the renewal and
sanctification of human character by the melting power of a
proclamation of mercy and love from God, by the regenerating
influences and motives of the truths and appeals spoken by his
lips, illustrated

7 In Gen. lib. ix. cap. 10, 11: "Parents would have yielded to
children not by death, but by translation, and would have become
as the angels."

in his life, and brought to a focus in his martyr death? Certainly
this was too plainly and prominently a part of the mission of
Christ ever to be wholly overlooked. And yet one acquainted with
the writings of the Fathers can hardly mistake so widely as to
think that they esteemed this the principal element in Christ's
redemptive work. Was the essence of that work, then, the making of
a vicarious atonement, according to the Calvinistic interpretation
of that phrase, the offering of a substitutional anguish
sufficient to satisfy the claims of inexorable justice, so that
the guilty might be pardoned? No. The modern doctrine of the
atonement the satisfaction theory, as it is called was unknown to
the Fathers. It was developed, step by step, after many
centuries.8 It did not receive its acknowledged form until it came
from the mind of the great Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm, as
late as the twelfth century. No scholar will question this
confessed fact. What, then, were the essence and method of
Christ's redemptive mission according to the Fathers? In brief,
they were these. He was, as they believed, a superangelic being,
the only begotten Son of God, possessing a nature, powers, and
credentials transcending those delegated to any other being below
God himself. He became flesh, to seek and to save the lost. This
saving work was done not by his mortal sufferings alone, but by
the totality of labors extending through the whole period of his
incarnation. The subjective or moral part of his redemptive
mission was to regenerate the characters of men and fit them for
heaven by his teachings and example; the objective or physical
part was to deliver their souls from the fatal confinement of the
under world and secure for them the gracious freedom of the sky,
by descending himself as the suppressing conqueror of death and
then ascending as the beckoning pioneer of his followers. The
Fathers did not select the one point or act of Christ's death as
the pivot of human redemption; but they regarded that redemption
as wrought out by the whole of his humiliation, instruction