carter purpose of suffering and dying. The fact, the time, many of the fbiatied circumstances and horrors of his death, were not only foreseen, but were foreordained (Matt. xxvi; 24,54 56; and xxvii 9,10; 35). > The death of Christ was God’s act: ‘ Hom, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain” (Acts ii. 23). “ But those things, which God be- fore had shewed” by the mouth of all his prophets, that Christ should suffer, he hath so fulfilled” (Acts iii. 18). “For of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Herod, and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together, For to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined -before (rpowpice) to be done” (Acts iv. 27, 28). If the sole design of the redemptive work of Christ is to pro-_ duce a moral effect wpon the sinner, as these men insist, the glorious transactions of Gethsemane and Calvary, which the Church has always regarded as infinitely real, intense -with divine attributes in action, are reduced to the poor level of scenes deliberately contrived for effect, Jinding their sole end wn their effect as scenes. If the Moral view of the Atonement should prove true, our astonishment and indignation in view of the stolid indif- ference of men to the moral power of the cross w ould need to be materially abated.
(2.) The utter inappropriateness of the work of Christ, upon hypothesis of the truth of the Moral Theory, to effect the end for which it was designed; is made more clear when we come to consider the process by which, upon that view of the case, the sinner must proceed to appropriate that work for his own benefit. This diffi- culty is very effectively exhibited by Bushnell, to whom the Church is thus indebted for the most conclusive refutation of his own theory which this age has pro-
- to its nature.
MORAL THEORY OF THE A TONEME! cD. 301
duced: ‘The principal reason for setting forth the mat- cusrrz ‘ter of Christ’s life and death as an bhlation (piacular .* sacrifice) remains to be stated, viz, the necessity ot somehow preventing an over-conscious state in the re- ceiver. It was going to be a great fault in the use, that the disciple, looking for a power on his character; would keep himself too entirely in this attitude of conscious- ness or voluntary self-application. He would be hang- ing around each fact and scene, to get some eloquent, moving effect from it. And he would not only study how to get impressions, but, almost before he was aware of it, to make them. Just here accordingly it was that the Scripture symbols, and especially those of the altar- service, were to come to our aid, putting us into a use of the gospel so entirely objective as to scarcely suffer a recoil on our consciousness at all. ... Doubtless there will be a power in it—all the greater power that I am not looking after power, and that nothing puts me thinking of effects upon myself. . . .. Our subjective applications of Christ get confused and grow ineffica- cious.”* Thus we see that it is confessedly the Moral Influence Theory of the death of Christ which fails - utterly to produce a moral impression, and that it must be disguised under the ideal forms of the opposite and inconsistent theory of sin-expiating, God-propitiating sacrifice, before any corresponding effect can be obtained. It is a singular case, indeed, if a false view of the Atonement can produce a better moral effect than a true view, and if a divine provision for the salvation -_ of men can attain the end God designed it to effect only
by means of a practical and voluntary misconception as Itis in. consistent with the 3. Our third argument is, that this view of the nature Pte ne of Christ’s work necessarily proceeds upon the denial design of a sacri- * Vicarious Sacrifice, pp. 535, 536. fice.
_ CHAPTER XX1.