inflicted upon the sinner in person. Fiske insists that God’s justice can no more be satisfied by the vicarious suffering of another than the sinful agent, than a man’s thirst can be slaked by another man’s vicariously drink- ing water for him. We have admitted that this is the precise point in which the Scriptural doctrine of the Atonement transcends human reason. But the whole difficulty les in our inability to discern fully the grounds upon which the legal oneness of Christ and his people depend. But the advocates of the Governmental Theory deny that the sacrifice of Christ is a pena vicaria. They say it is a substitute for a penalty—something in the place of the penalty to effect the same purpose. But (a) how can anything that is not of the nature of penalty effect the same purpose as penalty? And (b) how can the sufferings of one person sustain any relation to the sins of another person if the legal relations and respon- sibilities of the two persons are not identical? Suffering has relation to sin or it has not. If it has relation to sin, it must either be designed as chastisement or as penalty. The sufferings of Christ had relation to sin, and they were not personal chastisement; they must, therefore, have been, penalty——of the genus penalty and of the species vicarious penalty. If this be denied, let some one state definitely what they were, and let it be shown precisely how his suffering, which by hypothesis is not penalty, takes the place and secures the end of the literal punishment of persons whose identical legal obligations do not rest upon the person suffering. How in the name of reason is it possible that the undeserved sufferings of Christ, which were not the penalty which the law demanded, should make it consistent with God’s rectoral justice to relax the law, and omit the penalty altogether in the case of repentant sinners? If God’s abhorrence of sin is really and adequately expressed in
GOVERNMENTAL THEORY OF THE ATONEMENT. 309
the sufferings of Christ, how is it that his distributive ee justice is not strictly satisfied therein? and how could —— he truly and really express, his abhorrence of our sins by means of the sufferings of Christ, unless the real legal responsibility for our sins were first laid upon Christ, and they were then strictly punished in him ? The truth is, that this Governmental Theory is an invention designed to escape the pressure of Socinian objections levelled against the true doctrine of the Atonement. The point at which rational objections to the true doctrine of the Atonement are most efficient is that which concerns the satisfaction of strict justice in the person substituted in the place of the actual erlminal. In order to avoid this objection, the advo- cates of the Governmental Hypothesis admit its force, deny that Christ was punished in the place of sinners, or that he satisfies the demands of distributive justice at all, and claim that the death of Christ was a con- trivance to take the place of the penalty of the law, and to make it consistent with God’s rectoral righteous- | ness to omit the penalty in the case of believers alto- | ‘wether, But Jowett says truly: “This second theory ! S no advantage over the preceding [orthodox], except at which the more shadowy statement must ever have n rendering difficulties themselves ‘more shadowy.”’* henever they attempt a precise statement, in opposition o the Socinians, of their positive belief as to the manner in which the sufferings of Christ are related to the sins of his people, and of the manner in which his sufferings, which are no penalty, avail to express God’s abhorrence of sin, or to make it consistent with his rectoral justice to omit the penalty altogether, they always necessarily fall back upon the fundamental principles of the Satis- faction doctrine. And again, the very moment they
* St. Paul’s Epistles, vol. ii., p. 473.
OHAPTER XXII.
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It is founded upon a false theory of virtue.
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310 THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT.
turn to distinguish their position from that Church doc- trine which includes their \special theory as one of its — provinces, they always necessarily fall back in their nega- tions upon Socinian ground. | They thus ceaselessly oscil- late between the two—orthddox in all they affirm, and Socinian in all they deny. Their champions put one in mind of a landless laird straddling the line-fence between two farms. He is always found standing upon that leg which is the other side of the fence.