e were to be
saved.

There is still another theory that I must mention briefly, that which
is called the governmental theory, that which I was taught during my
course of theological instruction. The idea was that God had a moral
government to maintain, not only on this earth, but throughout the
range of the universe among all his intelligent creatures, and, if he
permitted his laws to be broken without exacting an adequate penalty,
then all governmental authority would be overthrown. In other words,
men took their poor human legal devices, their political ideals, and
lifted them into the heavens, made them the models after which it was
supposed God was to govern his great, intelligent universe.

So they said that God would be willing to forgive, he would like to
forgive, he was loving and tender and kind, but it was not safe, safe
for the interests of his universal government, for him to forgive any
one until an adequate penalty had been paid in expiation of human sin.

You see, according to this theory, it does not apparently make much
difference who it is that suffers, whether it is the person who has
committed the sin or not; but somebody must pay an adequate penalty,
and Jesus volunteered to do this, to be the victim, and so to deliver
man from the righteous deserts which he had incurred as a transgressor
of the law of God.

Gradually, however, as the world became civilized, as wider and broader
thoughts manifested themselves in the human mind, as tenderer and truer
feelings took possession of the human heart, these theories receded
into the background; and there came to the front I remember the bitter
controversies over it in my younger days what was called the Moral
Theory of the Atonement. The originator and sponsor for this theory was
the famous Dr. Horace Bushnell, of Hartford. He taught that God did not
need the punishment of anybody to uphold the integrity of his moral
government. He taught that God was not angry with the race, and did not
care to exact a penalty before he was ready to forgive human sin. He
taught that the inner nature of God was love, and that in the Second
Person of the Trinity he came to earth, was born, grew up, taught,
suffered, died, as a manifestation to the world of his love, of his
goodness, of his readiness to forgive and help, and that the efficacy
of the atonement as thus wrought on the part of the Christ was in its
revelation to men of the love and saving power of righteousne