I know not how all this may strike others; to me these arguments are simply overwhelming in their force. I tear out the "Gospel according to St. John" from the writings which "are profitable" "for instruction in righteousness." I reject it from beginning to end, as fatally destructive of all true faith towards God, as perilously subversive of all true morality in man, as an outrage on the sacred memory of Jesus of Nazareth, and as an insult to the Justice, the Supremacy, and the Unity of Almighty God.
THE Atonement may be regarded as the central doctrine of Christianity, the very _raison d'être_ of the Christian faith. Take this away, and there would remain indeed a faith and a morality, but both would have lost their distinctive features: it would be a faith without its centre, and a morality without its foundation. Christianity would be unrecognisable without its angry God, its dying Saviour, its covenant signed with "the blood of the Lamb:" the blotting out of the Atonement would deprive millions of all hope towards God, and would cast them from satisfaction into anxiety from comfort into despair. The warmest feelings of Christendom cluster round the Crucifix, and he, the crucified one, is adored with passionate devotion, not as martyr for truth, not as witness for God, not as faithful to death, but as the substitute for his worshippers, as he who bears in their stead the wrath of God, and the punishment due to sin. The Christian is taught to see in the bleeding Christ the victim slain in his own place; he himself should be hanging on that cross, agonised and dying; those nail-pierced hands ought to be his; the anguish on that face should be furrowed on his own; the weight of suffering resting on that bowed head should be crushing himself inta the dust. In the simplest meaning of the words, Christ is the sinner's substitute, and on him the sin of the world is laid: as Luther expressed it, he "is the greatest and only sinner;" literally "made sin" for mankind, and expiating the guilt which, in very deed, was transferred from man to-him.
I wish at the outset, for the sake of justice and candour, to acknowledge frankly the good which has been drawn forth by the preaching of the Cross. This good has been, however, the indirect rather than the direct result of a belief in the Atonement. The doctrine, in itself, has nothing elevating about it, but the teaching closely connected with the doctrine has its ennobling and purifying side. All the enthusiasm aroused in the human breast by the thought of one who sacrificed himself to save his brethren, all the consequent longing to emulate that love by sacrificing all for Jesus and for those for whom he died, all the moral gain caused by the contemplation of a sublime self-devotion, all these are the fruits of the nobler side of the Atonement. That the sinless should stoop to the sinful, that holiness should embrace the guilty in order to raise them to its own level, has struck a chord in men's bosoms which has responded to the touch by a harmonious melody of gratitude to the divine and sinless sufferer, and loving labour for suffering and sinful man. The Cross has been at once the apotheosis and the source of self-sacrificing love. "Love ye one another _as_ I have loved you: not in word but in deed, with a deep self-sacrificing love:" such is the lesson which, according to one of the most orthodox Anglican divines, "Christ preaches to us from His Cross." In believing in the Atonement, man's heart has, as usual, been better than his head; he has passed over the dark side of the idea, and has seized on the divine truth that the strong should gladly devote themselves to shield the weak, that labour, even unto death, is the right of humanity from every son of man. It is often said that no doctrine long retains its hold on men's hearts which is not founded on some great truth; this divine idea of self-sacrifice has been the truth contained in the doctrine of the Atonement, which has made it so dear to many loving and noble souls, and which has hidden its "multitude of sins"--sins against love and against justice, against God and against man. Love and self-sacrifice have floated the great error over the storms of centuries, and these cords still bind to it many hearts of which love and self-sacrifice are the glory and the crown.