debtor pays or another pays for him, The receipt in full of the creditor is purely a business acknowledgment that his claim is satisfied, and therefore extinguished by the simple force of the payment, and without any room for the exercise of grace on his part. In a case of debt, moreover, the demand is for the precise amount due. Nothing satisfies but the payment of the very thing nominated in the bond. Now the orthodox doctrine is, that the sufferings of Christ are a penal satisfaction to the demands of the law. In this case the claim of the law essentially respects the person of the criminal as well as the penal debt mcurred. The claims of law, precep- tive and penal, are all personal, and can be transferred from person to person only by the prerogative of the sovereign as a matter of gracious will. As a matter of mere law, no satisfaction can find acceptance other than the literal suffering of the penalty by the criminal in person. If the sovereign admits a substitute in the place of the criminal, it is a matter of pure grace. Even if the sovereign does admit a substitute, the solution of the penal debt by that substitute does not give any claim to the criminal represented, nor, ipso facto, liberate him from the legal bonds in which he is held. The only rights which the vicarious solution of a penal debt can give rise to accrue to the substitute, not the criminal, and the criminal receives the benefits thereof purely as a matter of grace, and at such times and under such conditions as may be settled between the sovereign judge and the substitute. In the case of a penal infliction, the demand respects not any constant and definite kind and degree of suffering. The demand is for whatever kind and degree of suffering the infinitely righteous intelli- gence of God sees in each given case to be morally right ; the crime to be expiated and the person to suffer being both taken into consideration.
EFFECTS OF CHRIST’S WORK. Vio
~The commercial language above quoted is not the cmarrr invention of orthodox theologians. It is the spontane- ous and very frequent language of the Holy Ghost, efor deliberately chosen to set before our minds the true cua nature and method of Christian salvation. It is, more the ortho- over, plain that this language, taken in its obvious sense, (°° is most appropriate to the subject, if our view of the nature of the Atonement be true, while it is certainly unnatural and misleading if either of the alternative views should be true.
On the Moral Influence Theory the language must be emptied of all sense, and the ideas it suggests must - not only be modified, but totally ignored. As a moral impression, the work of Christ terminates upon the heart of the sinner. But as a ransom, as an act of re- demption out of the hands of justice for a price paid, it must respect the deliverance of the sinner from the claim and power of some person exterior to himself.
The Governmental Atonement Theory sets forth the sufferings of Christ as having only a general and imper- sonal relation to the mass of sinners, and a very indefi- nite relation to the law and its penalty. The sufferings of Christ, in this view, secured no claim upon God on Christ’s part any more than on ours. They simply make it consistent with governmental expediency to offer salvation on easier terms, and put the sinner in a salvable, not a saved condition. But this character- istic Scriptural language of ransom, buying with a price, redeemed out of the hands of, &c., necessarily carries with it the ideas (a) of a personal reference to the indi- viduals redeemed—that is, paid for ; (b) of these persons being really saved by redemption, not simply put in a salvable condition ; and (c) of Christ having acquired a _ right to that for which he had paid the price. There is an exact correspondence between the representation that
180 THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT.
ovarrer Christ assumed our law-place, and as our substitute =“. suffered, in our stead and behalf, the penalty of the law, — and the Scriptural language above quoted, that Christ is the ransom of our souls, the price paid for our redemption; that is, by which we were bought off from the claims of that law by which we were held. TheScrip- There are three several generic forms of conception bine vat, Under which the work wrought by Christ for the salva- ousmodes tion of men is set forth. These are (a) that of an expia-
of con-