ht closes and another begins; but, broadly
speaking, we can for convenience classify them into the period of the
Fathers, the mediaeval period, the Reformation and afterwards up to the
eighteenth century, and the period of modern thought. The Fathers may
be divided into two groups, the ante-Nicene and the post-Nicene
writers, and also into the Greek and Latin Fathers. But as I am not
writing for theological students, I will not attempt any further
analysis of the various patristic schools. Those who wrote previous to
325 A.D. belong to the ante-Nicene group; those who wrote after that
date, to the post-Nicene group. The ante-Nicene writers, generally
speaking, avoid giving any theory of the atonement at all; but two of
their greatest thinkers, Origen and Irenaeus, held that mankind had
fallen under the dominion of Satan, and that Jesus by His sufferings
paid a ransom to Satan in order that we might be freed from his power.
Post-Nicene Fathers for the most part adopted this view without
attempting to justify it. Amongst their statements we find the ideas
that the Atonement was a ransom to Satan and also a sacrifice to God,
but they offer no explanation of the necessity of either. Later on
Augustine anticipated subsequent Christian thought by maintaining that
the atoning work of Jesus was part of an eternal purpose.

+Anselm and after.+--The scholasticism of the Middle Ages finds its
first important expression in the illustrious Anselm, an acute thinker
and a beautiful soul. Anselm rejected the idea of a ransom to Satan,
declaring that Satan had no rights over humanity; in place of this
notion he put forward the theory that Jesus made to God an infinite
satisfaction for an infinite debt. According to this theory the
majesty of God had suffered indignity because of human sin, and yet man
was unable by himself to offer an adequate satisfaction for the
offence. Hence the eternal Son of God became man in order that He
might offer the only satisfaction that could be considered adequate.
This theory did not go unchallenged. Abelard, for example, asked the
very reasonable question how the guilt of mankind could be atoned for
by the greater guilt of those who put Jesus to death. Abelard's famous
opponent, Bernard of Clairvaux, also repudiated Anselm's main
contention and fell back upon the theory of a satisfaction to Satan.

+Reformation theories.+--At the time of the Reformation the question of
the Atonement formed t