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seventh month, the priests were required to make a solemn atonement for themselves and all the people, while they held a sacred fast and day of affliction.1

These and other regulations for sacrifice and atonement by the priesthood were thus impressed on the minds of the Jewish nation as an absolutely essential condition of Divine favour and pardon of sins, and there is no doubt that they were in full observance at the time of Christ's coming. It therefore appeared essential to Paul, as one learned in the Jewish law, and boasting of it, that he should show his countrymen that Jesus Christ once for all fulfilled all these commandments. Hence, in his Epistle to the Romans, especially addressed to the Jews in Rome, and in that to the Hebrews written from Rome, his most anxious efforts are devoted to prove that Jesus Christ fulfilled every requirement of the Law, being in Himself at once a High Priest offering a sacrifice, and the very sacrifice Himself, so making a fresh atonement for the people with His blood, and bearing their sins, while Himself sinless. The whole of his other Epistles are permeated by the same idea. We find it to a small extent in those of St. Peter, a trace of it in St. John, in the words 'He is the 1 Lev. xvi. 29.

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propitiation for our sins,' but scarcely at all in the Epistle of St. James, of which it may be said that more nearly than any other it approaches the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount.

But it was natural, also, that the doctrines of St. Paul, who was especially the Apostle to the Gentiles, should receive close attention from the converts among them. The subtle intellect of the Greeks indeed revelled in the fine distinctions which he drew between the flesh and the spirit, and in the logical reasoning with which he worked out the proposition that the decrees of God must be immutable, and therefore that in some way they must be satisfied before redemption could be attained. Gradually also the elders' (presbyters) claimed the select privileges of the Jewish priesthood, while the inspectors or overseers (episkopoi) assumed the name and functions of bishops. The illiteracy of the Middle Ages gave the more scope for these pretensions, and accepted as truth whatever was taught by Constantinople or Rome. Thus the codes of the Jewish priesthood passed into the Christian creeds, and elaborated more fully the arguments of St. Paul as to the necessity of sacrifice and atonement. Under like influence the various

1 1 John ii. 2.

Protestant creeds accepted the same doctrines, merely pruning them of some of their grossest perversions.

Hence the dogma of the Christian Churches as expressed in their authoritative standards is this, That God, having denounced eternal death as the penalty for sin, cannot retract that decree on the repentance of individual men, and that consequently His justice requires that death should follow to all men, because all have sinned. But that Jesus Christ, assuming the form of man, yet Himself sinless, volunteered to undergo the penalty in place of men, and therefore died, not eternally but for three days, and that this is accepted by God as both a sacrifice for sin and as a satisfaction in lieu of the punishment of it which ought to be inflicted on all men. The Roman Church merely adds to this theory the assertion that the sacrifice is repeated every time the communion is celebrated; the priest by the act of consecrating the bread and wine being supposed actually to change them into Christ's body and blood, which are then anew offered as a sacrifice for the communicants.

The struggles of Churchmen who still call themselves orthodox to evade these doctrines would be a long and uninteresting story. Three-quarters of

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a century ago a Scottish divine, Mr. Campbell of Row, suggested that the function of Jesus was 'making a perfect confession of the sins of men, by which the wrath of God is rightly met and Divine justice satisfied.' But this substitution of vicarious confession in place of vicarious death was at that time deemed so heretical that Mr. Campbell was deprived of his office. Professor Maurice suggested that the sacrifice consisted in ' perfectly giving up that self-will which has been the cause of all men's crimes and all their misery.' These are examples of the efforts made by able and pious men to give a meaning to the idea of vicarious sacrifice which should not shock the human conscience. But the futility of such explanations is obvious, and all the more since undoubtedly they fail to harmonise with St. Paul's clear enunciation of the death of Christ as a sacrifice in the full Jewish sense.

But the real fact is that St. Paul's view was his own idea, and was not taught by Christ Himself. There is absolutely nothing in His teaching that suggests the idea of God's wrath demanding sacrifice, or of His own death being a sacrifice. He never once uses the word atonement, or satisfaction, or any other word in such a sense. The sole sem

blance to such an idea is in the words of blessing the cup during the last supper, when, as St. Matthew records, He said, 'This is the cup of the New Testament in my blood which is shed for you and for many for the remission of sins.' The other evangelists do not give these words. But we must recall that baptism also was said to be administered by John the Baptist for the remission of sins,' where clearly it was only a symbol, and not the medium; since frequently afterwards sins were declared by our Lord to be forgiven without baptism. In the same way therefore it is evident that these words applied by our Lord to His blood meant that it was a symbol of remission of sin, and as such to be kept in remembrance. This sufficiently explains why the other evangelists do not notice the remark. We may indeed take it as positively certain that if the disciples and all future Christians had been intended to accept our Lord's death as a sacrifice in the Jewish sense, or in the subsequent sense as the one vital and indispensable condition on which the redemption of mankind from eternal death was to depend, it would have been put forward most clearly and forcibly and with anxious iteration. But, on the other hand, what we do find so put forward in the

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