i® Tt is not pretended that the doctrine of Satisfac- tion, as received in common by the Lutheran and Re- formed Churches, was conceived of in all its elements, or stated with scientific accuracy, in the early ages of the Church, or that in this complete sense it is possessed by all parts of the Church in modern times. Such a state- ment would not be true, either historically or actually, of any single doctrine embraced in the entire system of revealed truth. All the elements embraced under the heads of Theology and Anthropology, as well as Soterio- logy, were at first conceived obscurely, stated vaguely, and mixed with incongruous and even inconsistent elements, and have reached the mature form in which they are at present embraced by all evangelical Chris- tians only through a process of growth. The fact is admitted that the early Fathers wrote like children in the childhood of the Church on this as upon all other subjects. But,—
2. We maintain, over against the advocates of the Moral Influence Theory, that the following points are susceptible of historical proof :—(1.) There is abundant evidence that from the first the faith of the true Church
CHAPTER XIX,
248 THH NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT.
has uniformly embraced Christ on the cross as a sacrifice explating sin and propitiating God. It is true that this element of their faith is often left to a remarkable degree in the background, and mixed up confusedly with other elements of truth or superstition, but indubitable traces of an objective bearing of the passion of Christ upon obstacles in the way of man’s deliverance exterior to himself are always visible. (2.) That the doctrine that the central design of the Atonement is to produce a subjective effect upon the sinner has never prevailed among any considerable number of people for any length of time. That, on the contrary, even every false doc- trine which has taken strong and permanent hold upon the human mind has always embraced in it precisely that principle which the theory in question excludes, viz., that the sufferings of Christ were necessary to re-_ move obstacles to our salvation existing exterior to our- selves. This fact is conspicuously illustrated in the pre- valence of the eccentric idea that Christ was delivered up as a ransom-price to Satan for the purpose of redeem- ing sinful men from the power of the usurper, which so long confused and disfigured the ideas of ecclesiastical writers upon the subject of redemption. (35.) We main- tain it can be proved that the doctrine that Christ has redeemed men from the claims of divine justice by his vicarious sufferings, has always been more clearly con- ceived and more frequently and emphatically insisted upon in exact proportion as the Church has been faithful in the profession of other fundamental truths and abun- dant in the fruits of the Spirit. The best of the earlier Church teachers teach the truth we contend for. Those who were most eminent in the defence of the truth as to the supreme divinity of our blessed Lord, as Athana- sius the Great; those who stood to the last faithful in resisting the inroads of Popery, as Claude, bishop of
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Turin (821-839); the best of the schoolmen, as Anselm, Hugh St. Victor, Bernard, Bonaventura, and Thomas Aquinas ; both of the two great sections (Greek and Roman) into which the Church divided ; the great evan- gelical teachers who, in the immediately preceding cen- turies, prepared the way for the Reformation, as Wycliffe and John Wessel; the Vallenses, who, isolated among the mountains, preserved the primitive apostolic faith through all the dark centuries of the Papal supremacy) ;