[Sidenote: The object of religion not to propitiate the Deity, but to change the heart of man.]
The Dionysian theory, however speculative and vicious as such, at least according to Colet's version of it, did not, like the modern theory, tend towards that grossest heathen conception of religion, according to which its main object is the propitiation of the Deity, rather than the changing of the heart of man.
Its gospel was not that Christ offered his sacrifice to propitiate an unreconciled God--to reconcile God to man. On the contrary, it told of a God who is 'beautiful and good,'[134] who had created all things because He is good, because He is good recalling[135] all things to Himself, by the sacrifice of Himself redeeming them, not from His own wrath, but from the power of Evil.
[Sidenote: Colet on the 'marvellous victory' of a 'suffering Christ.']
The following passage may be taken in illustration of this:--'When, directly after the creation, foolish human nature was allured by the seductive enticements of the enemy, and fell away from God into a womanish and dying condition, and was rolling headlong down with rapid course to death itself, then at length, in His own time, our good, and tender, and kind, and gentle, and merciful God, giving us all good things at once in place of all that was bad, willed to take upon Him human nature, and to enter into it, and rescue it from the power of the adversary, overthrowing and destroying his empire. For, as St. Paul writes to the Hebrews, "Forasmuch as the children"--or servants--"are partakers of flesh and blood," ... therefore also God himself "made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant," and "himself likewise took part of the same" flesh and blood--that is, human nature--"that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage:" that he might destroy, I say, that enemy, not by force, but (as Dionysius says) by judgment and righteousness; which he calls a hidden thing and a _mystery_.[136] For it was a marvellous victory, that the Devil, though victorious, in the very fact of his conquering, should be conquered; and that Jesus should conquer in the very fact of his being vanquished on the cross; so that in reality, in the victory on each side, the matter was otherwise than it seemed. And thus when the adversary that vanquished man was himself vanquished by God, man was restored, without giving any just cause of complaint to the devil, to the liberty and light of God. There was shown to him the path to heaven, trodden by the feet of Christ, whose footsteps we must follow if we would arrive where he has gone. A suffering Christ, I say (most marvellous!), and dying as though vanquished, overcame.... By that death we have been rescued from the dead, and are the servants of God.'[137]