Nor have I been successful in discovering in what way I have misapprehended Mr. Bates’s meaning respecting the word “SON,” in the following verse; “Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” I may doubtless have misstated his words; and if in his eyes the misstatement has any “serious inaccuracy,” I sincerely regret its occurrence. Nothing but the constant habit of short-hand writing, enabling me to take verbatim reports of public addresses, would have given me confidence enough in my correctness to found an argument on an unpublished verbal criticism. Even short-hand, however, being fallible, I relinquish the words: and the more willingly, because Mr. Bates’s own report appears to me absolutely identical in meaning with my own. He says, that the baptism enjoined in the verse just cited cannot, so far as our Lord is concerned, be “baptism in the name of a Mediator;” “our Lord’s words prevent such misapprehension: he says not ‘In the name of the Father and in my name’ (my mediatorial name); but ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son,’—the only begotten, co-essential, co-eternal, and co-equal, with the Father and the Holy Ghost.” I represented him as saying, that our Saviour’s words “expressly exclude such a construction; for he does not say, the name of the Father, and of myself, but of the Son, that is the Eternal Word.” The difference between “preventing such misapprehension” and “excluding such construction” is not very obvious. I understand the argument to be, that there is something in the form of expression in the second clause, forbidding us to think of anything less exalted than our Lord’s Divine Nature; the only expression contained in the clause is “the Son;” this term then, I imagined, was limited by the Lecturer to Christ’s Divine Nature; and must have been replaced by some other phrase, if his mediatorial character had been the subject of discourse. In drawing a general conclusion from this particular statement, I only gave the Lecturer credit for understanding the bearing of his own argument; for of course, all reasoning from the intrinsic force of an expression must be co-extensive with the occurrence of that expression. If I have not correctly explained Mr. Bates’s argument, it evades my apprehension altogether.
LECTURE VI.
THE SCHEME OF VICARIOUS REDEMPTION INCONSISTENT WITH ITSELF,
AND WITH THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SALVATION.
BY REV. JAMES MARTINEAU.
“NEITHER IS THERE SALVATION IN ANY OTHER; FOR THERE IS NONE OTHER NAME UNDER HEAVEN GIVEN AMONG MEN, WHEREBY WE MUST BE SAVED.”—Acts iv. 12.
The scene which we have this evening to visit and explore, is separated from us by the space of eighteen centuries; yet of nothing on this earth has Providence left, within the shadows of the past, so vivid and divine an image. Gently rising above the mighty “field of the world,” Calvary’s mournful hill appears, covered with silence now, but distinctly showing the heavenly light that struggled there through the stormiest elements of guilt. Nor need we only gaze, as on a motionless picture that closes the vista of Christian ages. Permitting history to take us by the hand, we may pace back in pilgrimage to the hour, till its groups stand around us, and pass by us, and its voices of passion and of grief mock and wail upon our ear. As we mingle with the crowd which, amid noise and dust, follows the condemned prisoners to the place of execution, and fix our eye on the faint and panting figure of one that bears his cross, could we but whisper to the sleek priests close by, how might we startle them, by telling them the future fate of this brief tragedy,—brief in act, in blessing everlasting; that this Galilean convict shall be the world’s confessed deliverer, while they that have brought him to this, shall be the scorn and by-word of the nations; that that vile instrument of torture, now so abject that it makes the dying slave more servile, shall be made, by this victim and this hour, the symbol of whatever is holy and sublime; the emblem of hope and love; pressed to the lips of ages; consecrated by a veneration which makes the sceptre seem trivial as an infant’s toy. Meanwhile the sacerdotal hypocrites, unconscious of the part they play, watch to the end the public murder which they have privately suborned; stealing a phrase from Scripture, that they may mock with holy lips; and leaving to the plebeian soldiers the mutual jest and brutal laugh, that serve to beguile the hired but hated work of agony, and that draw forth from the sufferer that burst of forgiving prayer, which sunk at least into their centurion’s heart. One there is, who should have been spared the hearing of these scoffs; and perhaps she heard them not; for before his nature was exhausted more, his eye detects and his voice addresses her, and twines round her the filial arm of that disciple who had been ever the most loving as well as most beloved. She at least lost the religion of that hour in its humanity, and beheld not the prophet but the son:—had not her own hands wrought that seamless robe for which the soldiers’ lot is cast; and her own lips taught him that strain of sacred poetry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” but never had she thought to hear it thus. As the cries became fainter and fainter, scarcely do they reach Peter standing afar off. The last notice of him had been the rebuking look that sent him to weep bitterly; and now the voice that can alone tell him his forgiveness, will soon be gone! Broken hardly less, though without remorse, is the youthful John, to see that head, lately resting on his bosom, drooping passively in death; and to hear the involuntary shriek of Mary, as the spear struck upon the lifeless body, moving now only as it is moved;—whence he alone, on whom she leaned, records the fact. Well might the Galilean friends stand at a distance gazing; unable to depart, yet not daring to approach; well might the multitudes that had cried “crucify him” in the morning, shudder at the thought of that clamour ere night; “beholding the things that had come to pass, they smote their breasts and returned.”
This is the scene of which we have to seek the interpretation. Our first natural impression is, that it requires no interpretation, but speaks for itself; that it has no mystery, except that which belongs to the triumphs of deep guilt, and the sanctities of disinterested love. To raise our eye to that serene countenance, to listen to that submissive voice, to note the subjects of its utterance, would give us no idea of any mystic horror concealed behind the human features of the scene; of any invisible contortions, as from the lash of demons, in the soul of that holy victim; of any sympathetic connection of that cross with the bottomless pit on the one hand, and the highest Heaven on the other; of any moral revolution throughout our portion of the universe, of which this public execution is but the outward signal. The historians drop no hint that its sufferings, its affections, its relations, were more than human,—raised indeed to distinction by miraculous accompaniments; but intrinsically, however signally, human. They mention, as if bearing some appreciable proportion to the whole series of incidents, particulars so slight, as to vanish before any other than the obvious historical view of the transaction; the thirst, the sponge, the rent clothes, the mingled drink. They ascribe no sentiment to the crucified, except such as might be expressed by one of like nature with ourselves, in the consciousness of a finished work of duty, and a fidelity never broken under the strain of heaviest trial. The narrative is clearly the production of minds filled, not with theological anticipations, but with historical recollections.
With this view of Christ’s death, which is such as might be entertained by any of the primitive Churches, having one of the gospels only, without any of the epistles, we are content. I conceive of it, then, as manifesting the last degree of moral perfection in the Holy One of God; and believe that in thus being an expression of character, it has its primary and everlasting value. I conceive of it as the needful preliminary to his resurrection and ascension, by which the severest difficulties in the theory of Providence, life, and duty, are alleviated or solved. I conceive of it as immediately procuring the universality and spirituality of the Gospel; by dissolving those corporeal ties which give nationality to Jesus, and making him, in his heavenly and immortal form, the Messiah of humanity; blessing, sanctifying, regenerating, not a people from the centre of Jerusalem, but a world from his station in the Heavens. And these views, under unimportant modifications, I submit, are the only ones of which Scripture contains a trace.