uestion is, what meaning was it intended to convey? We
maintain its meaning to be that

14 System der Reinen Philosophie, oder Gluckseligkeitslehre des
Christenthums, u.s.f.

15 Epitome Theologia Christiana Dogmatica.

16 Die Lehren von Adam's Fall, der Erbsunde, und dem Opfer
Christi.

17 Studien der Evang. Geietlichkeit Wurtemburgs, viii. 1, 2.
Doederlein, Morus, Knapp, Schwarze, and Reinhard affirm that the
death of Christ was not the price of our pardon, but the
confirming declaration of free pardon from God. Hagenbach,
Dogmengeschichte, sect. 297, note 5.

18 Die Lehre der Kirche vom Tode Jesu in den Ersten Drei
Jahrhunderteu.

19 Die Lehre der Kirche vom Tode Jesu in den Ersten Drei
Jahrhunderten, ss. 176-180.

20 Augustine, Epist. ad Evodium 99. Op. Imp. vi. 22, 30. Epist.
164. Dante makes Adam say he had been 4302 years in Limbo when
Christ, at his descent, rescued him. Paradise, canto xxvi.

through all the events and forces associated with the death of
Christ, including his descent to Hades and his resurrection, men
are delivered from the doom of the under world. The common
theology explains it as teaching that there was an expiatory
efficacy in the unmerited sufferings of Christ. The system known
as Unitarianism says it denotes merely the exertion of a saving
spiritual power on the hearts of men. The first interpretation
charges the figure of speech with a dramatic revelation of the
love of God freely rescuing men from their inherited fate. The
second seems to make it a tank of gore, where Divine vengeance
legally laps to appease its otherwise insatiable appetite. The
third fills it with a regenerative moral influence to be
distributed upon the characters of believers. The two former also
include the last; but it excludes them. Now, as it seems to us,
the first is the form of mistake in which the early Church,
including the apostles, embodied the true significance of the
mission of Christ. Owing to the circle of ideas in which they
lived, this was the only possible form in which the disciples of
Jesus could receive the new doctrine of a blessed immortality
brought to light by Christianity.21 The second is the form of
false theory in which a few scholastic brains elaborated the cruel
results of their diseased metaphysical speculations. The third is
the dry, meager, inadequate statement of the most essential truth
in the case.

There is one more point of view in which the New Testament holds
u