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other is regarded as being one with him, and as doing whatever he does? Thus an advocate appears for his client, speaks and acts instead of him, just because he is regarded by the court as representing him, sustaining his character, and being in the eye of the law the very client himself; or a plenipotentiary negotiates a treaty instead of his sovereign, just because he represents him, and acts in his name; or a member of Parliament represents his constituents, goes to Parliament instead of them, and they are regarded as having given their consent to the taxes they pay, because he has done

In all these cases the maxim holds good, "qui facit per alium facit per se;" and substitution is perfectly consistent, nay, is the very same thing with representation or identification. And this and no other sort of substitution is what is involved in the catholic doctrine of the Atonement. True, there is another sort of substitution, and it is probably this latter that Hofmann means to deny-that of exchange or barter, as where one thing is given in exchange for another. But this kind of substitution applies more properly to things than to persons. And it is an important principle that, in the Atonement, there is a substitution of persons, not an exchange of things. It is not that Christ's work and sufferings, considered as a thing apart from His person, are substituted or taken in lieu of the obedience and suffering of the sinner; but Christ himself, as a person, undertakes the obligations, and acts in the stead of the sinner as a person, and then, on the ground of this, the work and sufferings of Christ are accepted for the sinner. Scripture does, no doubt, speak in very many places of the work of Christ as a redemption, a purchase, the payment of a ransom or price, &c.; and we are not at liberty to explain away such phrases as mere figures, indicating no reality. They do point to a real transaction; and are images chosen by God as being the most suitable to convey to our minds true notions of the Atonement in certain of its aspects. Still they are figures, and cannot be pressed as complete analogies in every respect, without doing violence to the nature and laws of interpretation of figurative language, and, in consequence, running into the most erroneous and unscriptural notions.

The Atonement is not a pecuniary, but a judicial transaction. It is one great advantage of the federal system of theology, that it brings out so prominently the substitution of persons, and excludes so entirely any idea of comparing the great mystery of our redemption to a commercial or pecuniary transaction. And Hofmann's theology is in many respects very much allied to that of the Covenants. He does admit a vicarious atonement in the only sense in which we

would care to contend for it. For, even according to his system, Christ suffered everything that he admits to have come upon man in consequence of the Fall. Its consequences, as we have seen, were, according to him, mainly two-the wrath of God, on the one hand, and subjection to the power of Satan, on the other; and he distinctly teaches that Christ endured both of these. The latter of them, indeed, is the more prominent of the two in his system; for he makes a great deal of Christ's endurance of all that Satan could do against him, using the sin and passions of men as his instruments; and this he even makes the proximate cause of the death of Christ. The other point, that Christ endured the wrath of God, is not quite so conspicuous in his system. Still it is explicitly and repeatedly avowed by him. He says (Schriftbeweis, Vol. I., p. 479-80): "This wrath of God is nothing else but what the name implies: the hostile attitude of the Creator asserting himself against the creature denying him; and the infliction of all evil that comes upon men is an exercise of it, if not always on the individual on whom it falls, yet always on mankind. Only Jesus is the absolutely beloved; and what he endured was purely the exercise of the wrath of God against humanity, into which he had entered in order to endure it." It is but fair, however, to hear his own explanation of the sense in which he holds this, as he gives it in the second part of his Defence (pp. 94-5): “When I say that the Eternal Son exchanged his Divine blessedness for subjection to the wrath of God against mankind, Thomasius thinks I must therefore also say, that the punitive judgment of God against mankind was executed on the Son, and that He suffered this punitive judgment vicariously. For he thinks immediately of the death of Christ, to which he limits His endurance of the wrath of God against mankind; while to me that Christ assumed our nature and that He came to stand under this wrath of God is one and the same thing . . . for since mankind lies under God's wrath, it is to me self-evident that Christ's coming into it is a subjecting of himself to the wrath of God. As now the whole history of the Lord is an accomplishment of that relation to the Father in which he placed himself by his incarnation, so he experiences the wrath of the Father against mankind from his very conception onwards to his death, ever according to the measure of the progress of his history-in one way before and during his growth to manhood, in another way after that; in one way simply as man, in another way as an Israelite in particular; in one way before the beginning of his public ministry, in another way in the course of it; in one way in

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the time of his active work, in another in the hours of his suffering and death.”

As to this extending of Christ's endurance of the wrath of God over the whole of His life, we cannot quite see our way to agree with Hofmann. It has a good deal to commend it. to us; but in dealing with this mysterious and solemn subject, it is better, perhaps, to leave such questions in abeyance, as the subject is so far beyond the reach of our faculties, and the materials furnished by Scripture are so scanty. From the prominence always given in Scripture to the death of Christ, and from the indications in the Gospel narratives of such a special and mysterious gloom and sorrow over the last hours of our Saviour's work on earth, it seems evident that, if not exlusively then, at least then in a very special way, the Lord was laying upon Him the iniquity of us all; but beyond this we can hardly go. Still, whatever we may think of Hofmann's view on this point, that does not affect the fact that he does really represent Christ as bearing all the consequences of sin, and enduring these to the very utmost.

But, it will be asked, If he admits all this, how can he possibly deny that Christ suffered just what sinners deserved, and must else have suffered? The only grounds of distinguishing between them that he has stated, are just these that the doom of sinners is eternal death, the abiding wrath of God, and that it necessarily involves the pangs of remorse and an evil conscience, which Jesus the Sinless One could not feel. We are astonished. that such a man as Hofmann should give any countenance to such dishonest quibbles, which it is somewhat difficult to deal with calmly and seriously. Does he really imagine that the great body of Christians, who cherish as their dearest faith the vicarious atonement of Christ, hold a doctrine so monstrous, so impious, as he assumes is implied in it? Or does he mean to say that such is the necessary consequence of the doctrine, or that any person could possibly suppose that to be what is meant by it? But, if those men who do not scruple to use this as an argument, are really in earnest with it, why insult our understandings with elaborate arguments against a vicarious atonement, when, if they could but prove that these consequences are involved in it, we could not for a moment believe it-no, not if it were stated in so many words in every page of Scripture? To compare great things with small, such men are like those grammatical critics who, though no man in his senses would or could misunderstand a sentence, will yet maintain that they have a right to say that it means some absurd thing, which they say grammar requires. No one maintains, or can possibly maintain, that

the sufferings of Christ are exactly, and in every respect, identical with those that the lost will be doomed to suffer, or that this is essential to His being the substitute of sinners. If so, there could be no substitution at all. There is, indeed, some difference among the orthodox, whether it is proper to say that the sufferings of Christ are the same, or only an equivalent, to the punishment of sinners themselves. But it is a point of small moment, which of these expressions, idem or tantundem, we prefer. It is generally contended, and with truth, that the infinite dignity of the person who suffered in the stead of sinners, gave an infinite value to his sufferings; so that, though limited in time, they could atone for the infinite guilt of sin; and, on the other hand, it is obvious, that remorse and an evil conscience, being themselves of the nature of sin cannot be strictly part of the punishment that God inflicts, since God is not the author of sin. But, more generally, it may be held that the essence of the Atonement, as a vicarious endurance of the punishment of sin, does not lie in the amount or precise kind of suffering endured, but in the character in which it is endured. If it be admitted that Jesus suffered as the sinner's representative and substitute, and that what he suffered was of the nature of a penal infliction, we have secured all that is essential to the orthodox doctrine; for, as we said before, it is not the exchange of one thing for another, but the substitution of one person for others for which we contend.

And this brings us to what appears to us to be the real, fundamental, and fatal defect in Hofmann's theology. It is not that he denies a vicarious Atonement, for the Atonement he admits is just as truly vicarious as that which the great body of divines maintain. He admits that Christ suffered all that he allows that men suffer in consequence of sin. But he denies, in both cases alike, the properly penal character of the suffering. He denies that Christ suffered the punishment of our sins; but this by itself does not give a complete idea of his opinion; for he denies also that what men are exposed to, and must have suffered but for Christ, is properly punishment for sin. There is, as we have seen in his system, a very explicit and emphatic recognition of the wrath of God, as part of the sinner's doom, and as borne by Christ; but there is no recognition whatever of the curse or condemnation of God, either as lying on man or as borne by Christ. It is true that now and again, in his exposition and defence of his system, he speaks of punishment, or of the punitive judgment of God (Strafgericht) against sinners; and it is a common formula with him that Christ did not suffer the punishment that sinners must else have suffered. But this seems to be

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merely a form of speaking, which he cannot well altogether avoid; and it is remarkable that it only occurs in his explanations of his system; for in the formal and precise statement of it, prefaced to his work, neither the phrase nor the idea of punishment occurs in any connexion from beginning to end. There is an entire omission in his doctrine of the Atonement of the judicial element in any form; redemption is indeed a great and momentous work of God; but it is not, according to him, in any sense a judicial transaction. God does not sit as the moral Governor and Judge of the world.

And this is not a mere defect in one part of his theology, as in the doctrine of the Atonement; for his system is eminently a consistent and logical one; and he is never, so far as we can see, betrayed into an admission of a judicial dealing with men on the part of God. The flaw runs through the entire system, and makes its appearance at very various points, and in forms that we should little expect. Thus, for example, he admits the reality of the wrath of God, and it might perhaps be held by some that this is of the nature of punishment; but with him it is the expression, not of God's righteousness, but of His holiness. In like manner the contradiction that needs to be solved by the Atonement is not between the sin of man and the righteousness of God, but simply between it and His holiness; God acts towards men, according to Hofmann, simply as a holy Being, not as a righteous moral Ruler and Judge. And in consistency with this is his idea of what is meant by righteousness as an attribute of God. This, in his system, has an entirely different meaning from its ordinary one. It would lead us too far away from our subject, to explain fully the meaning attached to, and the place occupied by, the righteousness of God, in Hofmann's system. Suffice it to say, that it is defined (Vol. I., p. 571) as "the self-consistency of God's eternal will, which accomplishes itself historically, and which has for its object, not good in general, but the man of God." And when we add that this eternal will of God is what, in this system, takes the place of the decrees of God in common theological language, it will at once appear that the righteousness of God in this view has nothing whatever in common with what is usually understood by that term, His justice as the moral Ruler and Judge of the world. And the same omission of the judicial aspect of God's dealings with man appears in other points too. Thus, where he explains the original position of man, he admits, indeed, that God dealt with him as an intelligent moral agent, and in a sense dealt with him in the way of probation; but there is nothing like any judicial dealing on God's part with man. Again in his Eschatology we find,

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