the theory, the theology (so to speak), of the atonement, is another thing. About this, Orthodox Christians are differing with one another, about as much as they are differing from us. Nay, more, they are saying as hard things of one another as they ever said of us. Is it not time to learn wisdom? Is there not good reason for taking the ground we do,—the ground, that is to say, of general belief and trust, without insisting upon particular and peculiar explanations?

We believe in Christ, and well were it if we all believed in him too fervently and tenderly to be engaged much in theological disputes and denunciations. We believe in Christ. We pray to God through him. We ask God to bless us for his sake, for we feel that Christ makes intercession, and has obtained the privilege to be heard, through his own meritorious sufferings. Christ's sacrifice is the grandest, the most powerful means of salvation. It was a transcendent and most affecting example of meekness, patience, and forgiveness of injuries. It was a most striking exhibition of God's gracious interest and concern for us, of his view of the evil and curse of sin, and of his compassion for the guilty, and of his readiness to forgive the penitent. It was an atonement, that is to say, a means of reconciliation, reconciliation not of God to us, but of us to God. The blood of that sacrifice was atoning blood, that is, it was blood, on which whoever looks rightly, is touched with gratitude, and humility, and sorrow for his sins, and thus is reconciled to God by the death of his Son.

Now it is possible that we do not understand and receive all that is meant by the Scriptures on this subject. We admit it, as what imperfection ought always to admit; but we admit it, too, for the sake of saying, that, so long as we receive all that we can understand from the language in question, so long as we receive and believe every word that is written, no man has a right to say to us, without qualification, "You do not believe in the atonement." He may say, "You do not believe in the atonement according to my explanation, or according to Calvin's explanation ;" but he has no right to say, without qualification, "You do not believe in that doctrine; you do not believe in the propitiation, in the reconciliation, in the sacrifice of Jesus; no more right, than we have to address the same language to him.*

* In an Introductory Essay to Butler's Analogy, published by a leading defender of what is called the New Divinity in the Presby

We believe then in the atonement. We believe in other views of this great subject, than those which are expressed by the word atonement. But this word spreads before our minds a truth of inexpressible interest. The reconciliation by Jesus Christ, his interposition to bring us nigh to God, is to us his

terian Church, the author says, "We maintain that the system of Unitarians, which denies all such substitution," - meaning the removal of calamities from us, in ordinary life, by the interposition and suffering of another," is a violation of all the modes in which God has yet dispensed his blessings to man." We may just observe in passing, that the respectable author would not say, on reflection, "of all the modes"; for many of the most momentous blessings are dispensed to us through our own agency. But this is what he would say, that the Unitarian belief, with regard to the atonement, violates, as he conceives, one great principle of the divine beneficence. And that is the principle, that blessings are often conferred on us, in the course of Providence, through the instrumentality of others,-of parents, friends, fellow beings, &c. "It is by years of patient toil in others," says Mr. Barnes, in this Essay, "that we possess the elements of science, the principles of morals, the endowments of religion." "Over a helpless babe,ushered into the world, naked, feeble, speechless, there impends hunger, cold, sickness, sudden death, -a mother's watchfulness averts these evils. Over a nation impend revolutions, sword, famine, and the pestilence. The blood of the patriot averts these, and the nation smiles in peace." It is true that the author does "not affirm that this is all that is meant by an atonement," and herein we entirely agree with him. But he certainly is mistaken, when he says, that Unitarians deny all such substitution. We deny the Calvinistic explanation of atonement or substitution. We might reject the author's hypothesis too, if we knew what it was. But does it follow, that we deny all substitution? If all reputed belief in the atonement is to depend on receiving one particular explanation of it, where is this to end? The party in the Presbyterian Church which strictly adheres to their standards, that is, to the genuine old Calvinistic theology, charges Mr. Barnes and his friends, and the body of New England Divines, with holding "another gospel." These again charge Dr. Taylor and the New-Haven School with holding "another gospel." Meanwhile, each of these bodies very stoutly defends its position, insists upon its adherence to Christianity, and protests against the sentence of excision. Has either of these parties obtained a monopoly in protestation and profession? Are liberality and candor to stop with each party, just where its convenience may dictate? Have they needed charity so much, that they have used it all up? Is the last chance of a candid and kind construction gone by? and is nobody ever to be permitted any more to say, "We believe in the Gospel, though not according to your explanation"?

There are, perhaps, no more accredited defenders of the popular doctrine of the atonement than Andrew Fuller and Bishop Magee. Fuller, as quoted by Evans in his "Sketch," says, "If we say, a way was opened by the death of Christ, for the free and consistent exercise VOL. XVIII. N. S. VOL. XIII. NO. III.

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grandest office. To our minds there is no sentence of the holy volume more interesting, more weighty, more precious, than that passage in the sublime Epistle to the Ephesians, "Ye were strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world; but now in Christ Jesus, ye who sometime were far off are brought nigh by the blood of Christ." It is this which the world needed; it is this which every mind now needs, beyond all things, to be brought nigh to God. By error, by superstition and sin, by slavish fears and guilty passions, and wicked ways, we were separated from him. By a gracious mission from the Father, by simple and clear instructions, by encouraging representations of God's paternal love and pity, by winning examples of the transcendent beauty of goodness, and, most of all, by that grand consummation, DEATH, by that exhibition of the curse of sin, in which Jesus was made a curse for it, by that compassion of the Holy One, which flowed forth in every bleeding wound, by that voice for ever sounding through the world, "Father! Father! forgive them," Jesus has brought us nigh to God. Can it be thought enthusiasm to say, that there is no blessing, either in possession or in the range of possibility, to be compared with this? Does not reason itself declare, that all the harmonies of moral existence are broken, if the great, central, all-attracting Power, be not acknowledged and felt? Without God, to every mind that has awaked to the consciousness of its nature, without God, life is miserable; the world is dark; the universe is disrobed of its splendors; the intellectual tię to nature is broken; the charm of existence is dissolved; the great hope of being is lost; and the mind itself, like a star struck from its sphere, wanders through the infinite region of its conceptions, without attraction, tendency, destiny, or end. "Without God in the world"! what a comprehensive and desolating sentence of

of mercy in all the methods which sovereign wisdom saw fit to adopt, perhaps we shall include every material idea which the Scriptures give us of that important event." — Evans, p. 120, 14th Edition.

To the question, "In what way can the death of Christ be conceived to operate to the remission of sins?" Magee says, "The answer of the Christian is, I know not, nor does it concern me to know, in what manner the sacrifice of Christ is connected with the forgiveness of sins; it is enough that this is declared by God to be the medium through which my salvation is effected."- Magee on the Atonement, p. 29, American Edition.

exclusion is written in those few words! "Without God in the world!" It is to be without the presence of the Creator amidst his works, of the Father amidst his family, of the Being who has spread gladness and beauty all around us. It is to be without spiritual light, without any sure guidance or strong reliance, without any adequate object for our ever expanding love, without any sufficient consoler for our deepest sorrows, without any protector when the world joins against us, without any refuge when persecution pursues us to death, without any all-controlling principle, without the chief sanction of duty, without the great bond of existence. Oh! dark and fearful in spirit must we be, poor tremblers upon a bleak and desolate creation, deserted, despairing, miserable must we be, if the Power that controls the universe is not our friend, if God be nothing to us but a mighty and dread abstraction to which we never come near; if God be not our God, and our exceeding great reward for ever"! This is the fearful doom that is reversed in the gospel of Christ. This is the fearful condition from which it was his great design to deliver us. For this end it was that he died, that he might bring us nigh to God. The blood of martyrdom is precious; but this was the blood of a holier sacrifice, of innocence pleading for guilt, “of a lamb without spot and without blemish, slain from the foundation of the world."

But we must pass to other topics, and the space that remains will oblige us to give them severally much less expansion in this brief statement.

III. In the third place, then, we say, that we believe in human depravity; and a very serious and saddening belief it is, too, that we hold on this point. We believe in the very great depravity of mankind, in the exceeding depravation of human nature. We believe that "the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." We believe all that is

meant, when it is said of the world in the time of Noah, that "all the imaginations of men, and all the thoughts of their hearts were evil, and only evil continually." We believe all that Paul meant, when he said, speaking of the general character of the heathen world in his time, "There is none that is righteous, no, not one; there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God; they have all gone out of the way, there is none that doeth good, or is a doer of good, no, not one; with their tongues they use deceit, and the poison of

asps is under their lips; whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness; and the way of peace have they not known, and there is no fear of God before their eyes." We believe that this was not intended to be taken without qualifications, for Paul, as we shall soon have occasion to observe, made qualifications. It was true in the general. But it is not the ancient heathen world alone, that we regard as filled with evil. We believe that the world now, taken in the mass, is a very, a very bad world; that the sinfulness of the world is dreadful and horrible to consider; that the nations ought to be covered with sackcloth and mourning for it; that they are filled with misery by it. Why, can any man look abroad upon the countless miseries inflicted by selfishness, dishonesty, slander, strife, war; upon the boundless woes of intemperance, libertinism, gambling, crime, can any man look upon all this, with the thousand minor diversities and shadings of guilt, and guilty sorrow, and feel that he could write any less dreadful sentence against the world than Paul has written? Not believe in human depravity, great, general, dreadful depravity! - Why, a man must be a fool, nay, a stock or a stone, not to believe in it! He has no eyes, he has no senses, he has no perceptions, if he refuses to believe in it!

But let the reader of this exposition take with him these qualifications; for although it is popular, strangely popular, to speak extravagantly of human wickedness, we shall not endeavour to gain any man's good opinion by that means.

First, it is not the depravity of nature, in which we believe. Human nature, nature as it exists in the bosom of an infant, is nothing else but capability; capability of good as well as evil, though more likely from its exposures, to be evil than good. It is not the depravity, then, but the depravation of nature, in which we believe.

Secondly, it is not in the unlimited application of Paul's language, that we believe. When he said, "No, not one," he did not mean to say, without qualification, that there was not one good man in the world. He believed that there were good men. He did not mean to say, that there was not one good man in the heathen world; for he speaks in another place, of those, who, "not having the law, were a law to themselves, and by nature did those things which are written in the law." Paul meant, doubtless, to say, that the world is a very bad world, and in this we believe.