OBSTACLES TO THE SINNER'S SALVATION, EXISTING IN THE SIN- NER HIMSELF: RELATION OF THE ATONEMENT TO THEM.- FURTHER REMARKS ON MORAL INABILITY.-DIVINE DECREES.- PRACTICAL IMPROVEMENT. - INFERENCES FROM THE ATONEMENT ON THE NATURE AND EXTENT OF THE ATONEMENT OF CHRIST. DISCOURSE I. ATONEMENT.-THE CHRISTIAN ATONEMENT. HEB. IX. 26.-" BUT NOW ONCE, IN THE END OF THE WORLD, HATH HE APPEARED, TO PUT AWAY SIN BY THE SACRIFICE OF HIMSELF." WHEN, on the first Lord's day of last month, I announced my intention to deliver a short series of discourses on the nature and extent of the atonement, I had not sufficiently thought of the somewhat embarrassing predicament in which I was, by this means, placing myself. In the volume, long since published, on the principal points of the Socinian Controversy, there are three discourses relative to this great christian doctrine,—one on its nature, one on its practical tendencies, and one on the connexion of our blessed Lord's divinity with its sufficiency and availableness:—and in a more recent publication I have entered, at some length, into the subject of its extent. I have thus, to a considerable degree, forestalled myself. But this essential article of divine truth has, for some time A past, in our own part of the Island especially, been engaging not a little the attention of the public mind:-and some of the views respecting it, given in the publications just referred to, have, "to a certain extent," been charged with "unsoundness." I have felt it, therefore, a duty to myself, and, what is of far higher consequence, a duty to truth, to recur to this subject, and to vindicate the views in question, to the full extent in which I still conceive them to be in harmony with the revealed mind of God.—I have also, I confess, felt a strong desire, to bring as near to an exact balance as possible the amount of difference between recently and still contending parties;-who, on the present as on all occasions, are exceedingly apt, in the warmth of discussion, to hold up each other's sentiments as they appear through the magnifying lenses of controversy, and to condemn and proscribe them in terms of undue and undiscriminating severity. In what I may lay before you, on the various branches of this interesting subject, it will not, of course, be expected, that I should bind myself down to the entire avoidance of former statements, illustrations, and modes of expression and argument. All that I can promise is, to avail myself of them as little as possible. I shall enter into no critical discussion of the phrase in the text respecting the time of our Lord's appearing," in the end of the world." The word translated "world" is not the same with that which has the same rendering in the former part of the "for then must he often have suffered same verse, since the foundation of the world." The mere English reader would at once suppose it to be the same; and would naturally set about puzzling himself with the inquiry, how the period of Christ's manifestation in the flesh came to be called "the end of the world." But the latter of the two original words signifies ages; and "the end, or close, of the ages" appears to mean the termination of the Mosaic and previous dispensations of religion; the appearance of the Messiah being the event which was to supersede them all, by the introduction of that to which they were all preparatory, and which was to continue till the end of time.-By some, indeed, from the peculiarity of the Greek term that is here rendered "the end," the proper meaning has been conceived to be the junction of the ages, or the period of the close of the one and the commencement of the other,— the point of meeting between them.† * The one phrase isἀπο καταβολῆς κόσμου:—the other-ἐπι τη συντελείᾳ τῶν ἀιώνων. ↑ "Schoettgen supposes the term σvvreλ to be here used, rather than Tλos, by way of marking the junction of the two Tɛλŋ, or periods. Accordingly, it is well observed by Bengel and Wesley, that "the sacrifice of Christ divides the whole age or duration of the world into two parts, and extends its virtue backward and forward, from this middle point wherein they meet, to abolish both the guilt and power of sin."-BLOOMFIELD. |