enough to press the belief of it, and to say, we beseech thee, O God, to pardon our sins for Christ's sake, for the sufferings and merit of thy only begotten son, with other expressions of a like nature; and so would the patriarchs of old have done, if they had known any thing of such a doctrine, but their silence proves to a demonstration, that they were unacquainted with it. There is one argument indeed, which was urged with great confidence in petitions for pardon under the former dispensation, but it is of a very different nature from that, which is here under consideration: it is founded, not upon what was to be done by another being to satisfy the demands of justice, but upon the mercy and goodness of the divine nature; Psalm xxv, 7, " Remember not the sins of my youth nor my transgressions; according to thy mercy remember thou me, for thy goodness' sake, O Lord." God is here intreated to pardon, not for the sake of Christ, but for his goodness' sake, that is, out of regard to his goodness, which naturally inclined him to forgive. In the same manner forgiveness is spoken of in other places as the distinguishing excellence of the divine nature, without any reference to any consideration, which inclined him to it; Psalm lxxxvi, 5; "Thou, Lord, art good, and ready to forgive;" Daniel ix, 9; "To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgivenesses, though we have rebelled against him."

We thus see, both from the declarations of God himself, and from the language of good men, when

speaking of him, that all which he requires of sinners in the Old Testament, in order to bestow pardon upon them, is repentance and reformation.

Let us next examine, whether he have required any other terms in the New Testament. Luke xviii, 3, Jesus lays down this maxim for directing the conduct of his disciples in regard to the forgiveness of injuries: "If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him: and if he trespass against thee seven times in a day, and seven times in a day turn again to thee, saying, I repent, thou shalt forgive him." Where we find, that all we are allowed to require of men, who have offended us, before we forgive them, is that they repent. And shall God require more in regard to those, who have offended him? shall he insist upon receiving satisfaction from a third person, and shall that satisfaction consist in his voluntarily bearing the punishment due to the offender? This would be to make God less merciful than man, to represent him as imposing a harder service upon his creatures than he chose to perform himself, which is directly contrary to the dictates of reason and the language of Scripture. We are there exhorted to be merciful, even as our father in Heaven is merciful; which supposes, that he is much more ready to forgive those, who have offended him, and to do them good, than we are. In the Lord's prayer we are directed to ask, that God would forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us,

that is, agreeable to the rule which Christ himself has laid down, that he would forgive us when we repent, in the same manner as we forgive others when they repent. But if the doctrine of the atonement were true, in order to imitate God we must require something more than bare repentance before we could with propriety forgive-some kind of satisfaction, if not from the offender, yet from another person, to appease our resentment, and to render it consistent with our dignity to bestow pardon.

There are two parables, by which Jesus represents to us the full and complete manner in which God forgives the offences of mankind, neither of which bears any resemblance to the method of satisfaction and atonement, but they both perfectly accord with the idea of pardon being bestowed upon repentance only. When Peter asked him, how often he should forgive his brother, and Jesus told him, to seventy times seven, lest he should think the injunction hard, he illustrates the equity of the command by a parable, in which a king is represented as having a servant, who owed him ten thousand talents, whom he was about to sell for payment, but, because he desired him, he remitted the whole debt. The same servant, however, meeting with a fellow servant, who owed him a much smaller sum, refuses to listen to his cries, and executes the law upon him with the utmost rigour, which brings upon him the -resentment and punishment of his master. This parable was evidently intended to teach us how rea

sonable it is, that we, who obtain forgiveness from God, when we repent of our sins and implore pardon, should grant the like favour to our brethren, whenever they discover a like temper in regard to their offences against us, and the danger we expose ourselves to, if we show hardness of heart toward them, when we have experienced so much lenity ourselves.

But nothing can more strongly illustrate the ideas, which Christ entertained of the readiness of God to pardon his offending children, when they repent of their faults and come to him to ask forgiveness, than the parable of the prodigal son; where we find, that, although the son had spent his time with harlots and wasted his father's substance in riotous living, yet, when he repents and returns home, the father, instead of waiting for his approach, goes out to meet him, falls upon his neck, and kisses him. In this parable there is no third person introduced to prevail upon the father to forgive his son and to receive him again into favour; nor is any such person wanted under the divine government,

In all the other discourses of Christ, we find him speaking of repentance and good works like the other prophets, who went before him, as what were alone necessary to procure for us the mercy and favour of God; nor does he give us the smallest hint, that their doctrine on this subject was defective, and that beside these things it was necessary to rely upon his merits,

The silence of Jesus upon this subject, if the common doctrine of atonement and satisfaction be supposed to be true, is wholly unaccountable. If the belief of it had been necessary to the salvation of men, he would not have failed to have told them so plainly, in words, which could not have been misunderstood; but we find no such declarations in any of his discourses, or in those of his apostles. On the contrary, they teach us many things which are inconsistent with it. Thus Peter says before Cornelius, "Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons, but that in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted of him." And the apostle Paul tells us, Romans iii, 24; "That we are justified freely by the grace of God, through the redemption in Christ Jesus." But if a full and a proper satisfaction was made for sin, it would be impossible that we should be justified by free grace. The Being who gives that, for which he is paid a full compensation, does not exercise benevolence or bestow a favour.

Upon the whole then we see, that the language of the New Testament corresponds with that of the Old, and that they both agree in representing the terms, upon which sinners obtain forgiveness, to be repentance and reformation. It cannot be denied, indeed, that Christ himself and his apostles do speak of our sins in connection with his death; not however as making any satisfaction to divine justice for them, but in a way, which will be easily ex