There was an idea that the price paid (the common Scripture-term for the means of deliverance), was paid to the Evil Being. Austin thought that the sin of the first man was transmitted to his posterity, and that the human race were delivered over to the Devil; from whom God, having become incarnate in Christ, bought us by his blood: and Proclus explains the necessity of God dying for us, by no Angel having the power to pay a sufficient price to Satan. This scheme, absurd as it is, is not so much so as that which is now generally, thought a vital part of Christianity, and which either supposes the Omnipotent and Eternal Cre-. ator of the Universe to die, that he might enable, himself to forgive his own creatures, or that his Eternal Son died to induce him to forgive them., In dividing almighty power with another being, of malignant nature, the modern believers in a personal Spirit, of Evil are not far behind these, ancient redemptionists.

This was an approach towards the doctrine of Vicarious Satisfaction; but we see that it was something still very different. The idea concerning the death of Christ was neither definite nor settled. Some writers speak of it with uncertainty; by others it is wholly neglected, or treated with but meagre mention. It is impossible to account for this, had the doctrine of the atonement, in the modern arbitrary sense, been an apostolic tradition. It is complained of by the writers of ecclesiastical: history, that the bishops, or presbyters, who lived near the age of the Apostles, had very imperfect notions of what they conceive to be the vital pervading principle of Christianity.

The Atonement, in its present orthodox acceptation, was carried to its height by the Protestant reformers, in their zeal to oppose the Romish abuse of the merit of works-works of supererogation, or

exceeding the necessary proportion of righteousness, and superabundant and transferrible merit. They threw themselves therefore into the opposite extreme, of the abominableness of human righteousness, and the necessity of imputed merit.

The doctrine of a satisfaction made to GOD for human sin, without which he would not or could not forgive, is held only by the Trinitarians; who believe CHRIST to be equal with the FATHER, of the same as the FATHER, the original Creator of all worlds, and doing every thing by inherent and underived divinity. The advocates of the middle scheme, who believe in the Son of God as his created image before the ages, and his instrument in the making of this world, consider the death of Christ as in some measure disposing the divine nature to mercy, but only by the method of an acceptable sacrifice, and not in the sense of vicarious punishment, or satisfaction for a debt incurred; nor do they assent to the strange doctrine of original or transmitted sin.

It is thought by the Trinitarians, not that the mere physical consequence of the penalty, mortality of nature,9 attached to the sin of our common ancestor, but that a moral consequence, the actual sin itself, descended upon all his posterity, as from their federal head, independently of their volition, consent, or participation. That therefore all infants, though they had committed no sin, were regarded by GoD, their CREATOR, as equally guilty with ADAM, and, as such, deserving his infinite wrath and vengeance for ever and ever; and that this would actually have been their doom, had not the eternal Son of Gon, who at the same time was GOD, made a compact with GOD, and graciously interposed to avert the wrath of GOD from the children of Adam; and by submitting, as man, though really GoD, to suffer the wrath of GOD, and die in their stead, made an infinite satisfaction to

GOD for the infinite original sin of Adam, of which Adam's whole posterity. were, without their knowledge or assent of will, equally guilty: this sin of Adam being imputed to Christ, who did no sin;" Christ, as God made Man, feeling the weight and consciousness of all human guilt, of which by his nature he was notwithstanding incapable; he, as God, being smitten by God's wrath, and forsaken of God; and his righteousness being imputed to them, the children of Adam, whose sin was imputed to him. They were thus accepted of God, not for any works of piety and virtue of their own, but for their faith in the merits of Christ. Such works they were, by their nature, incapable of doing: they did them, therefore, through irresistible grace or arbitrary favour; yet these works, although, since men could do nothing good of themselves, they could be only the effects of divine operation on the mind, were, notwithstanding, in themselves so far from pleasing to the Maker of man, who had commanded them to be done by those his creatures who yet of themselves could not do them, that they were in fact odious, and so many presumptuous sins, unless performed under a sense of Christ's imputed righteousness; nor were they accepted from the free grace and rich mercy of their Creator and Father, or owing to any essential goodness in his nature, but solely on account of the merits of Christ, in being without sin; he, as GOD, being incapable of sin. Christ therefore was their original and proper Saviour, by interposing between the wrath of the Creator against the work of his own hands, by suffering their punishment, and being righteous in their stead. The faith spoken of in the Gospel is thus not a faith in the divine authority of Christ, as the medium of God's spiritual favour to men, and the "first fruits of those who slept" or died the

death of Adam, but a faith in Christ's imputed and vicarious righteousness.

The Calvinistic Trinitarians hold that God, by This fore-counsel and absolute will, ordained some men to certain destruction from the womb, that they might glorify his name by their everlasting misery; that holiness is the result of God's election, and wickedness of his reprobation: GOD himself blinding men, that they might not be saved. According to the Calvinistic scheme, therefore, the vicarious sufferings of an incarnate God were of no avail, nor intended to be so, as to the generality. of mankind: and even the elect of God, whom God had thought fit to make righteous, would have lain under his everlasting wrath, had not a person in the Deity condescended to be punished in their stead.

The scheme of Calvinism, as is familiar to medical experience, has tended to propagate insanity; but every scheme of the modern Atonement, even that modified form of it which is adopted by the Arians, has been found to depress the mind, and secretly alienate its first affections from "the Father of mercies and God of comfort."

As the departure from the primitive worship of the "One God and Father of all" opened the way to the worship of "the Mother of God" and of "All Saints;' so the divesting the Deity of his attribute of essential mercy has led to doctrines which poison the very sources of human charity and kindness, weaken self-vigilance, inflate the imagination, check the growth of practical piety and usefulness, and loosen all the ties of moral and social obligation: it has led to the doctrines of a malevolent God, of faith above works, of faith without works, of conversion, not effected by gradual discipline and effort under the fear of God, but by a momentaneous conviction of sin, and a

new birth to holiness through the sudden selfappropriation, by faith, to the sinner, of Christ's vicarious merits. The doctrine of the necessity of faith beyond all good works whatever, although directly opposed to the plain letter as well as the spirit of Scripture, and to the recorded Christian opinions of the first and best ages, forms the principal feature in the prevalent theology of the times. On this system it is contended that "the ungodly and sinners, unholy and prophane, murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, men-slayers, whore-mongers, and them that defile themselves with mankind," (1 Tim. i. 9, 10,) if they can, even in the very hour preceding their dissolution, appropriate to themselves by a strong internal persuasion the vicarious righteousness of Christ, are more worthy in the sight of God, than they who have walked all their lives in his fear and love, and "have kept themselves unspotted from the world." This system has reached its maturity in the doc trine of Antinomianism; which, leaping at once to the logically pursued consequence of a substi tuted righteousness, proclaims the abolition of the moral law, and holds forth impunity to past and future sin, through the new creatureship in Christ.

Hâc fonte derivata clades

In patriam populosque fluxit.

Whether we regard the triad in the Godhead as three different characters under which God acts, or as three attributes of his nature, or as three intelligences or essences, distinct from each other, yet united by a common consciousness, each being equally by himself God, yet all three together constituting but one single God, the satisfaction on the Trinitarian scheme is made by God to God; in other words, God, demanding a victim, becomes himself his own victim,10 and appeases himself by himself, and thus saves his justice by a fiction!