In his comment on Lev. 1:4, Dr. Seiss gives a definition of the atonement, which corresponds with that given by several New England divines : "If the man who brought it," he says of the burnt-offering, "would lay his hand upon its head, and so acknowledge it as that by which he hoped and prayed and trusted to be forgiven, the Lord said it shall be accepted for him to make atonement for him.' That is, the devoting of such a victim to death and fire was to answer as a substitute for the death and burning of the sinner himself. The word rendered atonement, primarily signifies to cover; especially in the sense of an adhesive covering, as with pitch or plaster. From this original meaning came its metaphorical signification of appeasing, pacifying, covering over anger or wrath. Its predominant usage,' says Bush, is in relation to the reconciliation effected between God and sinners; in which sense atonement for sin is the covering of sin, or the securing of the sinner from punishment. Thus when sin is pardoned, or its consequent calamity removed, the sin or person is said to be covered, made safe, expiated, or atoned.' The English word atonement, or at-one-ment, clearly expresses the idea. It involves such a removal or covering of the cause of offence or variance, as to produce reconciliation and friendly relations. The idea here is, that the sinner who should bring the prescribed offering, and lay his hand on it in humble confession, should thereby be absolved, forgiven, exonerated, saved from the consequences which would otherwise follow his transgressions" (pp. 37,38). . A more particular elucidation of the atonement, as viewed by Dr. Seiss, he gives in his comment on Lev. 9:15. "You read there," he says, " that Aaron took the sin-offering for the people, and slew it, and offered it for sin.' A stricter rendering of the original, as noted by various critics, would be: He sinned it, or He made it to be sin. The same diction occurs in ch. 6:23. The idea is, that the sin-offering somehow had the sin transferred to it, or laid on it, or was so linked with the sin for which it was to atone, as to become itself the sinful or sinning one, not actually, but imputatively and constructively. The animal had no sin, and was not capable of sinning; bat, having been devoted as a sin-offering, and having received upon its head the burden of the guilty one who substituted its life for his own, it came to be viewed and treated as a creature which was nothing but sin. And this brings us to a feature in the sacrificial work of Christ at which many have stumbled, but which deserves to be profoundly considered: Jesus died not only as a martyr to the cause he had espoused, not only as an offering apart from the sins of those for whom he came to atone, but as a victim who had received all those sins upon his own head, and so united them with his own innocent and holy person as to be viewed and treated, in part at least, as if he himself had sinned the sins of all sinners. He so effectually put himself into the room and stead of sinners, and so really assumed their wickedness, that he came to be the only wicked one which the law could see. Personally he was not a sinner, but 'holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners; nevertheless, as he surrendered to become the substitute of the guilty, and undertook to answer for all their crimes, he thereby became to the law as if he were a mere mass of sin, upon which the hottest furies of just indignation and wrath were let loose. Though in his own proper self as unsullied as the highest heavens, in his character as our sin-offering, he took a guiltiness upon him, and a volume of iniquity covered him, as intense and terrible as the combined wickedness of all men. Though never the committer, he became the receiver of sin, and stood to the law as a reservoir into which all the streams of human guilt had emptied themselves" (pp. 166, 167). "As the sins of Israel were so put upon the sin-offering that it came to be viewed and treated as nothing but sin, so the Lord hath made our great sin-offering to be, not merely a sinner, but the very substance and essence of criminality. He made him to be SIN,' a mere mass of guilt, laid bare to the judgments of divine wrath. How could it have been otherwise, when, as Isaiah tells us, The Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all?' The iniquity of us all, is no small iniquity. A ten-thousandth part of the sin that cleaves even to the most virtuous among men, would be enough, if uncancelled. to sink them to eternal death. How, then, are we to estimate the mightiness of that sum of crime, which has been accumulating since the world began? How shall we measure the ocean of guilt which has been gathering from every generation, as from a thousand Amazons? Aye, 'there are shadows upon the world that we cannot penetrate; masses of sin and misery that overwhelm us with wonder and awe.' Not vaster is the five-mile thickness of atmosphere around this globe, than the measure of the iniquities of those who have lived upon its surface. Yet every one of them was laid upon Jesus, as the great sin-offering of man. When the holy inquisition of Heaven was sent forth to deal out just in lignation for earth's amazing wickedness, there was not a sin, from Adam's fall to last night's theft, or the wandering thoughts of yon inattentive hearer, which was not found lying to the charge of that spotless Limb who had undertaken to answer for all. And of all the monsters in crime that this world has ever borne, none ever had upon him such an intensity and vastness of guilt as that which the holy Christ assumed and took upon himself in that dark hour when his soul was made an offering for sin. The law could have seen in him nothing but sin - an embodiment of condensed and unspeakable guiltiness the very purity of heaven so shrouded and buried up in a sea of vileness, that the Father, with all his tender love for his only-begotten, for a while turned away his face in abhorrence. Hence that awful cry of the dying Saviour: MY GOD! MY GOD! WHY HAST THOU FORSAKEN ME!' The Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all!' 'He made him, who knew no sin, to be sin for us"" (pp. 168, 169; sec, also, pp. 174, 306). Nothing, then, can be plainer than that Dr. Seiss regards the imputation of our sins to Christ, as the transfer not only of our guilt. in the sense of lableness to punishment, but also of our iniquities themselves, which n ake us liable to punishment. This is the old Calvinistic view, although many professed Calvinis's now deny that it was ever maintained. The following graphic illustration of the atonement is given by Dr. Seiss: "I remember to have met with an affecting little incident in Roman his tory connected with the death of Manlius Capitolinus, a renowned consul and general, who was once proudly hailed as the savior of Rome. It happened one night when the Gauls threatened to overwhelm the capitol, that he bravely took his stand upon the wall where they came on with their attack, and there fought singly and alone until he had repelled them, and so saved the city from destruction. It so occurred that this distinguished man was afterwards accused of some great public fault, and put upon trial for his life. But just as the judges were about to pass sentence upon him, he looked up at the walls of the capitol, which towered in view, and, with tears in his eyes, pointed to where he had fought for his accusers, and perilled his life for their safety. The people remembered the heroic achievement, and wept. No one had the heart to say aught against him, and the judges were compelled to forbear. Again he was tried, and with the same result. Nor could he be convicted until his trial was removed to some low and distant point, from which the capitol was invisible. And so, while Calvary is in full view, in vain will earth and hell seek to bring the Christian into condemnation. One serious look at the cross, and at the love which there, unaided and alone, when all was dark and lost, interposed for our salvation, is enough to break the power of passion at once, and to strike dead every guilty proceeding. Low must the believer sink, and blotted from his heart must be the recollection of that scene of suffering for him, before he can ever become faithless to his Redeemer, or perfidious to his Saviour's cause. There is a power in the bloody monument of redeeming love, which baffles all the allurements and accusations of hell. It is the great propelling motive to a holy life. It is the potent source of Christian loyalty and devotion. And if we would be virtuous and good, the first and grand requisite is, never to lose sight of Christ's atoning blood" (pp. 313, 314). LIFE OF JESUS.1 His The author of this work is well known as an acute logician, a careful historian, a scholar of vast resources, and a man of exemplary life. The present volume betrays, on every page, his habit of strictly independent investigation. He avoids the violent theories of Strauss and of Bruno Bauer, while he does not reach the highest evangelical interpretation of the Saviour's life. He often doubts, where he might logically believe. objections to the common view of the Redeemer's miracles, appear sometimes to be arbitrary. There seems to be no more reason for his scepticism where he wavers, than for a like scepticism where he assents. Still the volume is suggestive and valuable. It is translated faithfully and perspicuously. Life of Jesus. A Manual for Academic Study. By Dr. Carl Hase, Professor of Theology at Jena. Translated from the German of the third and fourth improved editions, by James Freeman Clarke Boston: Walker, Wise and Company, 245 Washington Street. 1860. pp. 267. 12mo. VITAL CHRISTIANS of the Lutheran Church, of all Ranks, before and during the Thirty-Years' War. By A. Tholuck. Berlin: 1859.1 IT has been a favorite project of the author, for more than a quarter of a century, to write a complete history of Rationalism, of which he gave a sketch many years ago, published in the early numbers of this Journal. But as this grew, historically, out of the excesses of pietism, and as pietism itself grew out of what has been fitly called the "dead orthodoxy" of a previous period, it was necessary for the author to extend his investigations back so far as to embrace them as the preliminary or introductory part of his work. The theology of the church was what the theological faculties of the universities made it. Hence the beginning must be made with an account of the schools of theology. Even preliminary to this, he published a volume on "the Spirit of the Wittenberg Theologians of the Seventeenth Century." Then he opened his chief work with two volumes of the Preliminary History of Rationalism, under the special title of "the Academic Life of the Seventeenth Century." In the first of these volumes, he treats of the state of the universities," and in the second, of "the history of the universities," having chiefly in view the theological faculties of the Protestant church. An account of the ecclesiastical Life of the same century is to follow, as a second part of the preliminary history of Rationalism. The present volume gives the portraiture of eminent religious men, in that barren period, which could not be embraced in the history without giving it too much of a biographical character. It is therefore a collateral and independent volume of Christian biography. It contains graphic sketches of the religious history of more than fifty men of various stations in life: princes, nobles, scholars, clergymen, and teachers. These biographical accounts have a two-fold interest, religious and historical. They show us brilliant individual lights in a time of general moral darkness; and they give us a clear insight into the former life and habits of a people, which would appear almost as strange to their descendants now, as to us. The first saint introduced to us is of a princely and somewhat doubtful character. It is the elector Augustus I. of Saxony, the brother and successor of Maurice, so well known in history. The name of Augustus is associated with the hyper-orthodox Formula of Concord. As a Christian he believed in Luther. This characterizes both what was good and what was evil in his piety. He considered that, being a ruler in the very seat and centre of the Reformation, it was his duty to preserve Lutheranism in its purity, and to exclude everything that savored of Calvinism. But Calvinism, as Lebenszeugen der lutherischen Kirche aus allen Ständen vor und während der Zeit des dreissigjahrigen Krieges. Der Geist der lutherischen Theologen Wittenbergs im Verlauf des 17ten Jahrhunderts. 8 Vorgeschichte des Rationalismus. Erster Theil. Das akademische Leben des 17. Jahrhunderts. Halle, 1853, 1854. the milder and more rational views of Melanchthon were then called, is a very different thing from what we mean by the term at the present day. Luther held to predestination as strongly as Calvin did. The controversy related simply to the nature of Christ's presence in the eucharist, which Luther affirmed to be corporeal, while Calvin maintained that it was spiritual. We will not deny that Cracov, Peucer, Stössel, and Schütz went altogether too far in attempting, secretly, to introduce the Calvinistic doctrine into Saxony, and especially in abusing the confidence which the elector put in them as his minister, physician, and confessor. The elector regarded it as little less than treason that a plan should be formed to change the religion of the state, without his knowledge or consent, by his most confidential servants. These persons were all arrested, and their papers seized. Cracov, his prime minister, died in his dungeon. Peucer was kept in close confinement twelve years, notwithstanding he was Melanchthon's son-in-law. The other two had a similar fate: the one dying a year after Cracov; and the other being liberated two years after Peucer. We must not complain of a prince for revering the authority of the great reformer. We must not be too strict in condemning him for the narrow theology of the Formula of Concord, which he enforced. But we must be permitted to say, that a persecuting Christian prince is to be regarded as a saint only in a modified sense of the term. The sixth in the series of biographies, that of duke Ernest the Pious, of Gotha, is unusually interesting from the pure and elevated character of the subject. His piety was as sincere as it was intelligent. Cromwell names him as one of the three greatest rulers of that age. He gathered around him such excellent Christian men and scholars as Glasius, Ludolph, and Seckendorf. He improved the whole system of education, rendering it at the same time less mechanical and more useful. He reformed the schools with great moderation and judgment, avoiding the radicalism of Rattich, the school-reformer of that age. Religious instruction, through the clergy, underwent as great and salutary a change. Indeed no German state, at that time, was more favored in respect to the condition of the schools and churches. Landgrave George II. of Hesse Darmstadt was a ruler of similar chraracter, and was himself a highly educated man. It is not a little interesting and amusing to read an order given by him, in 1649, respecting religious instruction and improvement. The preachers are therein required to meditate diligently on the subjects of their discourses, and not be satisfied with running over a few commentaries, and making up a patch-work of indigested remarks. The passage of scripture, and the subject, were to be thoroughly studied and analyzed: the instruction to be clear and solid; and the topics to be well arranged. The preachers were warned against trusting too much to extemporaneous thoughts and language, which often made men blunder and stammer; and against writing their preparations on loose scraps of paper. The catechism was to be explained from the pulpit, and the children and even adults to be examined on it afterwards. Not only were boys to |