"Scheme" of Salvation!

Thames Star, Volume XII, Issue 3802, 5 March 1881, Page 3

"Scheme" of Salvation!

The very phrase "Scheme of Salvation," as applied to Christianity, strikes us as.offensive, and when considered in relation to the details of the imagined scheme, almost monstrous. To those who hare been brought up to this scheme from infancy of course it is not so ; but as describing the impression made upon those who have come to it later in life, and who look at it from the outside, the word".monstrous "is not too strong. A scheme is a " contrivance " —a contrivance for obtaining an object, or getting out of a difficulty; and in the popular orthodox riew, the Christian dispensation is in plain words a " contrivance" concocted between God and his Son, between the the first and second persons of the Trinity (or, if you will, between the Creator of all worlds, and Jesus of Nazareth) for enabling the human race to escape from a doom and a curse which certain scholastic theologians fancy (as an inference from particular texts of Scripture) to have been in some way incurred, either from the offence of each individual, or from the offence of a remote ancestor. The "scheme" first assumes that the original sin of our first parents (to say nothing of our own) cannot be forgiven, nor the taint inherited by their immortal descendants wiped out without the rigid exaction of a penalty (" damnation," eternal fire and the like) altogether disproportionate to the offence —that the attributes of the Deity imply and involve this " cannot." Then since this doom is too horrible, and the doctrine laid down on the above assumption too repellant, alike in its basis and its consequences, to be endured and accepted, the " scheme " then imagines the only Son of G-od agreeing to bear this doom instead of the myriads of the offending race. An impossible debt is first invented, necessitating the invention of an inconceivable coin in which to psy it. A God is imagined bent on a design, and entertaining sentiments which it seems simple blasphemy and contradiction to ascribe to the Father in Heaven, whom Jesus of Nazareth came to reveal to us— and then he is represented as abandoning that design in consideration of a sacrifice, in which it is impossible to recognise one gleam of appropriateness or of human equity. What looks very like a legal fiction, purely gratuitous, is got rid of by what looks very like a legal ohicanery, purely fanciful. To use a terse simile of Macaulay, the scheme "resembles nothing so much as a forged bond, with a forged release endorsed on the back of it."

But it is essential to bear in mind that not only do none of the genuine, authentic, indisputable words of Christ contain or countenance this " scheme," but the entire tone and context of His teaching distinctly ignore it, and are at yariance with its fundamental conceptions. W. R. Gee&.