Two sentences of two papers have been attacked with sufficient readiness to suspect evil.
One is in the August number, on John 18, p. 128. I might be surprised that any discerning reader should not have gathered from the drift of the paper that morally (not “totally”) ought to have been printed.
The other occurs in Remarks on Mark 14 (Sept. No., p. 137, col. 1), where the writer says that expiation properly is “not the pure, however precious, act of Christ’s death.” This has been tortured to mean a denial that Christ suffered for our sins, or that such suffering up to death is atonement! Can perversity go farther? One main point of the passage, which extends over a long paragraph, is that while His death was necessary for expiation, His endurance of divine wrath, forsaken of God for our sins, was the essential thing (not without this the act of dissolution). Possibly those who found fault here are not aware how far enemies of the truth go in destroying the atonement by making it consist in the bare death and blood of Christ without the bearing of God’s judgment of sin—a fatal error. None but the divine person of the Son, become man, can meet the case; without the shedding of His blood was no remission; His death was absolutely requisite to free us from sin: but all this availed only because He endured the forsaking of God for sin.