory of his divine nature. Bushnell and Beecher were right when
    they maintained that suffering for sin was the natural consequence
    of Christ’s relation to the sinning creation. They were wrong in
    mistaking the nature of that suffering and in not seeing that the
    constitution of things which necessitates it, since it is the
    expression of God’s holiness, gives that suffering a penal
    character and makes Christ a substitutionary offering for the sins
    of the world.”


(_e_) That there can be no transfer of punishment or merit, since these
are personal.—We answer that the idea of representation and suretyship is
common in human society and government; and that such representation and
suretyship are inevitable, wherever there is community of life between the
innocent and the guilty. When Christ took our nature, he could not do
otherwise than take our responsibilities also.


    Christ became responsible for the humanity with which he was
    organically one. Both poets and historians have recognized the
    propriety of one member of a house, or a race, answering for
    another. Antigone expiates the crime of her house. Marcus Curtius
    holds himself ready to die for his nation. Louis XVI has been
    called a “sacrificial lamb,” offered up for the crimes of his
    race. So Christ’s sacrifice is of benefit to the whole family of
    man, because he is one with that family. But here is the
    limitation also. It does not extend to angels, because he took not
    on him the nature of angels (_Heb. 2:16_—“_For verily not of the
    angels doth he take hold, but he taketh hold of the seed of
    Abraham_”).

    “A strange thing happened recently in one of our courts of
    justice. A young man was asked why the extreme penalty should not
    be passed upon him. At that moment, a gray-haired man, his face
    furrowed with sorrow, stepped into the prisoner’s box unhindered,
    placed his hand affectionately upon the culprit’s shoulder, and
    said: ‘Your honor, we have nothing to say. The verdict which has
    been found against us is just. We have only to ask for mercy.’
    ‘We!’ There was nothing against this old father. Yet, at that
    moment he lost himself. He identified his very being with that of
    his wayward boy. Do you not pity the criminal son because of your
    pity for his aged and sorrowing father? Because he has so
    suffered, is not your demand that the son suffer somewhat
    mitigated? Will not the judge modify his sentence on that account?
    Nature knows no forgiveness; but human nature does; and it is not
    nature, but human nature, that is made in the image of God”; see
    Prof. A. S. Coats, in The Examiner, Sept. 12, 1889.


(_f_) That remorse, as a part of the penalty of sin, could not have been
suffered by Christ.—We answer, on the one hand, that it may not be
essential to the idea of penalty that Christ should have borne the
identical pangs which the lost would have endured; and, on the other hand,
that we do not know how completely a perfectly holy being, possessed of
super-human knowledge and love, might have felt even the pangs of remorse
for the condition of that humanity of which he was the central conscience
and heart.


    Instance the lawyer, mourning the fall of a star of his
    profession; the woman, filled with shame by the degradation of one
    of her own sex; the father, anguished by his daughter’s
    waywardness; the Christian, crushed by the sins of the church and
    the world. The self-isolating spirit cannot conceive how perfectly
    love and holiness can make their own the sin of the race of which
    they are a part.

    Simon, Reconciliation, 366—“Inasmuch as the sin of the human race
    culminated in the crucifixion which crowned Christ’s own
    sufferings, clearly the life of humanity entering him
    subconsciously must have been most completely laden with sin and
    with the fear of death which is its fruit, at the very moment when
    he himself was enduring death in its most terrible form. Of
    necessity therefore he felt as if he were the sinner of sinners,
    and cried out in agony: ‘_My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
    me?_’ (_Mat. 27:46_).”

    Christ could realize our penal condition. Beings who have a like
    spiritual nature can realize and bear the spiritual sufferings of
    one another. David’s sorrow was not unjust, when he cried: “_Would
    I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!_” (_2 Sam.
    18:33_). Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 117—“Is penitence
    possible in the personally sinless? We answer that only one who is
    perfectly sinless can perfectly repent, and this identification of
    the sinless with the sinner is vital to the gospel.” Lucy Larcom:
    “There be sad women, sick and poor. And those who walk in garments
    soiled; Their shame, their sorrow I endure; By their defeat my
    hope is foiled; The blot they bear is on my name; Who sins, and I
    am not to blame?”


(_g_) That the sufferings of Christ, as finite in time, do not constitute
a satisfaction to the infinite demands of the law.—We answer that the
infinite dignity of the sufferer constitutes his sufferings a full
equivalent, in the eye of infinite justice. Substitution excludes identity
of suffering; it does not exclude equivalence. Since justice aims its
penalties not so much at the person as at the sin, it may admit equivalent
suffering, when this is endured in the very nature that has sinned.


    The sufferings of a dog, and of a man, have different values.
    Death is the wages of sin; and Christ, in suffering death,
    suffered our penalty. Eternity of suffering is unessential to the
    idea of penalty. A finite being cannot exhaust an infinite curse;
    but an infinite being can exhaust it, in a few brief hours. Shedd,
    Discourses and Essays, 307—“A golden eagle is worth a thousand
    copper cents. The penalty paid by Christ is strictly and literally
    _equivalent_ to that which the sinner would have borne, although
    it is not _identical_. The vicarious bearing of it excludes the
    latter.” Andrew Fuller thought Christ would have had to suffer
    just as much, if only one sinner were to have been saved thereby.

    The atonement is a unique fact, only partially illustrated by debt
    and penalty. Yet the terms “purchase” and “ransom” are Scriptural,
    and mean simply that the justice of God punishes sin as it
    deserves; and that, having determined what is deserved, God cannot
    change. See Owen, quoted in Campbell on Atonement, 58, 59.
    Christ’s sacrifice, since it is absolutely infinite, can have
    nothing added to it. If Christ’s sacrifice satisfies the Judge of
    all, it may well satisfy us.


(_h_) That if Christ’s passive obedience made satisfaction to the divine
justice, then his active obedience was superfluous.—We answer that the
active obedience and the passive obedience are inseparable. The latter is
essential to the former; and both are needed to secure for the sinner, on
the one hand, pardon, and, on the other hand, that which goes beyond
pardon, namely, restoration to the divine favor. The objection holds only
against a superficial and external view of the atonement.


    For more full exposition of this point, see our treatment of
    Justification; and also, Owen, in Works, 5:175-204. Both the
    active and the passive obedience of Christ are insisted on by the
    apostle Paul. Opposition to the Pauline theology is opposition to
    the gospel of Christ. Charles Cuthbert Hall, Universal Elements of
    the Christian Religion, 140—“The effects of this are already
    appearing in the impoverished religious values of the sermons
    produced by the younger generation of preachers, and the
    deplorable decline of spiritual life and knowledge in many
    churches. Results open to observation show that the movement to
    simplify the Christian essence by discarding the theology of St.
    Paul easily carries the teaching of the Christian pulpit to a
    position where, for those who submit to that teaching, the
    characteristic experiences of the Christian life became
    practically impossible. The Christian sense of sin; Christian
    penitence at the foot of the Cross; Christian faith in an atoning
    Savior; Christian peace with God through the mediation of Jesus
    Christ—these and other experiences, which were the very life of
    apostles and apostolic souls, fade from the view of the ministry,
    have no meaning for the younger generation.”


(_i_) That the doctrine is immoral in its practical tendencies, since
Christ’s obedience takes the place of ours, and renders ours
unnecessary.—We answer that the objection ignores not only the method by
which the benefits of the atonement are appropriated, namely, repentance
and faith, but also the regenerating and sanctifying power bestowed upon
all who believe. Faith in the atonement does not induce license, but
“works by love” (Gal. 5:6) and “cleanses the heart” (Acts 15:9).


    Water is of little use to a thirsty man, if he will not drink. The
    faith which accepts Christ ratifies all that Christ has done, and
    takes Christ as a new principle of life. Paul bids Philemon
    receive Onesimus as himself,—not the old Onesimus, but a new
    Onesimus into whom the spirit of Paul has entered (_Philemon 17_).
    So God receives us as new creatures in Christ. Though we cannot
    earn salvation, we must take it; and this taking it involves a
    surrender of heart and life which ensures union with Christ and
    moral progress.

    What shall be done to the convicted murderer who tears up the
    pardon which his wife’s prayers and tears have secured from the
    Governor? Nothing remains but to execute the sentence of the law.
    Hon. George F. Danforth, Justice of the New York State Court of
    Appeals, in a private letter says: “Although it may be stated in a
    general way that a pardon reaches both the punishment prescribed
    for the offence and the guilt of the offender, so that in the eye
    of the law he is as innocent as if he had never committed the
    offence, the pardon making him as it were a new man with a new
    credit and capacity, yet a delivery of the pardon is essential to
    its validity, and delivery is not complete without acceptance. It
    cannot be forced upon him. In that respect it is like a deed. The
    delivery may be in person to the offender or to his agent, and its
    acceptance may be proved by circumstances like any other fact.”


(_j_) That if the atonement requires faith as its complement, then it does
not in itself furnish a complete satisfaction to God’s justice.—We answer
that faith is not the ground of our acceptance with God, as the atonement
is, and so is not a work at all; faith is only the medium of
appropriation. We are saved not by faith, or on account of faith, but only
through faith. It is not faith, but the atonement which faith accepts,
that satisfies the justice of God.


    Illustrate by the amnesty granted to a city, upon conditions to be
    accepted by each inhabitant. The acceptance is not the ground upon
    which the amnesty is granted; it is the medium through which the
    benefits of the amnesty are enjoyed. With regard to the
    difficulties connected with the atonement, we may say, in
    conclusion, with Bishop Butler: “If the Scripture has, as surely
    it has, left this matter of the satisfaction of Christ mysterious,
    left somewhat in it unrevealed, all conjectures about it must be,
    if not evidently absurd, yet at least uncertain. Nor has any one
    reason to complain for want of further information, unless he can
    show his claim to it.” While we cannot say with President Stearns:
    “Christ’s work removed the hindrances in the eternal justice of
    the universe to the pardon of the sinner, but _how_ we cannot
    tell”—cannot say this, because we believe the main outlines of the
    plan of salvation to be revealed in Scripture—yet we grant that
    many questions remain unsolved. But, as bread nourishes even those
    who know nothing of its chemical constituents, or of the method of
    its digestion and assimilation, so the atonement of Christ saves
    those who accept it, even though they do not know _how_ it saves
    them. Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 264-267—“Heat was once
    thought to be a form of matter; now it is regarded as a mode of
    motion. We can get the good of it, whichever theory we adopt, or
    even if we have no theory. So we may get the good of
    reconciliation with God, even though we differ as to our theory of
    the Atonement.”—“One of the Roman Emperors commanded his fleet to
    bring from Alexandria sand for the arena, although his people at
    Rome were visited with famine. But a certain shipmaster declared
    that, whatever the emperor commanded, his ship should bring wheat.
    So, whatever sand others may bring to starving human souls, let us
    bring to them the wheat of the gospel—the substitutionary
    atonement of Jesus Christ.” For answers to objections, see
    Philippi, Glaubenslehre, iv, 2:156-180; Crawford, Atonement,
    384-468; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:526-543; Baird, Elohim Revealed,
    623 sq.; Wm. Thomson, The Atoning Work of Christ; Hopkins, Works,
    1:321.


E. The Extent of the Atonement.


The Scriptures represent the atonement as having been made for all men,
and as sufficient for the salvation of all. Not the _atonement_ therefore
is limited, but the _application_ of the atonement through the work of the
Holy Spirit.

Upon this principle of a universal atonement, but a special application of
it to the elect, we must interpret such passages as Eph. 1:4, 7; 2 Tim.
1:9, 10; John 17:9, 20, 24—asserting a special efficacy of the atonement
in the case of the elect; and also such passages as 2 Pet. 2:1; 1 John
2:2; Tim. 2:6; 4:10; Tit. 2:11—asserting that the death of Christ is for
all.


    Passages asserting special efficacy of the atonement, in the case
    of the elect, are the following: _Eph. 1:4_—“_chose us in him
    before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and
    without __ blemish before him in love_”; _7_—“_in whom we have our
    redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses,
    according to the riches of his grace_”; _2 Tim. 1:9, 10_—God “_who
    saved us, and called us with a holy calling, not according to our
    works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given
    us in Christ Jesus before times eternal, but hath now been
    manifested by the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who
    abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through
    the gospel_”; _John 17:9_—“_I pray for them: I pray not for the
    world, but for those whom thou hast given me_”; _20_—“_Neither for
    these only do I pray, but for them also that believe on me through
    their word_”; _24_—“_Father, that which thou hast given me, I
    desire that where I am, they also may be with me; that they may
    beheld my glory, which thou hast given me._”

    Passages asserting that the death of Christ is for all are the
    following: _2 Pet 2:1_—“_false teachers, who shall privily bring
    in destructive heresies, denying even the Master that bought
    them_”; _1 John 2:2_—“_and he is the propitiation for our sins;
    and not for ours only, but also for the whole world_”; _1 Tim.
    2:6_—Christ Jesus “_who gave himself a ransom for all_”;
    _4:10_—“_the living God, who is the Savior of all men, specially
    of them that believe_”; _Tit. 2:11_—“_For the grace of God hath
    appeared, bringing salvation to all men._” _Rom. 3:22_ (A.
    V.)—“_unto all and upon all them that believe_”—has sometimes been
    interpreted as meaning “unto all men, and upon all believers” (εἰς
    = destination; ἐπί = extent). But the Rev. Vers. omits the words
    “_and upon all_,” and Meyer, who retains the words, remarks that
    τοῦς πιστεύοντας belongs to πάντας in both instances.

    Unconscious participation in the atonement of Christ, by virtue of
    our common humanity in him, makes us the heirs of much temporal
    blessing. Conscious participation in the atonement of Christ, by
    virtue of our faith in him and his work for us, gives us
    justification and eternal life. Matthew Henry said that the
    Atonement is “sufficient for all; effectual for many.” J. M.
    Whiton, in The Outlook, Sept. 25, 1897—“It was Samuel Hopkins of
    Rhode Island (1721-1803) who first declared that Christ had made
    atonement for all men, not for the elect part alone, as Calvinists
    affirmed.” We should say “as some Calvinists affirmed”; for, as we
    shall see, John Calvin himself declared that “Christ suffered for
    the sins of the whole world.” Alfred Tennyson once asked an old
    Methodist woman what was the news. “Why, Mr. Tennyson, there’s
    only one piece of news that I know,—that Christ died for all men.”
    And he said to her; “That is old news, and good news, and new
    news.”


If it be asked in what sense Christ is the Savior of all men, we reply:

(_a_) That the atonement of Christ secures for all men a delay in the
execution of the sentence against sin, and a space for repentance,
together with a continuance of the common blessings of life which have
been forfeited by transgression.


    If strict justice had been executed, the race would have been cut
    off at the first sin. That man lives after sinning, is due wholly
    to the Cross. There is a pretermission, or “_passing over of the
    sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God_” (_Rom. 3:25_),
    the justification of which is found only in the sacrifice of
    Calvary. This “_passing over_,” however, is limited in its
    duration: see _Acts 17:30, 31_—“_The times of ignorance therefore
    God overlooked; but now he commandeth men that they should all
    everywhere repent: inasmuch as he hath appointed a day in which he
    will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he hath
    ordained._”

    One may get the benefit of the law of gravitation without
    understanding much about its nature, and patriarchs and heathen
    have doubtless been saved through Christ’s atonement, although
    they have never heard his name, but have only cast themselves as
    helpless sinners upon the mercy of God. That mercy of God was
    Christ, though they did not know it. Our modern pious Jews will
    experience a strange surprise when they find that not only
    forgiveness of sin but every other blessing of life has come to
    them through the crucified Jesus. _Matt. 8:11_—“_many shall come
    from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and
    Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven._”

    Dr. G.W. Northrop held that the work of Christ is universal in
    three respects: 1. It reconciled God to the whole race, apart from
    personal transgression; 2. It secured the bestowment upon all of
    common grace, and the means of common grace; 3. It rendered
    certain the bestowment of eternal life upon all who would so use
    common grace and the means of common grace as to make it morally
    possible for God as a wise and holy Governor to grant his special
    and renewing grace.


(_b_) That the atonement of Christ has made objective provision for the
salvation of all, by removing from the divine mind every obstacle to the
pardon and restoration of sinners, except their wilful opposition to God
and refusal to turn to him.


    Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 604—“On God’s side, all is now taken
    away which could make a separation,—unless any should themselves
    choose to remain separated from him.” The gospel message is not:
    God will forgive if you return; but rather: God _has_ shown mercy;
    only believe, and it is your portion in Christ.

    Ashmore, The New Trial of the Sinner, in Christian Review,
    26:245-264—“The atonement has come to all men and upon all men.
    Its coëxtensiveness with the effects of Adam’s sin is seen in that
    all creatures, such as infants and insane persons, incapable of
    refusing it, are saved without their consent, just as they were
    involved in the sin of Adam without their consent. The reason why
    others are not saved is because when the atonement comes to them
    and upon them, instead of consenting to be included in it, they
    reject it. If they are born under the curse, so likewise they are
    born under the atonement which is intended to remove that curse;
    they remain under its shelter till they are old enough to
    repudiate it; they shut out its influences as a man closes his
    window-blind to shut out the beams of the sun; they ward them off
    by direct opposition, as a man builds dykes around his field to
    keep out the streams which would otherwise flow in and fertilize
    the soil.”


(_c_) That the atonement of Christ has procured for all men the powerful
incentives to repentance presented in the Cross, and the combined agency
of the Christian church and of the Holy Spirit, by which these incentives
are brought to bear upon them.


    Just as much sun and rain would be needed, if only one farmer on
    earth were to be benefited. Christ would not need to suffer more,
    if all were to be saved. His sufferings, as we have seen, were not
    the payment of a pecuniary debt. Having endured the penalty of the
    sinner, justice permits the sinner’s discharge, but does not
    require it, except as the fulfilment of a promise to his
    substitute, and then only upon the appointed condition of
    repentance and faith. The _atonement_ is unlimited,—the whole
    human race might be saved through it; the _application_ of the
    atonement is limited,—only those who repent and believe are
    actually saved by it.

    Robert G. Farley: “The prospective mother prepares a complete and
    beautiful outfit for her expected child. But the child is
    still-born. Yet the outfit was prepared just the same as if it had
    lived. And Christ’s work is completed as much for one man as for
    another, as much for the unbeliever as for the believer.”


Christ is specially the Savior of those who believe, in that he exerts a
special power of his Spirit to procure their acceptance of his salvation.
This is not, however, a part of his work of atonement; it is the
application of the atonement, and as such is hereafter to be considered.


    Among those who hold to a limited atonement is Owen. Campbell
    quotes him as saying: “Christ did not die for all the sins of all
    men; for if this were so, why are not all freed from the
    punishment of all their sins? You will say, ‘Because of their
    unbelief,—they will not believe.’ But this unbelief is a sin, and
    Christ was punished for it. Why then does this, more than other
    sins, hinder them from partaking of the fruits of his death?”

    So also Turretin, loc. 4, quæs. 10 and 17; Symington, Atonement,
    184-234; Candlish on the Atonement; Cunningham, Hist. Theol.,
    2:323-370; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:464-489. For the view presented
    in the text, see Andrew Fuller, Works, 2:373, 374; 689-698;
    706-709; Wardlaw, Syst. Theol., 2:485-549; Jenkyn, Extent of the
    Atonement; E. P. Griffin, Extent of the Atonement; Woods, Works,
    2:490-521; Richards, Lectures on Theology, 302-327.


2. Christ’s Intercessory Work.


The Priesthood of Christ does not cease with his work of atonement, but
continues forever. In the presence of God he fulfils the second office of
the priest, namely that of intercession.


    _Heb. 7:23-25_—“_priests many in number, because that by death
    they are hindered from continuing: but he, because he abideth
    forever, hath his priesthood unchangeable. Wherefore also he is
    able to save to the uttermost them that draw near onto God through
    him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them._” C. H.
    M. on _Ex. 17:12_—“The hands of our great Intercessor never hang
    down, as Moses’ did, nor does he need any one to hold them up. The
    same rod of God’s power which was used by Moses to smite the rock
    (Atonement) was in Moses’ hand on the hill (Intercession).”

    Denney’s Studies in Theology, 166—“If we see nothing unnatural in
    the fact that Christ prayed for Peter on earth, we need not make
    any difficulty about his praying for us in heaven. The relation is
    the same; the only difference is that Christ is now exalted, and
    prays, not with strong crying and tears, but in the sovereignty
    and prevailing power of one who has achieved eternal redemption
    for his people.”


A. Nature of Christ’s Intercession.—This is not to be conceived of either
as an external and vocal petitioning, nor as a mere figure of speech for
the natural and continuous influence of his sacrifice; but rather as a
special activity of Christ in securing, upon the ground of that sacrifice,
whatever of blessing comes to men, whether that blessing be temporal or
spiritual.


    _1 John 2:1_—“_if any man sin, we have an advocate with the
    Father, Jesus Christ the righteous_”; _Rom. 8:34_—“_It is Jesus
    Christ that died, yea rather, that was raised from the dead, who
    is at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for
    us_”—here Meyer seems to favor the meaning of external and vocal
    petitioning, as of the glorified God-man: _Heb. 7:25_—“_ever
    liveth to make intercession for them._” On the ground of this
    effectual intercession he can pronounce the true sacerdotal
    _benediction_; and all the benedictions of his ministers and
    apostles are but fruits and emblems of this (see the Aaronic
    benediction in _Num. 6:24-26_, and the apostolic benedictions in
    _1 Cor. 1:3_ and _2 Cor. 13:14_).


B. Objects of Christ’s Intercession.—We may distinguish (_a_) that general
intercession which secures to all men certain temporal benefits of his
atoning work, and (_b_) that special intercession which secures the divine
acceptance of the persons of believers and the divine bestowment of all
gifts needful for their salvation.


    (_a_) General intercession for all men: _Is. 53:12_—“_he bare the
    sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors_”; _Luke
    23:34_—“_And Jesus said, Father, forgive them; for they know not
    what they do_”—a beginning of his priestly intercession, even
    while he was being nailed to the cross.

    (_b_) Special intercession for his saints: _Mat. 18:19, 20_—“_if
    two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they
    shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in
    heaven. For when two or three are gathered together in my name,
    there am I in the midst of them_”; _Luke 22:31, 32_—“_Simon,
    Simon, behold, Satan asked to have you, that he might sift you as
    wheat: but I made supplication for thee, that thy faith fail
    not_”; _John 14:16_—“_I will pray the Father, and he shall give
    you another Comforter_”; _17:9_—“_I pray for them; I pray not for
    the world, but for those whom thou hast given me_”; _Acts
    2:33_—“_Being therefore by the right hand of God exalted, and
    having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he
    hath poured forth this, which ye see and hear_”; _Eph. 1:6_—“_the
    glory of his grace, which he freely bestowed on us in the
    Beloved_”; _2:18_—“_through him we both have our access in one
    Spirit unto the Father_”; _3:12_—“_in whom we have boldness and
    access in confidence through our faith in him_”; _Heb. 2:17,
    18_—“_Wherefore it behooved him in all things to be made like unto
    his brethren, that he might become a merciful and faithful high
    priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the
    sins of the people. For in that he himself hath suffered being
    tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted_”; _4:15,
    16_—“_For we have not a high priest that cannot be touched with
    the feeling of our infirmities; but one that hath been in all
    points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore
    draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace, that we may
    receive mercy, and may find grace to help as in time of need_”; _1
    Pet 2:5_—“_a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices,
    acceptable to God through Jesus Christ_”; _Rev. 5:6_—“_And I saw
    in the midst of the throne ... a Lamb standing, as though it had
    been slain, having seven horns, and seven eyes, which are the
    seven Spirits of God, sent forth into all the earth_”; _7:16,
    17_—“_They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither
    shall the sun strike upon them, nor any heat: for the lamb that is
    in the midst of the throne shall be their shepherd, and shall
    guide them unto fountains of waters of life: and God shall wipe
    away every tear from their eyes._”


C. Relation of Christ’s Intercession to that of the Holy Spirit.—The Holy
Spirit is an advocate within us, teaching us how to pray as we ought;
Christ is an advocate in heaven, securing from the Father the answer of
our prayers. Thus the work of Christ and of the Holy Spirit are
complements to each other, and parts of one whole.


    _John 14:26_—“_But the Comforter, even the Holy Spirit, whom the
    Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and
    bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you_”; _Rom.
    8:26_—“_And in like manner the Spirit __ also helpeth our
    infirmity: for we know not how to pray as we ought; but the Spirit
    himself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be
    uttered_”; _27_—“_and he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is
    the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the
    saints according to the will of God._”

    The intercession of the Holy Spirit may be illustrated by the work
    of the mother, who teaches her child to pray by putting words into
    his mouth or by suggesting subjects for prayer. “The whole Trinity
    is present in the Christian’s closet; the Father hears; the Son
    advocates his cause at the Father’s right hand; the Holy Spirit
    intercedes in the heart of the believer.” Therefore “When God
    inclines the heart to pray, He hath an ear to hear.” The impulse
    to prayer, within our hearts, is evidence that Christ is urging
    our claims in heaven.


D. Relation of Christ’s Intercession to that of saints.—All true
intercession is either directly or indirectly the intercession of Christ.
Christians are organs of Christ’s Spirit. To suppose Christ in us to offer
prayer to one of his saints, instead of directly to the Father, is to
blaspheme Christ, and utterly misconceive the nature of prayer.


    Saints on earth, by their union with Christ, the great high
    priest, are themselves constituted intercessors; and as the high
    priest of old bore upon his bosom the breastplate engraven with
    the names of the tribes of Israel (_Ex. 28:9-12_), so the
    Christian is to bear upon his heart in prayer before God the
    interests of his family, the church, and the world (_1 Tim.
    3:1_—“_I exhort therefore, first of all, that supplications,
    prayers, intercessions, thanksgivings be made for all men_”). See
    Symington on Intercession, in Atonement and Intercession, 256-308;
    Milligan, Ascension and Heavenly Priesthood of our Lord.

    Luckock, After Death, finds evidence of belief in the intercession
    of the saints in heaven as early as the second century. Invocation
    of the saints he regards as beginning not earlier than the fourth
    century. He approves the doctrine that the saints pray _for us_,
    but rejects the doctrine that we are to pray _to them_. Prayers
    _for_ the dead he strongly advocates. Bramhall, Works,
    1:57—Invocation of the saints is “not necessary, for two reasons:
    _first_, no saint doth love us so well as Christ: no saint hath
    given us such assurance of his love, or done so much for us as
    Christ; no saint is so willing to help us as Christ; and
    _secondly_, we have no command from God to invocate them.” A. B.
    Cave: “The system of human mediation falls away in the advent to
    our souls of the living Christ. Who wants stars, or even the moon,
    after the sun is up?”


III. The Kingly Office of Christ.


This is to be distinguished from the sovereignty which Christ originally
possessed in virtue of his divine nature. Christ’s kingship is the
sovereignty of the divine-human Redeemer, which belonged to him of right
from the moment of his birth, but which was fully exercised only from the
time of his entrance upon the state of exaltation. By virtue of this
kingly office, Christ rules all things in heaven and earth, for the glory
of God and the execution of God’s purpose of salvation.

(_a_) With respect to the universe at large, Christ’s kingdom is a kingdom
of power; he upholds, governs, and judges the world.


    _Ps. 2:6-8_—“_I have set my king.... Thou art my son.... uttermost
    parts of the earth for thy possession_”; _8:6_—“_madest him to
    have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all
    things under his feet_”; _cf._ _Heb. 2:8, 9_—“_we see not yet all
    things subjected to him. But we beheld ... Jesus ... crowned with
    glory and honor_”; _Mat. 25:31, 32_—“_when the Son of man shall
    come in his glory ... then shall he sit on the throne of his
    glory: and before him shall be gathered all the nations_”;
    _28:18_—“_All authority hath been given unto me in heaven and on
    earth_”; _Heb. 1:3_—“_upholding all things by the word of his
    power_”; _Rev. 19:15, 16_—“_smite the nations ... rule them with a
    rod of iron ... King of Kings, and Lord of Lords._”

    Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 34, says incorrectly, as we think,
    that “the _regnum naturæ_ of the old theology is
    unsupported,—there are only the _regnum gratiæ_ and the _regnum
    gloriæ_.” A. J. Gordon: “Christ is now creation’s sceptre-bearer,
    as he was once creation’s burden-bearer.”


(_b_) With respect to his militant church, it is a kingdom of grace; he
founds, legislates for, administers, defends, and augments his church on
earth.


    _Luke 2:11_—“_born to you ... a Savior, who is Christ the lord_”;
    _19:38_—“_Blessed is the King that cometh in the name of the
    Lord_”; _John 18:36, 37_—“_My kingdom is not of this world....
    Thou sayest it, for I am a king.... Every one that is of the truth
    heareth my voice_”; _Eph. 1:22_—“_he put all things in subjection
    under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things to the
    church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in
    all_”; _Heb. 1:8_—“_of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for
    ever and ever._”

    Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:677 (Syst. Doct., 4:142, 143)—“All great
    men can be said to have an after-influence (_Nachwirkung_) after
    their death, but only of Christ can it be said that he has an
    after-activity (_Fortwirkung_). The sending of the Spirit is part
    of Christ’s work as King.” P. S. Moxom, Bap. Quar. Rev., Jan.
    1886:25-36—“Preëminence of Christ, as source of the church’s
    being; ground of the church’s unity; source of the church’s law;
    mould of the church’s life.” A. J. Gordon: “As the church endures
    hardness and humiliation as united to him who was on the cross, so
    she should exhibit something of supernatural energy as united with
    him who is on the throne.” Luther: “We tell our Lord God, that if
    he will have his church, he must look after it himself. We cannot
    sustain it, and, if we could, we should become the proudest asses
    under heaven.... If it had been possible for pope, priest or
    minister to destroy the church of Jesus Christ, it would have been
    destroyed long ago.” Luther, watching the proceedings of the Diet
    of Augsburg, made a noteworthy discovery. He saw the stars bestud
    the canopy of the sky, and though there were no pillars to hold
    them up they kept their place and the sky fell not. The business
    of holding up the sky and its stars has been on the minds of men
    in all ages. But we do not need to provide props to hold up the
    sky. God will look after his church and after Christian doctrine.
    For of Christ it has been written in _1 Cor. 15:25_—“_For he must
    reign, till he hath put all his enemies under his feet._”

    “Thrice blessed is he to whom is given The instinct that can tell
    That God is in the field when he Is most invisible.” Since Christ
    is King, it is a duty never to despair of church or of the world.
    Dr. E. G. Robinson declared that Christian character was never
    more complete than now, nor more nearly approaching the ideal man.
    We may add that modern education, modern commerce, modern
    invention, modern civilization, are to be regarded as the
    revelations of Christ, the Light of the world, and the Ruler of
    the nations. All progress of knowledge, government, society, is
    progress of his truth, and a prophecy of the complete
    establishment of his kingdom.


(_c_) With respect to his church triumphant, it is a kingdom of glory; he
rewards his redeemed people with the full revelation of himself, upon the
completion of his kingdom in the resurrection and the judgment.


    _John 17:24_—“_Father, that which thou hast given me, I desire
    that where I am, they also may be with me, that they may behold my
    glory_”; _1 Pet. 3:21, 22_—“_Jesus Christ; who is on the right
    hand of God, having gone into heaven; angels and authorities and
    powers being made subject unto him_”; _2 Pet. 1:11_—“_thus shall
    be richly supplied unto you the entrance into the eternal kingdom
    of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ._” See Andrew Murray, With
    Christ in the School of Prayer, preface, vi—“_Rev. 1:6_—‘_made us
    to be a kingdom, to be priests unto his God and Father._’ ” Both
    in the king and the priest, the chief thing is power, influence,
    blessing. In the king, it is the power coming downward; in the
    priest, it is the power rising upward, prevailing with God. As in
    Christ, so in us, the kingly power is founded on the priestly:
    _Heb. 7:25_—“_able to save to the uttermost, ... seeing he ever
    liveth to make intercession_”.

    Watts, New Apologetic, preface, ix—“We cannot have Christ as King
    without having him also as Priest. It is as the Lamb that he sits
    upon the throne in the Apocalypse; as the Lamb that he conducts
    his conflict with the kings of the earth; and it is from the
    throne of God on which the Lamb appears that the water of life
    flows forth that carries refreshing throughout the Paradise of
    God.”

    Luther: “Now Christ reigns, not in visible, public manner, but
    through the word, just as we see the sun through a cloud. We see
    the light, but not the sun itself. But when the clouds are gone,
    then we see at the same time both light and sun.” We may close our
    consideration of Christ’s Kingship with two practical remarks: 1.
    We never can think too much of the cross, but we may think too
    little of the throne. 2. We can not have Christ as our Prophet or
    our Priest, unless we take him also as our King. On Christ’s
    Kingship, see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, IV, 2:342-351; Van
    Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 586 sq.; Garbett, Christ as Prophet, Priest,
    and King, 2:243-438; J. M. Mason, Sermon on Messiah’s Throne, in
    Works, 3:241-275.