itself is suggestive of the revolution through which the mind both of Erskine and of his age was passing.  His book, The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel, appeared in 1828; The Brazen Serpent in 1831.  Men have confounded forgiveness and pardon.  They have made pardon equivalent to salvation.  But salvation is character.  Forgiveness is only one of the means of it.  Salvation is not a future good.  It is a present fellowship with God.  It is sanctification of character by means of our labour and God’s love.  The fall was the rise of the spirit of freedom.  Fallen man can never be saved except through glad surrender of his childish independence to the truth and goodness of God.  Yet that surrender is the preservation and enlargement of our independence.  It is the secret of true self-realisation.  The sufferings of Christ reveal God’s holy love.  It is not as if God’s love had been purchased by the sufferings of his Son.  On the contrary, it is man who needs to believe in God’s love, and so be reconciled to the God whom he has feared and hated.  Christ overcomes sin by obediently enduring the suffering which sin naturally entails.  He endures it in pure love of his brethren.  Man must overcome sin in the same way.

Campbell published, so late as 1856, his great work The Nature of the Atonement and its Relation to the Remission of Sins and Eternal Life.  It was the matured result of the reflections of a quarter of a century, spent partly in enforced retirement after 1831.  Campbell maintains unequivocally that the sacrifice of Christ cannot be understood as a punishment due to man’s sin, meted out to Christ in man’s stead.  Viewed retrospectively, Christ’s work in the atonement is but the highest example of a law otherwise universally operative.  No man can work redemption for his fellows except by entering into their condition, as if everything in that condition were his own, though much of it may be in no sense his due.  It is freely borne by him because of his identification of himself with them.  Campbell lingers in the myth of Christ’s being the federal head of the humanity.  There is something pathetic in the struggle of his mind to save phrases and the paraphernalia of an ancient view which, however, his fundamental principle rendered obsolete, He struggles to save the word satisfaction, though it means nothing in his system save that God is satisfied as he contemplates the character of Christ.  Prospectively considered, the sacrifice of Christ effects salvation by its moral power over men in example and inspiration.  Vicarious sacrifice, the result of which was merely imputed, would leave the sinner just where he was before.  It is an empty fiction.  But the spectacle of suffering freely undertaken for our sakes discovers the treasures of the divine image in man.  The love of God and a man’s own resolve make him in the end, in fact, that which he has always been in capacity and destiny, a child of God, possessed of the secret of a growing righteousness, which is itself salvation.