an exhausted monarchy, violated St. Denis and scattered to the winds the bones of the kings who had made France great in the times of old.

And now, in conclusion, a clergy who can speak with freedom is of importance to the laity who adhere to the Church, and even to those outside it. It is said that the late judgment militates against this freedom. If so, it certainly is part of the duty of the laity to take care that this liberty should not be infringed, and to claim, with distinctness, that the alleged modifications in the judgment should have their full value, to let the clergy understand that they are not considered dishonest when they take advantage of those modifications.

Many of you wish to remain connected with the Church of England. It has to you the deep interest of a great historical past. Great names and great deeds belonging to it have been woven into the whole web of our history. No man of imagination but would feel that in disconnecting himself from the Church he had severed himself from a great history, and few of the sorrows of the imagination could be more bitter than that. No man could separate from the Church without feeling how sad it was to lose all the pleasure and all the strength inherent in belonging to a great and united corporation, every member of which, in the midst of many differences, acts together at certain points and shares in one feeling of affection. There is none who would not regret to lose, or to be forced to put aside, a thousand dear associations, and to live alone, in the midst of memories which had changed from being tender and sweet to harshness and bitterness. To separate from the Church would be to separate from an organisation in which freedom seemed to have its truest home; freedom

within limits which saved it from intemperance of expression and opinion, which preserved its intellectual sanity, which secured a certain amount of culture, which by an insensible restraint of sensational opinions gave religious progress permanence and promoted its acceptance.

But if the freedom which the clergy have enjoyed should now be taken from them, and definitions unheard of before imposed on them, they cannot, in the interests of truth, abide with her whose features are no longer those of a mother but of a step-mother. And if they leave, and you agree with their love of liberty, your place is also no longer in the Church. Truth should be as dear to you as it is to your ministers. Whether this judgment really limits freedom as it has never before been limited in the Church, or does not, is a question which ought to be as important to you as it is to us. It ought to be known, and known publicly and clearly, that you consider any new limitation of freedom, any narrowing of the boundaries, as of the last importance with regard to the existence of the Church, and as a violation of the whole genius of the Church of England. The Liberal clergy ought to feel that they have the support of liberally-minded men in their effort to keep the Church open and on a level with the knowledge of the day.

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II

THE ATONEMENT.

My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?-MATT. XXVII. 46.

IN these words, the central expression of the theory that the Atonement was made by God the Father inflicting on the Son the punishment due to our sins, and in this manner satisfying His justice, has been found by those who hold that view. It has been thought, but I think without sufficient reason, that the following phrase in the late judgment imposes that view upon the Church: The question is, whether it be or not consistent with the Articles of Religion to deny that Christ bore the punishment due to our sins, or suffered in our stead. We think that to deny this statement without any qualification is inconsistent with the plain meaning of the second and fifteenth Articles of Religion.' And again: 'It is not consistent with such statements (statements in these Articles) to aver without any qualification that He did not bear the punishment due to our sins, nor suffer in our stead.'

These phrases, twice repeated, are the phrases which have caused us some natural fear lest the extreme theory of the Atonement mentioned above should demand our assent, or indeed lest any definite theory be demanded of us at all. They have been taken to define the mode in which we must receive the doctrine that Christ made an atonement for our sins-a thing unattempted by the Articles, and never yet attempted

by the English Church, for the phrases themselves are an addition to the Articles and the Prayer Book, neither of them once occurring in these books.

We have no objection to say that we can put a meaning on those terms, and say that Christ bore the hatred and cruelty and scorn which were sins of men, and that in bearing the evils which were the result of the sins of men, such as pain, infirmity, and death, He may be said to have borne the punishment due to our sins, and this may be a qualified explanation such as that alluded to in the judgment. But those terms, as commonly used in theology, have a distinct meaning connected with a special theory of the Atonement, and mean that God inflicted on Christ, being absolutely innocent, the punishment which He would otherwise have inflicted on man, and that His justice being thus satisfied, He forgave man, and that in this sense Christ suffered instead of us. I cannot believe that the words of the judgment intend to demand our assent to this theory, especially as it is held by only a section in the Church. And it is as well to state directly, that this meaning and the whole of the theory, commonly called the forensic theory of the Atonement, I emphatically deny and repudiate. But since the judgment, though making use of these suspicious terms, speaks of qualifications, and condemns the appellant because he did not try to interpret, but denied in any sense the Articles which speak of Christ's satisfaction and the necessity of that satisfaction; and since I neither deny, but assert that the sacrifice of Christ was a 'propitiation,' and a necessary propitiation for the sins of the whole world, and interpret that and other phrases within, as I consider, the fair meaning of the Articles, I am willing to repose within the ambiguity of the judgment, only I desire openly to claim that

ambiguity as permitting me altogether to deny the theory commonly connected with the phrases introduced into the judgment.

How Christ suffered for us, as the Prayer Book says (not instead of us), how He bore the punishment of our sins (not due to our sins), in what sense God was reconciled to Humanity and Humanity to God, in Christ, are subjects on which I shall endeavour to state my view this morning in connection with a general treatment of the text, 'My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?'

We are told that at the hour of the greatest crisis in the history of man, when the redemption of the race was born out of the womb of suffering love, darkness crept over all the land in which the work was wrought. From the sixth to the ninth hour, from midday till three o'clock, the cross was veiled, and no voice came from the Saviour. At last, a sudden cry broke the silence: About the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?

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There is no need to assume that this physical darkness was miraculous-we are not told that it was so; but if it were so, the time when it occurred might in itself tend to make it credible. The understanding will rebel against its being miraculous, as it rebels against all miracles, but in the region of feeling and imagination one would almost expect that nature would reflect, as if in sympathy, the darkness of pain and sorrow which filled the soul of Him who was not only a man but essential humanity. That there should be such a harmony between the physical and spiritual universe, that great events in the latter should be attended by remarkable things in the former, is not only not unthinkable, but seems