and became the established doctrine of the English Church for almost three hundred years.  It was carried across the ocean and became the dominant theory in the New Haven school of theologians, as represented by Jonathan Edwards, Dwight, and Taylor.  The Princeton school of theology still clung to the penal substitution theory, and it was the clashing of the New Haven school and the Princeton school which caused such a commotion in the Presbyterian Church of sixty years ago.  They are antiquated.  They are too little.  They seem mechanical, artificial, trivial.  We can say of the governmental theory what Dr. Hodge said, “It degrades the work of Christ to the level of a governmental contrivance.”  If I should attempt to preach to you the governmental theory as it was preached by theologians fifty years ago, you would not be interested in it There is nothing in you that would respond to it.  You would simply say, “I do not like doctrinal preaching.”  Or if I should go back and take up the penal substitution theory in all its nakedness and hideousness, and attempt to give it to you as the correct interpretation of the gospel, you would rise up in open rebellion and say, “We will not listen to such preaching.”  If I should go back and take up the Anselmic theory and attempt to show how an infinite debt must be paid by infinite suffering, you would say:  “Stop, you are converting God into a Shylock, who is demanding His pound of flesh.  We prefer to think of Him as our heavenly Father.”  If I should go further back and take up the old ransom theory of Origen and Gregory, I suspect that some of you would want to laugh.  You could not accept an interpretation which represents God as playing a trick upon Satan in order to get humanity out of his grasp.  No, those theories have all been outgrown.  We have come out into larger and grander times.  We have higher conceptions of the Almighty than the ancients ever had.  We see far deeper into the Christian revelation than Martin Luther or John Calvin ever saw.  These old interpretations are simply husks, and men and women will not listen to the preaching of them.  If, now and then, a belated preacher attempts to preach them, the people say, “If that is doctrinal preaching, please give us something practical.”

And so the Church is to-day slowly working out a new interpretation of the great fact that Christ died for our sins.  The interpretation has not yet been completed, and will not be for many years.  I should like this morning simply to outline in a general way some of the more prominent features of the new interpretation.  The Holy Ghost is at work.  He is taking the things of Christ and showing them unto us.  The interpretation of the reconciliation of the future will be superior in every point to any of the interpretations of the past.

The new interpretation is going to be simple, straightforward, and natural.  The death of Christ is not going to be made something artificial, mechanical, or theatrical.  It is going to be the natural conception of the outflowing life of God.