God's moral nature, or the conduct which springs out of it, we can but know what God has been pleased to tell us: the fact of the atonement can be determined but by revelation; and I believe, with the gentleman opposite, that revelation determines it very conclusively. But if fact it be, then must we hold that it is a fact which springs directly out of that underived moral nature of God which constitutes the governing law of his power and will; and that, his nature being what it is, the antagonist fact of remission without atonement is in reality an impossibility. Your appeal in the question lay to the omnipotence of God; it is something to know that in that direction there can lie no appeal. Mark how strongly your own great poet brings out this truth. In his statement of the doctrine of the atonement,—a simple digest of the Scriptural statement,—all is made to hinge on the important fact, that God having once willed the salvation of men, an atonement became as essentially necessary to Him, in order that the moral nature which He did not give himself might not be violated, as to the lapsed race, who might recognize in it their sole hope of restoration and recovery. Man, says the poet,
'To expiate his treason hath nought left,
But to destruction, sacred and devote,
He, with his whole posterity, must die:
Die he, or justice must; unless for him
Some other, able, and as willing, pay
The rigid satisfaction, death for death.'"
The countryman was silent. "You Scotch are a strange people," said one of the commercial gentlemen. "When I was in Scotland two years ago, I could hear of scarce anything among you but your Church question. What good does all your theology do you?"—"Independently altogether of religious considerations," I replied, "it has done for our people
