deepest thinkers. It is happily not necessary to salvation to possess a perfect insight into this many-coloured mystery of Divine wisdom, otherwise it would have fared hardly with the Church of the first Christian millennium, which was content with a theory of atonement scarcely deserving the name. Anselm's theory by comparison was scientific, and in one form or another it has been found a sufficiently good working hypothesis from his time till now. Yet it too has failed to give perfect contentment to many minds, especially since men began to take in earnest the teaching of Christ concerning God. Two things in the traditional theory have appeared unsatisfactorythe legal, forensic aspect given to the process of redemption, and the disruption of the moral unity of the Godhead by the imputation, in effect if not in intention, to the different Persons in the Trinity of discrepant dispositions. Christ dies to satisfy Divine justice, and God the Father demands the satisfaction, which God the Son, in love to men, is ready to give. Would it not considerably improve matters if one could say on Scripture warrant: Christ died to satisfy, or, to use a Scripture expression, to manifest Divine righteousness, and Divine love, and in that manifestation the whole Godhead took part? It would likewise be a movement in the right direction if we could contrive in our theological formulations to take into account the ethical aspect of Christ's death, as due to fidelity to the Divine interest in an evil world, on which Christ Himself insisted in His first lesson to His disciples on the significance of His death. This view brings Christ's experience into line with the suffering experience of the righteous generally, which not less than His needs a theory and a theodicy. The Apostle Paul did not take that aspect into account, but that is no reason why we should not, seeing Christ Himself did. A full scientific theory of the cross might demand a comprehensive answer to two questions: Why does righteousness suffer, not by accident, but with the regularity of a law, in this world? and in what relation does that feature in the moral order of the world stand to the whole character of God? Euripides said that a son of God was never known to be happy, and it is the simple fact that the men who have been emphatically the heroic sons of God have ever been men of sorrow and acquainted with grief. How is this? Is it not because the Spirit of God is in them, and is not their sorrow the sorrow of God; and are they not in all they endure, though apparently accursed, the well-beloved of the Father? It does not follow from this view that Christ's death is not in some respects unique, but the wider survey might tend to prevent some misapprehensions into which we are apt to fall when we regard our Lord's suffering as in all respects isolated.

Dr. Fairbairn has not made the general topic of the sufferings of righteousness a subject of remark, but he has made some helpful

suggestions as to the way in which Christ's atonement is to be contemplated so as to bring it into harmony with the Divine Fatherhood. Among the important points in his statement are these: the idea of law in the New Testament has very little in common with the idea of law in our juridical theologies. The Roman lex was not the synonym of the Greek νόμος,

"Hence if a man reads the Pauline vópos as if it were Roman and magisterial lex, he will radically misread it, especially in all that concerns its relation to the death of Christ. 'Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law '; but this was the law which the Jew loved, and which was thus for ever abolished, not the universal law of God. His death was not the vindication, but the condemnation of the law.”

"It works in the

Yet Christ's death is a Divine judgment of sin. universe as the manifest and embodied judgment of God against sin, but this judgment as chastening and regenerative rather than juridical and penal." In the suffering of Christ the Son, the Father in a real sense shared. "The being of evil in the universe was to His moral nature an offence and a pain, and through His pity the misery of man became His sorrow." Christ's atoning work is "substitutionary " in the sense that it "so does the work of the penal yet corrective judgments of God as to create the very sense of sin and attitude to it that they aim at." "The atonement has satisfied both the love and the righteousness of God." The obedience of Christ is "the cause of a collective righteousness which cancels for the irresponsible and guiltless the evil of collective sin."

In the closing chapters of his work Dr. Fairbairn speaks of the Holy Spirit's activity in Revelation and in the Church. The chapter on Revelation and Inspiration is a closely-packed piece of thinking, of great value, though expansion, if there had been room for it, would have made the statement more easily comprehensible, and therefore more generally useful. It is not at once apparent how the Divine Fatherhood comes in here, but the author holds it to be the theological basis for a constructive theory of the Christian revelation; and it is obvious that the possibility of revelation is involved in the affinity of nature implied in the relation of Fatherhood and Sonship.

The bearing of the Christian idea of God on the doctrine of the Church is more apparent. Dr. Fairbairn's statement on this subject, though brief, is very significant. In no part of his work is he more thoroughly in earnest. He has a deep dislike to sacerdotalism and the idea of the Church which goes along with it. And on good grounds; for nothing can be more utterly opposed to Christ's doctrine of God, and the whole religious ideal embodied in His teaching. Nothing can more fatally compromise the Fatherhood of God and the sonship of men. Nothing is more hostile to the unity and peace of

the Church, or more fitted to separate those who ought to form one fold under the one Shepherd; nothing save perhaps the dogmatic spirit which makes acceptance with God depend on holding right opinions. Dogmatic legalism and sacramentarian legalism are the two great enemies of the Christianity of Christ, the true Antichrists which men should greatly fear. The idea of the Church which goes along with the Christian idea of God is that of a society of redeemed men who are sons of God, and have the spirit of sonship-who are therefore free men, and have direct access to their Father without the intermediation of priestly officials. Christianity as contrasted with Leviticalism is the religion of unrestricted fellowship with God: its symbol a rent veil, and a High Priest who is also a pódрoμoç, going as forerunner into the holy of holies, where all believers may follow, instead of standing afar off trembling while their sacerdotal representative enters the mysterious adytum in their stead. "Draw near" is the watchword of the religion of the better hope, and all abettors of sacerdotalism are simply substituting for it the counter-watchword "Stand off," and doing their best to cancel dearly bought Christian liberties, and conduct, God's people back from Mount Zion to Mount Sinai. Obviously, to the holy brotherhood of the sons of God organisation is a secondary matter, a thing which may be left to look after itself, and can never have any higher importance than that of order and convenience. The people of God are before organisation, create their own polity and officials, which have for their sole raison d'être the edification of the body of Christ. Catholicism, so called, reverses all this makes the secondary primary, reduces God's children to a state of abject dependence on certain exclusively authorised ministers of grace, and ruthlessly unchurches all who decline to occupy this ignoble position. The result is the reductio ad absurdum of the theory. No wonder advocates of the "Catholic" hypothesis, endowed with some measure of humanity and common sense, gladly avail themselves of any feasible way of escape from the absurdity, such as that of Dr. Schanz, who in his excellent work, "A Christian Apology" (vol. iii.), decides that "what are called bond fide heretics must, in all fairness and justice, be morally considered members of the one true visible Catholic Church,

though they are not visibly in her communion. Thus it remains true that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church." This is very comforting for poor Protestants. Dr. Fairbairn likens the polity that shuts outside the Church as immense a body of holy men as are to be found within it to that which would "constitute a State by disfranchising its free-born citizens, and degrading them into serfs and helots." Truly a violent usurpation and tyranny! But there are mitigations of the evils under which afflicted mankind suffers. A witty statesman described the Russian Government as despotism tempered by apoplexy. Catholicism, as construed by its most

kindly advocates, is a spiritual despotism tempered by uncovenanted mercies" and benevolent fictions.

The work of which an inadequate account has been given in the foregoing pages is in every respect weighty and important. It imposes an obligation on the religious community. When a man of Principal Fairbairn's standing, ability, learning, earnestness, and undoubted loyalty to the faith makes an appeal to his fellow-Christians to the effect that theology requires revision and reconstruction on the basis of Christ's idea of God, it cannot reasonably or safely be put aside. Its claim to attention is strengthened by the perfect courtesy and good temper with which the writer's views are stated even when, as in the case of the Church question, his attitude is most uncompromising. Dr. Fairbairn's theological position is by no means. revolutionary. He discards no recognised theological categories, and he adds no new ones. He aims only at revision and correction, and above all, at the breathing of Christ's spirit into theology. The fault of his book in the eyes of many will be that it alters so little. It will much help all who accept the Catholic faith, but it will disappoint those who wish for ever to be rid of the miraculous and the transcendental in religion, and to have a creed based on thorough-going naturalism. Such will have to take up with the “ new Christianity offered to them in the name of philosophy, or find for themselves a new religion not bearing Christ's name, or get on as well as they can without religion. Whether the party of malcontents is to increase amongst us may depend on the response given to "Christ in Modern Theology."

A. B. BRUCE

THE ANTI-SEMITIC MOVEMENT.

THE

I.

IIE first Napoleon prophesied that in fifty years Europe would be either Republican or Cossack. He reckoned without the Jew. It is now about fifteen years since the first tidings of organised agitation on the Continent against the Jews reached us in England through the daily press. It was only natural that the occasion should have afforded us ample opportunities for contemplating the vagaries of others with that mixture of pity and didactic advice which we have fortunately ever been able to tender gratis. But, however that may be, it is sad to note that our well-meant exhortations have hitherto had no effect.

Professor Heinrich von Treitschke, the Prussian historian, was the first man of acknowledged position to take a serious view of what many then believed to be only a passing craze. It required courage

to give public expression thereto. In a series of articles in the renowned Preussische Jahrbücher" he pointed out the growing power of the Jews, their solidarity as a separate caste of foreign race in Germany, their arrogance in the press, their resentment at the slightest reference to themselves as lèse-majesté, whilst daily indulging in unlimited criticism of everything and everybody--these he stigmatised as the causes of the Anti-Semitic agitation. Treitschke foretold an enormous increase of the movement; and his prophecy has been more than fulfilled. That which appeared to be, at most, a temporary agitation has enlarged its area, and to-day the so-called Anti-Semitic movement bids fair to assume international dimensions only second to those of Social Democracy itself.

Already Russia is engaged in ridding herself mercilessly of a Jewish population about equal to that of England in the time of Elizabeth. And it is difficult to see what Europe will do if the Russians persist in their policy of expulsion. Will cruelty restrain them? Cruelty * See Preussische Jahrbucher numbers November 15, 1879, and following. Berlin.