may be for want of intuitional acuteness, but, we must confess, our intelligence is somewhat flurried, when we are told that, 'before the world was, there was that in the mind of God which we may call the humanity of His Divinity,' or, as it is put elsewhere, that 'the Eternal Son' is 'the Humanity of the being of God, the ever human mind of God.' And when the love of God to the Son, that 'profound truth which the ancient fathers endeavoured to express in the doctrine of the Trinity,' is explained to be only 'the sublime expression of the unselfishness' of His nature; when Christ is said to be the son of man just because the Son of God, more Divine because more human;' and when the Saviour, in His youth, is described as gradually and gently waking to the consciousness of life and its manifold meaning, and as finding Himself in possession of a self, not at once, but by degrees,-we cannot but deem that, if speculation, in theories like these, does not pass the bounds of reverence, it at least assumes a liberty in which Christian wisdom would be slow to indulge. What calls for still graver reprehension, however, is Mr. Robertson's doctrine of the vicarious sacrifice of Christ. That doctrine, so far as we are able to understand it, is something to this effect.-Christ was the eternal idea or type of humanity, 'the reality of human nature.' He contained within Himself whatever can be predicated of every single human being as such. He was representative man. Whatever He did during His incarnation was done by us in Him. In this sense He stood in the place of us all; and recognising the law of sacrifice as the great law of being, by His absolute submission to the will of the Father, a submission which, because it was perfect, involved the necessity of suffering unto death,—He grappled with and vanquished the evil which tyrannized over our nature, and made us virtually partakers of His triumph. The forensic notion of salvation by substitution, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, and in particular the idea that God dealt with His Son as taking the place of the guilty world, and bearing the penalty of its sin, is to be utterly repudiated. He died for sin, inasmuch as sin was the cause of His dying. He came into collision with the world's evil, and bore the penalty of that daring. He approached the whirling wheel, and was torn in pieces. He laid His hand upon the cockatrice's den, and its fangs pierced Him.' The penalty of the true life He led was the sacrifice which is the world's atonement. His death was for all men, inasmuch as the evil which caused it was in its essence and spirit the very evil of which every individual is guilty. That evil was our evil precisely as the sin of the men who slew the prophets was the sin of their

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descendants in the days of Christ. He was our sacrifice, not because He died on the cross, but because His entire selfsurrender as 'the realized idea of our humanity, the idea of man completed,' represents the sacrifice of us all in the like submission of ourselves to God. Not His death, not His bloodshedding, was the satisfaction for sin. It was His entire devotion of Himself to the Father's will. God was satisfied with the offering of Christ because 'for the first time He saw human nature a copy of the Divine nature, the will of Man the Son perfectly coincident with the will of God the Father, the Love of Deity for the first time exhibited by man; obedience entire unto death, even the death of the cross.' And this work of Christ was the work of humanity. In Christ thus made perfect, God 'saw humanity submitted to the law of self-sacrifice;' and in the light of that idea He beholds us as perfect, and is satisfied.' And when the germ of Christ's Spirit in us developes, when we become conscious of the relation to God into which Christ has brought us, when we recognise ourselves in Christ as dead to sin and alive to righteousness, and withdrawing ourselves from self are absorbed into the spirit of His offering, then have we the love of God; and sooner or later shall attain to that perfect life which Christ now lives with the Father. -Now against all this we most firmly and earnestly protest. We bind no man to our phrase. We have no apology to make for ultra-Calvinist or any other views of the Atonement, which attribute vindictiveness to God, and exhibit Christ as burdened with the sense of our sins. We yield to none in the strength of our belief, that the Saviour's obedience to the will of the Father was a perfect obedience, and that the perfection of it was essential to the efficacy of His atonement. Were we willing even to grant, that there is somewhat in the writings of St. Paul, seeming to favour those Platonist ideas of Christ's Person and work, which penetrate every part, not only of the foregoing theory of Robertson, but of the kindred schemes of Maurice, Kingsley, and other leaders of religious opinion among us— yet we join issue with this whole school on their fundamental position, and wholly deny the scriptural authority of that doctrine of atonement, which they have reared upon it. The New Testament knows nothing of Christ as the idea of humanity,' and of mankind as 'atoned' to God in Him in the sense which these writers intend. It is true it speaks of Him as our Substitute, and it represents men as dying with Him, buried with Him, risen and alive with Him. But there is not the smallest evidence that any such mystical blending of our personality with His personality as the Platonizing view supposes

was ever dreamt of by the sacred writers; and, what is absolutely fatal to its pretensions, while there is no one passage, so far as we know, in which the blessings of the Christian salvation are connected with human nature as such, they are invariably described as flowing to individuals or classes of mankind from the active grace of the Holy Ghost, and as the immediate result of a personal faith in Christ. It is not redeemed man, as such, that dies with Christ and lives in Him; but redeemed man repenting towards God, and believing in His Son whom He hath sent. We wait for the proof, that Scripture ever speaks of any but believers in language like this; and until it is produced, we hold the ideal theory of atonement to be a fantastic, bewildering, and dangerous error. It robs the pre-Mosaic and Levitical sacrifices of their obvious significance. It transmutes very many of the types and prophecies of the Old Testament into mere illusion and accident. It ignores to a great degree the doctrine, on which the Scriptures lay so much stress, that the gift of Christ was a signal, special, and extraordinary manifestation of the love of God to man. It makes no account of that righteousness of God, which set Christ forth as a propitiation for sins, and reduces to a shadow the doctrine of justification through faith in His death. It fritters to nothing those solemn and emphatic utterances of the Spirit of God, which ascribe our salvation to the blood' of Christ, and which represent His suffering as bruising and stripes which He endured on our behalf at the hand of the Father. Finally, it lowers the scriptural idea of sin, as violation of the law of God; it places unconverted men in a false position by confounding the distinction between the Church and the world; it dishonours the work of the Holy Ghost in connexion with our salvation; and, whatever may be affirmed to the contrary, tends by a plain logical necessity, to disbelief of the doctrine of eternal punishment.

With views of the atonement such as Mr. Robertson expresses, we are not surprised to find him at fault on the great subjects of our relations to God under the economy of redemption, of the means by which the sacrifice of Christ becomes effectual for men's recovery to peace and holiness, and of the proper character and necessary supports of the Divine life in the soul. His teaching on these points, and on some others akin to them, only too clearly substantiates what has just been alleged as to the sequences of the idealistic theory of Christ's propitiation. Take, for example, what our author has to say on original sin, and on the position in which mankind, apart from all voluntary action of their own, are placed by the self-sacrifice of Christ. There is no such thing as imputed guilt antecedent to our natural tendencies. The first man must have exerted

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on his race an influence quite peculiar: his acts must have biassed their acts. And this bias or tendency is what we call original sin.' The tendency incurs guilt, but is not the result of any penalty to which man is subject through the sin of Adam. And, in regard to this evil considered in itself, it is not a taint or disease, as it is sometimes imagined to be. It is nothing positive. It is the absence of that controlling will which orders and harmonizes our nature. In its essence it is denial of 'God's paternity-refusing to live as His children, and saying we are not His children.' From this condition Christ has redeemed us, so that we are all from our birth children of God. Baptized or unbaptized-it matters not: this is our high estate and prerogative. Baptism does not constitute our sonship, it only warrants it. It is to every man who receives it what coronation is to a king. It is an authoritative symbol,' betokening and setting forth a fact, which is no less real in the absence of it. Let others see what this redeemed son of man is. 'He is heir to the inheritance; therefore give him the titledeeds. He is of royal lineage; put the crown upon his head. He is a child of God; baptize him.' Baptism 'reveals and pledges to the individual that which is true of the race.' You take the child in baptism and address it by name—' Paul-no longer Saul-you are a child of God. You, Paul, are now regenerate......You are a member of Christ......You are an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.' Every man is, not in the Divine purpose and will merely, but truly and actually, a child of God-only the natural man does not know it, while the spiritual does. The world are God's children as well as the Church so called. Our sonship is a broad, grand, universal, blessed, fact.' Humanity in Christ is united to God. All are regenerate. All are entitled to heaven. We are sons of God, not through faith in Christ Jesus, but absolutely and simply through His redemption, irrespective of faith or anything else. And upon this principle we are to judge and act towards others. 'Do not say that because the Church is [by baptism] separated from the world, therefore the world are not God's children.' Much less is any line to be drawn among those whom baptism has constituted members of the Church. As to these 'take care. Do not say that they are unregenerate—of the world. Do not make a distinction within the Church of Christians and non-Christians. That wretched beggar that holds his hat at the crossing of the street is God's child as well as you, if he only knew it. You know it, he does not, that is the difference but the immortal is in him too, and the eternal word speaks in him.'

Such is briefly the doctrine, which Mr. Robertson holds and inculcates-a doctrine which, however true it may be in some of its parts and aspects, is, in the main, as distinctly opposed to the very letter of the Scripture as doctrine can be. We will not stay to discuss the questions raised by his statements on the subject of original sin. We believe he is wrong in several of the details of his theory; and sure we are, that the view which resolves our natural evil into what is merely negative, or at best privative, is very far from satisfying the obvious requirements either of our consciousness, or of the word of God. Enmity against God' and 'desperate wickedness' are much more than the want of regulating will; and that man must be strangely ignorant of himself, who does not feel, that whatever the explanation of the fact may be, his unchanged heart is the seat of a positive, active, and virulent hatred of God and of goodness. But we must not allow our author's dogma as to the common regeneration of mankind, and their universal sonship to God by virtue of Christ's atonement, to pass without formal challenge; and this the more as the hypothesis is a favourite one with a large and increasing school of contemporary theology. We do not deny, nay, we zealously maintain, the doctrine of a real federal relationship between Christ and mankind. In Adam all die; and there is an important sense in which in Christ all live. We may not be able to define precisely the teaching of Scripture on this subject; but we can make near approximation to it. It never speaks of mankind at large as actually and, if we may use the expression, organically united to God in Christ. It never represents men as justified before God, or as being children of God, or as born of God merely because of the fact of their redemption. It never so much as once attributes either sonship or regeneration to the race-to man as man. On the contrary it maintains a uniform distinction between those that are 'condemned,' and those that are 'justified;' between those that are 'after the flesh,' and those that are 'born of the Spirit;' between those that are 'of the world' and 'the wicked one,' and those who are 'the children of the kingdom' and ' of God.' And, which is most noteworthy in this connexion, with an absolutely unvarying uniformity, it points to a personal faith in Christ as the channel through which alone men can receive the grace either of adoption or of the new birth. Potentially, all are children of God. The sacrifice of Christ has made them such. Actually, only those are His children who repent, and believe the Gospel. In the Divine will and in the gracious arrangements and provisions of redemption we are sons; and it is this which the