What means the allusion made to the non-atoning character of the sufferings of others? It is as if it were altogether forgotten that the atonement of the Cross of Christ was not the result of death in the abstract, but the result of the victim being what he was, the Anointed One of God, the Only-begotten of the Father. It is hard to conceive where the heart and conscience of any one could be, who could pen the last sentences in the quotation we have made; as if all the merits of the Cross arose not out of the wonderful fact that it was God who was making the propitiation. Had this stupendous thought been pervading the writer’s thoughts, could he have written that saints who suffered for Christ would “abhor the falsehood that their sufferings atoned.” Truth has lost its power when such truisms are uttered, as that a sinner cannot by suffering atone for a sinner. The heresies of 1848 left the cross very much untouched—the precious blood remained still the simple and single ground of atonement before God, and the only power of cleansing for the conscience to the sinner. The writer here says, “it was not the pure death of Christ that was expiation,” but it was what he suffered for our sins “in body and soul under the wrath of God.” What can the tendencies of such teaching as this be, but to under mine confidence in those very foundation truths which are reiterated again and again in the Scripture of truth, where we are ever reminded that it was the blood, and the blood alone, which settled every question between the believing sinner and his God.
Let us hear what scripture says on this all important matter. We are told that:—we are “justified by his blood” (Roman v. 9); “have redemption through his blood” (Eph. i. 7); that we are “made nigh by his blood” (Eph. ii. 13); that we have “peace through the blood of His cross” (Col. i. 20); that we have “cleansing of conscience through the blood of Christ” (Heb. ix. 14); that we have “boldness to enter into the Holiest by the blood of Jesus.” It is to the “blood of sprinkling” that we draw near in the heavens (Heb. xii. 24); and the standing of the believer here is in the same “sprinkling of the blood of Jesus” (1 Peter i. 1); for he knows that God has redeemed him “with the precious blood of Christ as of a Lamb without blemish and without spot.” It is “the blood of Christ, God’s Son, that cleanseth from all sin,” and before the throne it is the blood of the Lamb that gives title to a place there (Rev. vii), and that alone. Of the death of Christ it is said that we are “reconciled by the death of God’s Son” (Romans i. 10, Col. i. 21, 22), and the Cross is given as that which, being the emblem of sacrificial death , becomes therefore the ground of reconciliation, so that it is said of Christ, “that he might
