t his claim. Sometimes this is represented as a fair
bargain, sometimes as a deception practised on the devil,
sometimes as a battle waged with him. Next, it is conceived that
the devil has no right over human souls, that it is God who has
doomed them to the infernal prison and holds them there for their
sin. Accordingly, the sacrifice of Christ for their ransom is
offered not to the tyrannical devil but to the offended God.
Finally, in the progress of culture, the satisfaction theory
appears; and now the suffering of Christ is neither to buy souls
from the devil nor to appease God and soften his anger into
forgiveness; but it is to meet the inexorable exigencies of the
abstract law of infinite justice and deliver sinners by bearing
for them the penalty of sin. The whole course of thought, once
commenced, is natural, inevitable; but the starting point is from
an error, and the pausing places are at false goals.

The view which we have asserted to be the scriptural view
prevailed as the orthodox doctrine of the Church throughout the
first three centuries, as Bahr has proved in his valuable treatise
on the subject.18 He shows that during that period Christ's death
was regarded as a revelation of God's love, a victory over the
devil, (through his resurrection,) a means of obtaining salvation
for men, but not as a punitive sacrifice, not as a vindication of
God's justice, not as a vicarious satisfaction of the law.19 If
the leading theologians of Christendom, such as Anselm, Calvin,
and Grotius, have so thoroughly repudiated the original Christian
and patristic doctrine of the atonement, and built another
doctrine upon their own uninspired speculations, why should our
modern sects defer so slavishly to them, and, instead of freely
investigating the subject for themselves from the first sources of
Scripture and spiritual philosophy, timidly cling to the results
reached by these biassed, morbid, and over sharp thinkers? In
proportion as scholarly, unfettered minds engage in such a
criticism, we believe the exposition given in the foregoing pages
will be recognised as scriptural. Without involving this whole
theory, how can any one explain the unquestionable fact that
during the first four centuries the entire orthodox Church
believed that Christ at his resurrection from the under world
delivered Adam from his imprisonment there?20 All acknowledge that
the phrase "redemption by the blood of Christ" is a metaphor. The
only q