The Atonement According to the Maurice-school. A SERMON, PREACHED AT ST. GEORGE'S HALL, LANGHAM PLACE REV. CHARLES VOYSEY. PSALM, LXXIII. 24.," Whom have I in heaven but Thee, and there is none upon earth that I desire in comparison of Thee." N dealing with the subject of the atonement, it was necessary to consider by itself that view which is held in common by both the Evangelical and Sacramentarian Schools. We have now to examine the view of that more modern School which originated with Coleridge and Arnold, was expanded by Robertson of Brighton, and at last took dogmatic shape in the writings of Maurice, Kingsley, Llewellyn Davies, Stopford Brooke, and many others less eminent, and which has for its organ the Spectator. It is a common error to call this School the Broad Church Party. It does not constitute the Broad Church, but forms only a small section of it. If it be asked why the views of this School should be especially examined and attacked, my reason for doing so is that these teachers are the rear-guard of Christianity. When Evangelicalism and Sacramentarianism shall have been demolished we shall still have to face the old enemy under a fresh disguise; we shall have a religion perfectly unheard of and undreamed of during the first 16 or 17 Rev. C. Voysey's sermons are to be obtained at St. George's Hall, every Sunday morning, or from the Author (by post), Camden House, Dulwich, S.E. Price one penny, postage a halfpenny. centuries presenting itself for our acceptance under the Christian name and even claiming to be the only true Christianity which the world ever had. We have no opponents more bitter and inveterate than these. With all the pride of orthodoxy and the conceit which always comes with a sense of having made a discovery, they assume airs of contempt towards all who outstrip them, or adopt the worst tactics which not long ago the old orthodoxy had been using against themselves. Not one of them lent a helping hand to Bishop Colenso, or to Professor Jowett, or to any writers of that School. They used what power they had to bring Biblical criticism into contempt and to keep their disciples from reading anything which did not contain their Shibboleths. They are in principle quite as retrograde as the Sacerdotalists, resting wholly on external authority and being fast bound by Bibles and texts. But what influence they have, and it is considerable, is due to the unquestioned superiority of some of their beliefs over the older orthodoxy. They have risen into favour by their denial of endless suffering and vicarious punishment. They have appealed to the finer and more tender feelings of humanity and they deserve to be listened to and to win disciples, if only for that. But as we have already seen, any dogmatic system is bad because it is dogmatic; and this new one has already given signs that it could be as cruel and tyrannical, as bigoted and persecuting as any of its predecessors. I have taken great pains to discover from the writings of this School what it is they really believe about the atonement; and in reading volume after volume, one is struck by the dreadful mistiness and mysticism which no ingenuity can unravel, nor power of expression can translate. Of course this cannot be due to any deficiency of intellectual clearness in such writers as Charles Kingsley, or Stopford Brooke, though it might be so accounted for in the writings of others even more eminent. But the mist and the haze arise out of the endeavour to take old words, and old doctrines, and put an entirely new and non-natural sense upon them. Ambgiuity is thus not an accident of their system, but its very essence. Everything may mean anything; it is the apotheosis of metaphysical jugglery; and at last we find men who deny the dogma of endless torments preaching sermons in defence of the text "Whosoever shall say a word against the Holy Ghost shall never be forgiven neither in this life nor in the life to come; and crowning the climax of their inconsistency by calling the Athanasian Creed "the Charter of our Liberties." The atonement theory of this new School agrees with the older theories only in two points-first in that it traces back to the fall of Adam as its foundation; and secondly, in that it accepts as an historical fact that a God came down and became incarnate, and lived and died on behalf of mankind. In all else it differs. (1.) This school denies or explains away God's curse against the race. They repudiate and deny altogether the doctrine of endless sufferings. To do them justice they leave no doubt as to this point. With nearly equal distinctness they deny that the death of Christ appeased God's anger, or was ever intended to do so. They represent the transaction as one only of Love from beginning to end, Love of the Father and Love of the Son for a lost world-"lost," in the sense of having wandered, not in the sense of being cursed and doomed. In spite of their own repeated efforts to reconcile these views with orthodox phraseology, they do most certainly and clearly deny that punishment is ever endless, or that Christ bore the punishment due to our sins, or suffered in our stead. To recur for a moment to the judgment of Lord Hatherley. It is there laid down that it is contrary to the 2nd and 15th articles of Religion to say without any qualification that "Christ did not bear the punishment due to our sins, nor suffer in our stead." Accordingly Mr. Stopford Brooke thinks that he and his party may safely deny that Christ bore the punishment due to our sins so long as they do so with some qualification. In one of his seven sermons on Freedom in the Church of England, No. 2 he says "since I neither deny but assert that the sacrifice of Christ was a propitiation and a necessary propitiation for the sins of the whole world, and interpret that and other phrases within, as I consider, the fair meaning of the articles, I am willing to repose within the ambiguity of the judgment, only I desire openly to claim that ambiguity as permitting me altogether to deny the theory connected with the phrases introduced into the judgment." He goes on to say, "How Christ suffered for us, as the Prayer Book says (not instead of us) how he bore the punishment of our sins (not due to our sins) in what sense God was reconciled to Humanity and Humanity to God in Christ are subjects on which I shall endeavour to state my views," &c., &c. For centuries plain people wrote and understood those words about Christ dying for our sins and being a perfect sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world, in their natural obvious sense, viz: as in lieu of the eternal penalty which they thought sin deserved. And now we have an entirely new religious belief foisted upon the old words, which with all its disguises and subleties denies in the most unmistakeable manner the only sense which those words have borne for all these ages. 66 Whereas the late Bishop Jeune, of Peterborough, said that Christ's worst agony came upon him when he fell into his father's hands," and hundreds of Evangelical preachers have proved the Father's anger from the words on the Cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Mr. Stopford Brooke preaching on this very text says "He (Christ) knew that He was not forsaken by God at the very moment when He realized the feeling of Humanity that it was forsaken," p. 36. Again page 40. "In distinction from the theory which says that he bore his father's wrath in that dread hour, we believe that on him rested at that moment the entire fullness of His father's Love. God saw on earth the perfect image of His own life; and at the very instant when some say he turned away His face from the innocent because he accounted him guilty, the Father beheld the Son absolutely righteous; and righteous especially in this that he had then realized through perfect sympathy and loss of self, the misery of the world's sin." God saw in the absolute sacrifice which enabled Christ to lose himself in love of man, and to 66 66 bear the burden of the sin of man in passionate sympathy with the awfulness of the burden, the highest reach of human virtue, the highest ideal of human sacrifice realized; saw human nature in this especially at one with His own nature, and was well pleased with this image of humanity; united Himself in perfect sympathy to it; and as He took into Himself, and into union with Himself, the Humanity of Christ, so He took into Himself and into unity with Himself the Humanity which Christ represented. This is the reconciliation of God to man, the forgiveness of man's sin by God. This is the objective side of the atonement." "It was then that Christ lost sense of all He suffered from the sin of man, and entered into the horror of sin itself and the misery which followed it, in awful pity and holy love, and, sinless, said to God, 'I die for love of them.' It was then that the Father saw man perfect. It was this self-sacrificing love, this life in others, this loss of His own particular Being in the love of all, which made atonement. God could not help uniting Himself to that. The divine word filled the Humanity of Christ, became utterly at one with it, and in becoming at one with it, became in idea, and will become hereafter in fact, at one for ever with mankind." I have quoted entirely from Mr. Stopford Brooke because his language, misty as it is, is nevertheless not so misty as that of the great founder of his School, or any of his fellow disciples. The work from which I quote is, moreover, designed as an exposition of these peculiar views, and is an apology or defence of the followers of Mr. Maurice for maintaining their position in the Church of England after the decision of the Privy Council in my own case. Those who feel interested in further enquiry into their views may read Tracts for Priests and People which appeared about 12 years ago. Present day Papers, edited by the late Bishop Ewing. The works of the Rev. Llewellyn Davies. Fragments of Truth, by McLeod Campbell, and Maurice's Theological Essays and his Doctrine of Sacrifice. I was bound to read you these extracts, for I could not trust myself to translate them into plain English. I do not myself understand the mysticism. But from all their |