1. The precious truth which it undeniably contains has always been held by the Church as an integral part of the orthodox doctrine of the piacular sacrifice of Christ. All that is negative in the Moral Influence Theory is refuted by the overwhelming evidence we have recited in establishing the Church doctrine as to divine justice and vicarious punishment; while all that is positive in that theory is maintained with far greater consistency and illustrated with far greater force. on our view of the nature, necessity, and design of his sacrifice than on theirs. We believe that God could have changed man’s subjective moral condition by the direct action of his Holy Spirit upon the human soul, without the objec- tive exhibition of his love by means of such a sacrifice as that made in the person of his Son. The position that this is impossible is unreasonably presumptuous, and entirely unsusceptible of proof. If, then, there remains the conceivable hypothesis that God might have attained his end in the moral regeneration of human souls in some other and less expensive way than the one chosen, it follows that the infinite love of God for man is less luminously exhibited, upon the supposition that the necessity of his dying was only as one of two or more alternative instrumentalities to subdue the distrust and alienation of the human heart, than it is upon the suppo- sition that he died because his death was the absolutely necessary means of removing obstacles to the salvation of men posited in the unchangeable nature of God. It
* Life and Light of Men, pp. 801, 302.
MORAL THHORY OF THE ATONEMENT. 297
is all the-greater love, because the sacrifice was abso- carrer lutely necessary to attain its object. It is all the ~~ sweeter and holier love, because, while making such entire sacrifice of self, it refuses all sacrifice of principle. As a matter of practical experience, that view of the sacrifice of Christ which maintains its strictly piacular character has inspired all the hymns of the Church and has melted the hearts of all the multitudes either in Christian or in heathen lands who have been won by the story of redeeming love to the discipleship of Christ. It is the Church doctrine, and not the Moral Influence understanding of the character of Christ’s death, which has been preached in all revivals and been carried forth by all missionaries, and which has kindled the flame in the hearts of the Lollards and Vallenses, Lutherans, Puri- tans, Moravians, and Methodists; while it is the boasted Moral Influence Theory which has just claim to what- ever of moral regeneration and spiritual life distinguish the history of Abelard and his disciples, of Socinians, -Unitarians, Rationalists, and whatever other of this sort Young and Bushnell may please.
Bushnell, with singular simplicity, after having written a volume to prove that the doctrine of piacular sacrifice as held by the Church is revolting to the moral sense and dishonouring to God; after insisting through five hundred pages that Christ’s death was a simple martyr- dom, and its sole effect a moral one on the hearts of men, coneludes by acknowledging that the Moral Influ- ence Theory is unable of itself to produce a moral in- fluence result, and hence the Church doctrine must in idea be substituted in its place. That is, he confesses that his doctrine, on its own ground of subjective moral influence, is not only no more effective than the repu- diated doctrine of Christ’s Church, nor merely that it is less effective, but that it is in fact, when brought to the
CHAPTER XXI.
298 THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT.