Viewed in itself, Christ's death is, we beheve, a sacrifice acting in some unknown way for the expiation of human sin; but Mr. E. views it, (as indeed it may well be viewed, but exclusively as it should not be viewed,) as a mark and pledge of God's love to us, which it would be, though it were not an Expiation. Even though Christ's incarnation issued in nothing more than His preaching to the world and sealing His doctrine with His blood, it would be a great sign of His love, and a pledge now of our receiving blessings through Him; for why should He die except He meant to be merciful to us? but this would not involve the necessity of an expiation. St. Paul died for the Church, and showed his love for it in this sense. When then the view of the Christian is limited, as Mr. E. would almost wish it to be, to the Manifestation of the Atonement, or the effect of the Atonement on our minds, no higher doctrine is of necessity elicited than that of its being a sign of God's mercy, as the rainbow might be, and a way is laid, by obscuring, to obliterate the true doctrine concerning it. So far Mr. E. proceeds, not denying it (far from it) but putting it aside in his philosophical evidence: Mr. A., upon the very same basis, is bolder in his language, and almost, if not altogether gets rid of it.
In the following passage he applies Mr. Erskine's doctrine of the moral lesson, taught in Christ's death, of the justice and mercy of God; and he will be found distinctly to assert that the virtue of it lay in this, viz. that it was a declaration of God's hatred of sin, the same in kind as the punishment of the sinner would have been, only more perfect, a means of impressing on us His hatred of sin; not as if it really reconciled us to an offended Creator.
"The balm for your wounded spirit is this, that the moral impression in respect to the nature and tendencies of sin, which is the only possible reason God can have in leaving you to suffer its penalties,"
one should think the reason might be that "the wages of sin is death,"
"is accomplished far better by the life and death of His Son;—"
surely it is a greater balm to know that Christ has put away the wrath of God, as Scripture says, than to theorize about
