+True of all higher human experience.+--The same thing holds good in a lesser degree of everything worthy of Jesus in human experience. We do not account for any man"s goodness or greatness by pointing to his ancestry. Heredity may account for a great deal, but it is inadequate as an explanation of genius or high moral achievement. If we go back far enough, we shall find that our ancestry was barbarous, and, judging from its tendencies, not at all likely to produce the Christ-man of future ages. Wherever the Christ-man appears, we have to acknowledge that the princ.i.p.al factor in his evolution is the incoming of the divine spirit. It is only another way of stating what has already been stated above, that the true man or higher self is divine and eternal, integral to the being of G.o.d, and that this divine manhood is gradually but surely manifesting on the physical plane. The lower cannot produce the higher, but the higher is shaping and transforming the lower; every moral and spiritual advance is therefore of the nature of a virgin birth--a quickening from above. The spiritual birth described in the conversation between our Lord and Nicodemus as given in the third of John is, properly speaking, a virgin birth. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh and that which is born of the spirit is spirit." "Ye must be born anew," or, literally, "quickened from above." Every man who deliberately faces towards the highest, and feels himself reenforced by the Spirit of G.o.d in so doing, is quickened from above; the divinely human Christ is born in him, the Word has become flesh and is manifested to the world.
+Human history one long incarnation.+--If now we can turn our thoughts away for a moment from the individual to the race and think of humanity as one being, or the expression of one being, we shall read this truth on a larger scale. All human history represents the incarnation or manifesting of the eternal Son or Christ of G.o.d. The incarnation cannot be limited to one life only, however great that life may be. It is quite a false idea to think of Jesus and no one else as the Son of G.o.d incarnate. It is easy to understand the loving reverence for Jesus which would lead men to regard Him as being and expressing something to which none of the rest of us can ever attain, but in affirming this we actually rob Him of a glory He ought to receive. We make Him unreal, reduce His earthly life to a sort of drama, and effect a drastic distinction in kind between Him and ourselves. If He came from the farther side of the gulf and we only from the hither; if we are humanity without divinity, and He divinity that has only a.s.sumed humanity,--perfect fellowship between Him and ourselves is impossible.
But it is untrue to say that any such distinction exists. Let us go on thinking of Jesus as Christ, the very Christ of glory, but let us realise that that same Christ is seeking expression through every human soul. He is incarnate in the race in order that by means of limitation He may manifest the innermost of G.o.d, the life and love eternal. To say this does not dethrone Jesus; it lends significance to His life and work. He is on the throne and the sceptre is in His hand. We can rise toward Him by trusting, loving, and serving Him; and by so doing we shall demonstrate that we too are Christ the eternal Son.
To think of all human life as a manifestation of the eternal Son, renders it sacred. Our very struggles and sufferings become full of meaning. Sin is but the failure to realise it; it is being false to ourselves and our divine origin; it is the centrifugal tendency in human nature just as love is the centripetal. There is no life, however depraved, which does not occasionally emit some sign of its kinship to Jesus and its eternal sonship to G.o.d. Wherever you see self-sacrifice at work you see the very spirit of Jesus, the spirit of the Christ incarnate. I find it everywhere, and it interprets life for me as nothing else can. Take up any work of fiction, no matter what, and you will find the author instinctively preaching this truth. Look into any commonplace, everyday life, no matter whose, and you will find it exemplified. Many a selfish bad man has one tender spot in his nature, his affection for his child, and for the sake of that child he will deny himself as he has never dreamed of doing for anything else; so far as that one influence is concerned he actually reverses the principle which governs the rest of his life. I have read of an African negress who on one occasion was beaten nearly to death by the brute to whom she was slave and paramour. Her murderer, for such he was, was arrested and placed on trial for his misdemeanour, in accordance with the rough justice of the white man in his dealings with the native. In the night the poor dying woman crawled painfully to the tree against which the ruffian lay bound, cut his cords, and set him free. It was her last act in this life; in the morning she was found lying dead on the spot whence the prisoner had fled. This particular story may or may not be true, but the same kind of thing has been true a million times in human history. What was the spirit in this benighted woman of the African wilds but the Christ spirit, the self-giving spirit seen with such unique sublimity in the life of Jesus?
Look abroad all through the world, look back upon the slow, upward progress of humanity to its home in G.o.d, and you will read the story of the incarnation of the eternal Son. Never has there been an hour so dark but that some gleams of this eternal light have pierced the murky pall of human ignorance and sin; never have bitter hate and fiendish cruelty gone altogether unrelieved by the human tenderness and self-devotion that testify of G.o.d. Indeed without the limitation, the struggle, and the pain, how would this Christ spirit ever have known itself? Granted that self-surrender had never been called for by the conditions of life, granted that our resources had always known themselves infinite, and that which is worthiest and sublimest in the nature of G.o.d and man alike could never have been revealed. This is why the eternal Son has become incarnate; this is what we are here to do, and upon the faithful doing of it depends our experience of the joy that the world can neither give nor take away. The life and death of Jesus are the central expression and ideal embodiment of this age-long process, a process the consummation of which will be the glorious return and triumphant ingathering of a redeemed and perfectly unified humanity to G.o.d. "And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that G.o.d may be all in all."
CHAPTER VIII
THE ATONEMENT
+I. a.s.sociation of the Doctrine with Jesus+
+Importance of the subject.+--This brings us to a subject, which, more than any other, with the exception of that of the person of Jesus, has come under discussion at the present time. In the course of Christian history it has created a more extensive literature than probably any other doctrine. I mean the subject variously known as Salvation, Redemption, Atonement, and with which the terms Forgiveness, Expiation, Reconciliation, Ransom, Justification, Propitiation, Satisfaction, Sanctification, and such like have been commonly a.s.sociated. The Christian doctrine of Atonement, as we may call it for convenience, bulks so large in Christian thought that all others may be held to be dependent upon it, even that of the person of Jesus; for, according to the received theology, Jesus became incarnate for our redemption, and that redemption can only be accomplished by one who is very G.o.d.
+The need for an adequate explanation.+--But there is no subject upon which modern Christian thought is less coherent than this. We are constantly hearing the statement that a rational theory of the Atonement is badly wanted, or that it is our duty to preach the fact without a theory, or that the Atonement is such a mystery that no theory is possible and we must just accept it on faith. This confession of helplessness shows that there is something seriously wrong with the conventional presentation of the doctrine. But I do not think the Atonement is such a very great mystery after all, and it ought to be possible to get at the heart of it without stultifying the intellect. Anyhow, let us try.
+The usual theological method of expounding it.+--As a rule treatises on the Atonement begin with an examination of the Scripture pa.s.sages which are supposed to have a bearing upon it. Then follows a careful examination and criticism of the various theories of it which have successively held the field during its history; the author concludes by giving us his own. I do not propose to follow that method, for it does not possess a living interest for the mind of to-day; the psychological should take precedence of the historical. I do not feel called upon to take the doctrine of Atonement for granted and then proceed to try to find a place for it in Christian experience. On the contrary, I prefer to take human nature for granted and inquire whether it needs anything like a doctrine of Atonement. If it does not, let the doctrine go; if it does, let us see that the doctrine is presented in a reasonable fashion. If it cannot be presented reasonably, it is not wanted. But I think it is wanted, and more than wanted; it is already taken for granted by everyone who thinks seriously about life, whether it is called by its theological name or not.
+Outline of present-day accepted belief in regard to it.+--Before I proceed to attempt to justify these statements let me ask my readers to call to mind the outline of what they have been taught in reference to this great fundamental of the Christian faith. Part of it has already been indicated, for it was hardly possible to avoid it when considering such a subject as that of the nature of evil or the divinity of Jesus.
Roughly stated it is as follows: Our fallen humanity is separated from and under the displeasure of G.o.d. G.o.d longs to save us from our sin, but justice demands that He must punish us. The world is already an unhappy place because of sin, but what we endure here is nothing to what we shall have to endure presently when we cross the river of death; we shall all go to h.e.l.l, a place of never-ending torment, unless some means can be found of justifying us before G.o.d ere we pa.s.s over.
This means has been found in the self-devotion of the second person in the Trinity. The sinless Son of G.o.d took upon Himself the likeness of sinful humanity, was born into this world, lived here for a few years, suffered a violent death, and then reascended to His Father to make unceasing intercession for mankind. It was the dying of the death that was the all-important thing. It was in consideration of this death that G.o.d agreed to pardon sin. Jesus was put to death because G.o.d had arranged that He should be put to death, and because Jesus was willing to be put to death, in order that a satisfactory offering might be made to divine justice for the sins of the world. G.o.d had to punish someone before he could be free to forgive His erring children, and therefore with the consent of Jesus He punished Him. The whole scheme was prearranged in heaven, cross and all, and therefore Jesus was not taken by surprise when the end came; He was, in fact, a party to it, and His murderers were in a sense only the instruments of a beneficent, foreordained plan. G.o.d accepts this sacrifice as a full and complete equivalent for all that humanity deserves, but we must individually appropriate it by faith or it will not avail for us; we shall go to h.e.l.l all the same. If on the other hand we do claim the benefit of this finished work, the merits of the Redeemer are imputed to us; we are held to be justified before G.o.d, and are gradually sanctified by the Holy Spirit operating within our souls and fashioning us into the moral likeness of our Lord.
+Conventional view both true and false.+--To say that these statements are wholly untrue is impossible, for they everyone contain a truth of considerable value, but as popularly stated they are misleading. This view of the Atonement is unethical, and, in my judgment and that of many others, has wrought a good deal of mischief in the past and bewilderment in the present. Some readers of these pages will no doubt find fault with me for stating it so baldly, and will maintain that no front-rank theologian or preacher would enunciate it in these terms to-day. Once again I can only repeat that they use language which implies it, and it seems impossible to resist the conclusion that they are driven to use the vaguer language because of their own feeling that the balder statement, which their predecessors made without hesitation, is intellectually and morally impossible, and yet they do not know what to put in its place. They are reluctant to give up the belief that in some way or other the death of Jesus on Calvary actually effected something in the unseen by making G.o.d propitious toward us and removing the barrier which prevented Him from freely forgiving human sin. Of course they add other and valuable elements in their discussion of the theme, but this is their central idea and they seldom get away from it.
The typical theologian never seems to think of looking at the death of Jesus from the purely human point of view, and yet surely this is the only legitimate thing to do when trying to get at the heart of the subject. It is what we should do in any other case of a like kind; we should never dream of doing anything else. We have no business to begin speculating upon transcendental questions until we have examined the purely human causes of such an event as the crucifixion of Jesus.
When an adherent of the so-called orthodox view of the doctrine of the Atonement is pressed to say just what he supposes the death of Jesus to have effected in the mind of G.o.d so as to free humanity from its curse, he usually takes refuge in phrases about the "mystery of the cross,"
and so on. He does not say in plain language exactly what he means, for the truth is he does not know; he only believes what he has been told, and has persuaded himself that it is of the utmost value to Christian experience, which it is not and never was. The doctrine as popularly held is not only not true but it ought not to be true; it is a serious hindrance to spiritual religion. Why in the world should G.o.d require such a sacrifice before feeling Himself free to forgive His erring children? And why should it be regarded as in any real sense a subst.i.tute for what is due from us or any equivalent for what we should otherwise have to bear? Once more, perhaps, the dogmatic theologian will pull me up sharply and say that I am misrepresenting him, but I think I am on fairly safe ground in declaring that this is what the ordinary man in the pew as well as the man in the street understands by the saving work of Jesus, and he does so because of the language of the pulpit backed by the theological college preceptor. If this is the Atonement, there is little wonder that thoughtful minds will have nothing to say to it and that so many good people are puzzled to know what to think about it.
+The human causes of the crucifixion of Jesus.+--If the death of Jesus took place under similar circ.u.mstances to-day, we should be in no doubt as to what to call it. It was a barbarous and wicked murder instigated by base and unscrupulous men who wanted to get rid of a dangerous teacher. We do not need to search far in order to find reasons for the tragedy. There were reasons enough in the antagonism which had long existed between Jesus and the ecclesiastical rulers of Judea. Jesus held and taught a certain ideal concerning human life and its relation to G.o.d. At the beginning of His brief public ministry He seems to have thought that His invitation to men to realise their divine sonship would meet with a ready response, and that therefore the kingdom of G.o.d would without great difficulty be established upon earth through the working of the spirit of love in human hearts. At first He gained an extensive hearing because the Jewish people were willing and ready to listen to any teacher who would hold out to them some hope of a better and happier day. Consequently He was for a time extremely popular, and even the Pharisees deliberated as to whether He might prove to be the long-expected leader who should restore the kingdom to Israel. But this att.i.tude soon changed. People and rulers alike became disappointed with Jesus. They were looking for a kingdom which should come by force, and Jesus for one which should come by love. They wanted material benefits forthwith, while to Jesus these were altogether a secondary matter. Then, too, He became an inconvenience.
His standard of rect.i.tude was exacting. He saw through the hypocrisies and villanies of many of those who posed as the guides and directors of the nation, and He was not silent about them. He spoke out without fear or hesitation. What other people had been thinking and dared not say He said without pausing to consider what the consequences might be.
No wonder the ecclesiastics came to feel that He must be silenced at any cost. It can hardly be supposed that people in general were offended by His plain language concerning those in high places, but then they wanted Him to do something besides talk. They wanted to see Him drive out the Roman without delay and inaugurate the era of power and plenty. Jesus saw well enough what the end of all this must be.
He must either temporise a little, or go away and hide, or go straight on doing His work until the night came and He could work no more. He decided for the last-named course, leaving the results to G.o.d. It was in the line of His duty to go up to Jerusalem for the feast of the Pa.s.sover, so to Jerusalem He went. He could hardly have been under any delusion as to what awaited Him there. The crowds in the capital were very excited about Him; His name was on every lip, and there were many who would have declared for Him at once if He had only offered Himself as the national champion against the foreigner. But by this time priests, Pharisees, and scribes understood that, in their sense of the word, a national champion He would never be. The crisis was reached at the cleansing of the Temple. The moral greatness, the tremendous impressiveness, of the personality of Jesus were never more clearly demonstrated than on this occasion. There was no earthly reason why dove-sellers, money-changers, priests, and Temple officials should be driven pell-mell out of precincts they had come to look upon as their own, except that they were overawed by the stern majesty of this wonderful Galilean. For a brief hour Jesus was master of the situation; the next day He was arrested. The thing had to be done secretly and quickly, but those who planned it calculated rightly. No sooner was Jesus made a prisoner than the populace turned against Him and clamoured for His destruction. Those who know something of mob psychology will readily understand this. Human pa.s.sion easily swings from adoration to hate, as history has shown over and over again. If a strong man fails in a conflict of forces in a time of great public excitement, he is rarely allowed to sink quietly into oblivion; the mob turns upon him with the savagery of a wild beast. Napoleon was one day driving through the streets of Paris amid cheering crowds. One of his suite remarked to him that it must be gratifying to see how his subjects loved him. "Bah!" said the Emperor, "The same rabble would cheer just as madly if I were going to the guillotine." He was right.
It was just the same with this Jerusalem crowd. The populace thought that the Jesus who had seemed so strong was not so strong after all, and therefore their base fury vented itself upon Him just as priests and Pharisees had foreseen.
These were the immediate causes of the death of Jesus. His execution was a judicial murder done to gratify sacerdotal spite and popular pa.s.sion, and the men who took part in it were guilty of what has proved to be the blackest deed in history. The same type of man exists to-day, as he has existed in every age, and if Jesus came again without saying who He was, history would repeat itself. I do not suppose His enemies would nail Him on a wooden cross,--public opinion would forbid that now, thanks to nineteen centuries of His gospel,--but they would find some means of making Him suffer, and they would invoke His own name to justify them in doing it.
+The reason why there was no supernatural interference.+--But is this all that can be said about the matter? Where does G.o.d come in? Why was a crime of this sort ever permitted? Why has the memory of it actually become a religious dogma? Other people have been put to death quite as unjustly, and the results, though great, are not to be compared with those which have followed from the death of Jesus. Why is this? As we have already seen, the popular view of the doctrine of Atonement presumes that this foul deed was in some way, as the scripture has it, by "the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of G.o.d." Was it really so? Was the whole dreadful drama merely a programme to be gone through in all its appointed stages, ending with the cry of the victim, "It is finished"?
There is one sense, and only one, in which such a deed can be said to have been by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of G.o.d, and that is that G.o.d did not interfere to save Jesus from the last dread ordeal.
He allowed wickedness to do its worst, and thereby made the disinterested n.o.bleness of the character of Jesus all the clearer. In such a time as that in which Jesus lived such a life as His was sure to end on a Calvary of some kind, unless He ran away from it, or G.o.d supernaturally intervened to save Him. Neither event happened. If Jesus had shrunk from the full consequences of His actions; if He had temporised, concealed Himself, tried to gain time, or adopted any other subterfuge or expedient in order to save His life--that life would not have the moral power it possesses or shine with such glorious l.u.s.tre in the world to-day. Supernatural interference would have dimmed the moral beauty of the faith, courage, and perfect self-devotion of Jesus.
The moral worth of any act of self-sacrifice, no matter on what scale it is performed, is dependent upon the fact that it is done without regard to consequences. If we could see with absolute clearness the sure and certain result of any action, if we could know, as unquestionably as that two and two make four, that it would always pay to do the right thing, the very soul of goodness would have gone out of it. It is just because we do not know, save with the deeper knowledge that contradicts appearances,--the knowledge that is rightly termed faith,--that an unselfish action is in accord with the general rightness of the universe, and therefore must prevail in the end, that there is anything praiseworthy in it. The determinate counsel and foreknowledge of G.o.d were that this should be fully demonstrated in the experience of Jesus, as it has been in the experience of many a one of His followers since. Once more therefore we come to the last word of the cosmos, manifestation by sacrifice; and the experience of Jesus is the sum and centre of it all. The reason why the name of Jesus has such power in the world to-day is because a perfectly n.o.ble and unselfish life was crowned by a perfectly sacrificial death. Both were needed; either without the other would have been incomplete. Many a British soldier has died as brave a death as Jesus, but none have ever lived the life of Jesus. The life and death together were a perfect self-offering, the offering of the unit to the whole, the individual to the race, the Son to the Father, and therefore the greatest manifestation of the innermost of G.o.d that has ever been made to the world. It makes the sacrifice unreal to speak of it as though Jesus knew the end from the beginning and foresaw every stage in the programme before He came to it. He did not; He shrank from the shameful end just as we should have done, and prayed to G.o.d to save Him from it. An immense amount of pious nonsense has been spoken and written about our Lord"s agony in Gethsemane. We have been told that in this dreadful hour the sorrow of Jesus bore no relation to his physical death, but was caused by His mysterious self-identification with all the sins of mankind, past, present, and to come. To add to the horror G.o.d the Father turned His face away from Him, treating Him as though He were indeed the embodiment of all the guilt of mankind, the scapegoat driven into the wilderness. I have never been able to read this kind of thing without an inner protest against the unreality of it; it precludes the possibility of understanding Jesus or entering sympathetically into an experience in which to a greater or less degree every n.o.ble soul has sooner or later to share with Him. The only way to explain Gethsemane is to approach it from the purely human point of view, as we have already done with the causes which led up to the crucifixion. Let us try to put ourselves in the sufferer"s place, a perfectly legitimate and right thing to do. How would any of us have felt in the circ.u.mstances of Jesus? Suppose that you had laboured consistently and whole-heartedly, in season and out of season, to get men to realise their divine sonship and live the life that is life indeed. Suppose you had seen your hopes perish one by one, and that materialism, selfishness, and hypocrisy seemed to have become all the stronger for your protest. Suppose you saw evil gathering head against you, that you found yourself left utterly alone, and that even G.o.d seemed to be silent in this hour of tragic failure. Here are your enemies triumphant at the gate, thirsting for your blood. Beyond that gate, betrayal, torture, and public shame are waiting for you. In the background of all stands the cruel gibbet to which your own countrymen, the people you have loved with an all-absorbing love, shall presently commit you. Tell me what you would pray in like circ.u.mstances. Your agony would be just as great as that of Jesus, though perhaps your prayer would lack His magnificent faith and ungrudging self-surrender.
Jesus went to His death having nothing to rely upon except His inner conviction that G.o.d and the cause of truth were one, and that somehow or other in the end that would be made plain to Himself and all the world. It would have been the same no matter what had been the particular death that Jesus died. His murderers might have taken His life in any one of a thousand ways and the ultimate result would have been just as we see it now. They might have hanged, drowned, or burnt Him, in which case the stake or the hangman"s rope would have become the symbol of the world"s redemption, but, after the fashion of their time, they crucified Him; it was the worst they could do, and they wanted to do the worst. At Calvary perfect love joined issue with perfect hate, perfect goodness with perfect wickedness, and became victorious by enduring the worst and remaining pure and unchanged to the last.
+The moral outcome.+--But it was not the last after all; the world had still to reckon with G.o.d. That life and death have become a moral force, a spiritual dynamic greater than any before or since, just because of the completeness of the self-offering that culminated on Calvary"s cross. I must not antic.i.p.ate what I have to say about the resurrection further than to remark that more came out of the tomb of Jesus than ever went into it. When all seemed lost this buried life arose in power in other lives that up till then had never fully known its divine greatness and spiritual beauty.
This is the truth about the death of Jesus, and nothing needs to be added to show how great an event in the dealings of G.o.d with men it must have been. It was both simple and sublime. Theological word-spinning only serves to obscure its true significance. Show to the world the real Jesus; tell men how it came about that He had to die, and they cannot help but love Him.
CHAPTER IX
THE ATONEMENT
+II. Semitic Ideas of Atonement+
+Atonement in history.+--What, then, has this death to do with the Atonement? A great deal; but the best way to answer the question will be to obtain a clear idea as to what the Atonement really means and always has meant to Christian experience, notwithstanding the tortuous ways in which the doctrine has been articulated. I am convinced that underneath every genuine attempt to explain the Atonement which has ever held the field for any length of time in Christian history the same truth is always to be found. It is so even with the statement of it which is supposed to be orthodox to-day, but which is quite modern after all, and is practically discredited by all thoughtful minds. The mental dialect changes from one generation to another, but truth does not. As a matter of fact, statements of truth are but conventional symbols at the best, and possess only the ethical and emotional value a.s.sociated with them in our minds. This is why venerable propositions which seem obscurantist to us originally possessed vital significance to their framers; the ethical and emotional content were greater than the form of statement, as they always must be. Every one of my readers is no doubt aware of the power possessed by some particular landscape or piece of music to awaken certain emotions in the heart or bring back the memory of certain events to the mind. The same scene or song might not do this for anyone else because the a.s.sociations are different. It is much the same with the forms in which religious truth is stated from age to age. The form is no more the truth than the landscape is the emotion or recollection it excites; it is only a symbol for the truth.
To grasp this clearly should not only make us more tolerant of archaic confessions of faith, but should help us to realise that truth is one even under apparently contradictory forms of statement. It is our duty in religion as in everything else to endeavour to express the content of spiritual experience in the forms which best accord with the mental dialect of our own day. I repeat, therefore, that underneath every one of the princ.i.p.al forms of statement in which the doctrine of Atonement has been presented in the past the same truth is to be found. It is an interesting historical and psychological study to try to find out what it is.
+Atonement in the Old Testament.+--As I have already said above, it is usual for writers on the Atonement to begin by taking scripture for granted and presenting an examination of the princ.i.p.al pa.s.sages in which the Atonement is thought to be presumed or declared. But if what I have just said be true, we have to get behind even the language of scripture and ask how the writers of the Old and New Testaments came to use these particular symbols and what they originally meant. The word "atonement" is not an exact translation of any one Old Testament term, but connotes a group of related religious ideas. In its Christian use other elements enter into it from Greek thought which are not to be found in the Old Testament. But the Old Testament source of the ideas as well as the term is much older than the Greek, and therefore we are right in looking to the Old Testament for the origin of the doctrine which has taken such an important place in Christianity. But here again modern research has opened up an enormous field of investigation.
Israel was a member of a vast family of nations all of which had sprung from one stock, and of which the Babylonians and a.s.syrians were the most powerful representatives. The Israelites were, politically speaking, a comparatively insignificant folk surrounded by mighty empires which had attained a high degree of civilisation. The excavations which are now proceeding in oriental lands, especially the territories occupied by ancient a.s.syria, Babylonia, and Egypt, are bringing much valuable and interesting matter to light. We find that the civilisation of these peoples was much older than up to now scholars have believed. The communities inhabiting the land of Canaan, for example, had developed a complex political and commercial organisation long before the Israelitish invasion; Canaan was in fact the highway along which pa.s.sed the commerce of Egypt with the mighty nations to the north. The painstaking efforts of expert explorers are bringing vast forgotten literatures to light and reconst.i.tuting for us the religious ideas and modes of life of these people of the ancient world. One result of these researches has been to prove that Hebrew religious ideas were closely allied to those of other Semitic peoples, and even the way in which they were expressed owed not a little to older civilisations. In nothing was this more clearly the case than with the ideas included afterward in the doctrine of Atonement. The word translated Atonement in our version of the Old Testament scriptures played an important part in the Old Testament sacrificial system, and this again was closely connected with Semitic modes of worship in general.
+The Day of Atonement.+--There was one great day in the Jewish religious year called the Day of Atonement, when a special ritual was gone through and special offerings made to G.o.d on account of the sins of the people as a whole. The ceremonial was very elaborate and the occasion was observed with great solemnity by the whole nation. As described in the Old Testament the prescriptions for this Day of Atonement, the Good Friday of the Levitical system as it has been called, probably owe a good deal to Babylonian influences. It should be remembered that the outstanding event in later Jewish history was the carrying away of the flower of the nation by Nebuchadnezzar into Babylon, where they remained for more than two generations. It is quite likely that, in spite of their exclusiveness and their hatred of their conquerors, the Jews may have borrowed some of their religious ritual from the Babylonians, but, whether they did or not, the ideas underlying their respective modes of worship were much the same.
Primitive religious sacrifice among Semitic peoples appears to have been mainly of a joyous character; worship and sacrifice went hand in hand. The worshippers were accustomed to offer to their G.o.ds sacrifices of everything which the votaries themselves valued,--the fruits of the earth, their material possessions, their flocks and herds, the prisoners they had taken in war, and occasionally even the children of their own body. It was only on great and solemn occasions, such as the necessity for staying a pestilence, or averting defeat in war, that the offering of the more terrible kinds of sacrifice was made. It would be instructive, therefore, for us to inquire what were the underlying ideas a.s.sumed in Semitic religious sacrifice.
+Underlying ideas in Semitic sacrifice. 1. The solidarity of man with G.o.d.+--In the first place there was the idea of community of life between the worshipper and his G.o.d. It is doubtful how far this can be pressed, but it is clear that in the Semitic mind there was always a conviction that the deity of the clan or tribe was the giver as well as the sustainer of its life. This did not apply to the minor divinities, the demons of wood and stream, but to the tribal deities, the Chemosh of Moab, the Dagon of the Philistines, the Jehovah of Israel. Probably the Philistines were not Semites, but no doubt ancient worship in general took for granted this community of life between any particular people and their deity. In the offering of the best of their possessions to the G.o.d the worshippers thought they were rendering to him of his own. As he was at once the giver and the guardian of life, they felt bound to render him the best of the fruits of life. This was a true thought, a principle essential to all true spiritual life, and implied in all spiritual aspiration. The reader will have already seen that it is fundamental to the New Theology. However crude and even repellent some of its expressions may have been in ancient modes of worship, it is the same truth all ages through--the truth that G.o.d and man are essentially one.
+2. The solidarity of the individual with the community.+--A further idea underlying primitive sacrifice was that of the solidarity of the individual with the community as a whole. In the Chaldean tribes out of which Israel arose personality as we know it had not even emerged.
Readers of the Old Testament will not need to be reminded that in the earlier stages of Israel"s existence as a people the whole nation was repeatedly said to be punished for the behaviour of individuals, and families perished for the transgression of a father, as in the case of Achan. No particular attention was ever paid to the individual as such. A man had no life of his own, and no value, apart from the life of the community. He belonged to it, not to himself. Hence, when any communal act of worship was performed, when any tribal sacrifice was made to the deity, the organic unity of the individual with the whole was specially emphasised. Physically and spiritually the unit was held to belong to the whole, and to exist for the sake of the whole. Here again we have a great truth, the foundation truth of all morality, and a truth which reaches its highest in the life of Jesus. The deepening of individual self-consciousness, and the increased perception of individual value, have neither weakened nor destroyed it, for it is written in the very const.i.tution of the universe. Mankind is fundamentally one; here is morality. We are individually fulfilled in G.o.d; here is religion. These are the cognate ideas underlying all modes of sacrificial worship, ancient or modern. These are the ideas which find elaborate ceremonial expression in the Israelitish Day of Atonement as described in the Old Testament. The main purpose of these observances was the desire to a.s.sert as solemnly and emphatically as possible the essential oneness of the community with G.o.d, and of every individual with all the rest. Everything which tended to separate between Israel and her G.o.d was ceremonially put away on this great occasion. From the religious point of view it was the beginning of a new year. The Babylonian new year began about the same time. It was supposed that a man"s good or evil fortune was appointed on new year"s day and settled past all possibility of revision on the tenth day after. The intervening nine days were therefore kept as a sort of Lenten season; the tenth day was the grand occasion for the making sure of the harmonious relations of the community with the deity. It will be seen, therefore, that psychologically the idea of Atonement takes precedence of the idea of sin. Most westerners are accustomed to think exactly the reverse, and that is why the various theories of Atonement which have appeared and disappeared in the course of Christian history have so generally obscured the truth. The root principle of Atonement is not that of escaping punishment for transgression, but the a.s.sertion of the fundamental oneness of G.o.d and man. This may or may not be accompanied by feelings of guilt and contrition, but it is the very marrow of religion. Atonement implies the acting-together of G.o.d and man, the subordination of the individual will to the universal will, the fulfilment of the unit in the whole.
+Sense of sin not originally essential to atonement.+--It ought to be recognised that in Semitic modes of worship the idea of sin did not originally hold the place it has since come to hold in the Christian consciousness. The Babylonian and the early Israelite were greatly afraid of offending G.o.d, but they do not seem to have thought of such a transgression as being morally culpable. The profound sense of sin which characterises so many of the psalms and prophetic writings of the Old Testament was a comparatively late development. The primitive Semites had a markedly anthropomorphic idea of their deities. They thought of any divine being as more or less like an ordinary man and liable to take umbrage at little things. It was even possible to offend him without knowing it, and therefore to be left without protection against the ills of life. It was to make sure of smoothing away all possible misunderstandings that covering sacrifices were offered from time to time; but the offering of these sacrifices did not necessarily mean that the worshipper thought he had done anything to be ashamed of and which required to be put right. He was simply treating his G.o.d as he would have treated a powerful earthly patron or potentate, that is, he was apologising for anything he might have done to alienate his favour. This notion of the necessity for placating G.o.d is to be found in close a.s.sociation with the worthier spiritual instincts to which I have already referred, and it has not even yet disappeared from our thinking. Unbia.s.sed readers of the Old Testament will find abundant justification for this statement. We are told repeatedly therein that the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel or against this or that individual, and that the whole community had in consequence to humble itself before Him in order to avert plague, or pestilence, or some other form of general calamity. Not only was Jehovah thought of as a kind of larger man who was at once protector and tyrant to his people, he was but the G.o.d of Israel in contradistinction to the G.o.ds of other nations, one G.o.d out of many.
It was only gradually, and after the lapse of ages, that Israelites came to think of their G.o.d as the G.o.d of the whole earth and a being who must be worshipped in righteousness. Israel was fortunate in possessing what other nations had not in the same degree, a succession of specially inspired men, teachers of moral and spiritual truth called prophets. The best of these--for no doubt the generality of them spoke only the language of their time--earnestly protested against material ideas of sacrifice and inadequate notions about G.o.d. They declared that G.o.d and the moral ideal were one and that the best way to serve the former was to be true to the latter. True sacrifice, they maintained, was of a spiritual kind and ought never to be thought about in any other sense. Thus in the fifty-first psalm the writer, one of the prophetic school, thus contrasts mere ceremonialism with spiritual worship:
Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it; Thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of G.o.d are a broken spirit. A broken and a contrite heart, O G.o.d, Thou wilt not despise.
Or take the prophet Micah, chapter vi., verse 6. Here is a reference to human sacrifice, to which the Israelites were p.r.o.ne from time to time, following the example of their neighbours:
Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the Most High G.o.d? shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
And the answer of the prophet is:
He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy G.o.d?
Here we have a declaration in unmistakable terms that the moral ideal and the religious ideal are one, and that to worship G.o.d properly the worshipper must treat his fellow-men properly. We now get the idea that sin against G.o.d is not something into which a man may fall without knowing it, but the living of a selfish life.
+Atonement never an equivalent for penalty.+--We ought to recognise too that the sacrifices of the Day of Atonement were never held to secure a complete amnesty for all kinds of sin. If a man committed theft or murder, he had to bear the appropriate penalty of his misdemeanour because he had been guilty of an action directed against the well-being of the community and the community had to take measures to protect itself; the Day of Atonement availed nothing in such a case. Here is where many who see in the Old Testament sacrificial system a type and antic.i.p.ation of the one perfect sacrifice of Jesus frequently go wide of the facts. The Day of Atonement was a ceremonial and symbolical a.s.sertion of the willingness of the individual and the nation to fulfil their true destiny by being at one with G.o.d. If some particular man had been so living as to cut himself off from the communal well-being, he had to suffer.
+The significance of the blood.+--Many people seem to think that some actual saving efficacy was supposed to attach to the shedding of the blood of the victims offered on the altar of sacrifice, but that never was so. No doubt in the ignorant popular mind material sacrifices came to be looked upon as possessing some virtue in themselves, but the intelligence of the nation never regarded them in this way. In the offering of a victim the worshipper symbolically offered himself. The Semites thought that the life of any organism was in the blood. Thus in Numbers we read, "The life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the soul (or life)."