# Our New Departure (Brooks)/Chapter 4

There is no saving power in Christianity, except as there is first a personal interest in Christ; and such an interest is possible only as there is to inspire it some fitting sense of what Christ has done for us, and of the reality and magnitude of the obligations under which he has placed us. If, then, Universalism is to be made more religiously effective, this is one of the points to which increased attention must systematically be given. We have always made Christ prominent. But, as the rule, have we not made him prominent chiefly in his general relations—as the means of God's appointment, destined certainly to redeem our race? Have we equally pressed his personal relations and claims, and our personal obligations? These questions found their answer in our first chapter.
How shall we, to best purpose, press these personal relations and claims, and our consequent obligations? I is, therefore, I believe, just now, one of the inquiries of most urgent interest to our future usefulness. And, as I state the inquiry, Paul's words to the Corinthians, "Ye are not your own, for ye are bought with a price," seem to me to suggest the best answer. Ingratitude is universally held in odium. So far as any moral sentiment asserts itself, mankind are always touched by undeserved sacrifices in their behalf. To the same extent, then, that we can penetrate men with the feeling that they belong to Christ by virtue of what it has cost him to serve them, we shall awaken them to a sense of these personal relations and obligations to him. Herein is the explanation of the efficacy of what is called evangelical preaching, so far as it has ever moved and won hearts. It assigns to Christ a specific work for our sake, and so compels the feeling of obligation to him. Much of its apparent success, it is true, is due to fright, and nervous excitement, and mercenary ​and terrific appeals, quite out of place in any Christian pulpit, producing results only seemingly religious, and not seldom working injury alike to the convert and the church. But that it has been instrumental in the real conversion of many souls, inducing their genuine consecration to God, is equally undeniable. Proceeding on a false theory of our exposure, such conversions have nevertheless been wrought by a true sense of Christ's self-sacrifice. The exposure has been assumed to be, our liability to endless perdition, under God's wrath and curse; but as the cross has been pictured, and the pitying Saviour has been portrayed hanging upon it, forgetful of himself in his love for us, willing to die that we might live, and the appeal has been urged, Can you be indifferent to such an interest in your welfare? the loving spirit of Christ has shone through all encompassing errors, and the effect has invariably been to awaken to penitence and attract to a religious life, in proportion as attention has been secured, and the reality of the sacrifice has come home to thought and conscience. Much as we may abhor its theory of redemption, justice compels the confession that, as so administered, 'orthodoxy' has proved itself widely—and despite its terrible misconceptions, beneficently—potent for religious ends; and a host of devoted and saintly souls, won many of them from open and flagrant courses of sin, have, through the centuries, been wedded to Christ by it in a sense of obligation which has mastered every faculty, and made their whole subsequent lives one continued and chivalric purpose to love and serve a Saviour who has done so much for them. It is for us, on the basis of our better interpretation, if we wish to have our labors accompanied with similar signs following, to be equally specific in setting forth what Christ has done for us, and in urging home its appeal. Generalities move nobody. Talk to a man in a vague, miscellaneous way about favors conferred upon him, and, ordinarily, little or no impression is made; but let some one leap into the water to save his life, or lose a limb, or shed so much as a drop of blood for him, and the probability is, that he will ever after feel himself in debt to his benefactor. With a like direct​ness of appeal, we must seek to impress people with as vivid and realistic a sense of what Christ has done to befriend and save them. For all religious purposes, we might as well cease to be, if we do not.
Hence the importance of this fact that we are "bought with a price." It is the central fact in Christ's relations to us. The entire plan of redemption, so far as he is a party in it, grows out of this—that he loved us and gave himself for us, "a ransom for all, to be testified in due time." There was, indeed, as we believe, no bargain in the case. The 'evangelical' theory has always assumed that there must have been; that a price could really be paid only in some such commercial sense. On this account, as the Bible speaks of our bondage to Satan, it was at one time supposed that the ransom was paid to him. Then, as the absurdity of this became apparent, the theory now current obtained—the theory, scarcely less absurd and even more barbarous, that Christ had to buy off God from His relentless purpose of vengeance, by suffering in our stead an equivalent for our endless woe. We hold no such theories. We pronounce them as derogatory to God as they are degrading to the conception of our salvation. But the price at which we have been bought, we insist, is none the less real. There was no wrath or curse of God, no impending sword, no endless woe, from which it was needful for Christ to purchase our escape. But there was sin; there was ignorance; there was selfishness with its canker and its curse; there was pain for which there was no healing, and sorrow that had no consolation; there was spiritual darkness, destitution, death. These were more than any material hell could be. From these we needed deliverance, and because of these the world needed the infusion of some fresh moral force, an element of Divine life, for its regeneration. Therefore Christ came—to teach us; to awaken and inspire us; to make us conscious of God and spiritually self-conscious; and thus to save us by putting us into electric contact with imperishable realities, by making sin abhorrent to us, and by so shedding something of his own vitality into us "that we might have life, and have it more abundantly." ​But all this could be done only at the cost of loneliness and pain, of obloquy and toil, of the ignominy and anguish of the cross. And this was the price at which he bought us—this giving of himself, a willing sacrifice, to suffer and to die for our salvation;—a price paid to no being or law, as a consideration for our release, but paid as mothers pay weary days and sleepless nights in the sick rooms of their children, for their recovery; paid as the patriots of our revolution paid their hardships and blood to ransom us from British oppression, and as later soldiers and patriots paid their valor and their lives to maintain the institutions thus founded; paid as sacrifice has ever been the price of privilege, and as hazard and suffering are the usual cost at which great blessings are bought.
Christ is an idea and a principle. But he is more. He is a pervading fact. Asking as to the origin of the world and the wonderful phenomena of which it is so full, everything points to God. God is written in an alphabet of light and beauty on the heavens, and in hieroglyphics of verdure, grandeur and use on all the face of the earth. God is whispered by the breeze; is sung by the birds and the waving corn; is preached by the rolling thunder and by the everlasting throbbing of the ocean. And so, if we ask as to the origin of the ideas, institutions and influences by which we are most enriched and benefited, we are just as certainly pointed to Christ. Efforts have been made to eliminate him as a factor in modern progress; to explain it on various grounds of climate, geographical position, intellectual conditions, and other hypotheses. But he is not to be eliminated. Whatever simulation of facts may be contrived, whatever specious web of appearances may be woven, to get rid of him, he meets us everywhere; and every stream of good by which our lives are watered and fertilized, if followed up to its source, leads us back to the tomb in Joseph's garden,—to the cross on Calvary,—to the sea-shore where Christ taught, or to the mountain where he prayed,—and finally to the manger in Bethlehem where he was born. All modern history is full of him. As a distinguished historian has said, his life "is the greatest event ​in the annals of time. The former ages had been a preparation for it; the latter unroll from it." Whatever we may know, believe, or have, worth the having or keeping, no man can say that it would have been ours without Christ. He has quickened thought; animated investigation; educated taste; created a new conscience; refined and ameliorated law; sanctified home; suggested and inspired every moral and social reform. He has shed abroad a new class of convictions, hopes and expectations; has furnished a new ideal of character, and the materials and incentives for attaining it; has lifted life into grander relations, filled it with more exalted aspirations, clothed it with loftier meanings. Like the sunlight and the rain, his religion sheds its blessings for the benefit of all; and no neglect is gross enough, no unbelief perverse enough to hinder it from shedding something of its benediction upon us, or to enable any one to say, It does nothing for me. As a spiritual essence pervades all material forms, as the air we breathe surrounds the globe, vitalizing, beautifying all, so Christ pervades everything about us, encompassing us with his benign ministries, bathing our lives with refreshment, and filling them with whatever makes them most a joy.
And whatever thus points us back to Christ is somehow a reminder of the price at which we have been bought. Not one of these gifts or blessings in which, directly or indirectly, we so share, could have been ours if Christ had not purchased it by the life of weariness and deprivation, of contempt and sacrifice which he lived for us, and by the death of shame and agony, and yet of sublime endurance and forgiving love, which he died for us. All that is meant by our Christian knowledge, and every privilege peculiar to our Christian birth,—our faith in God, our familiarity with the terms of Divine pardon and acceptance, our assurance of immortality,—all our means of Christian culture, and all that renders our Christian civilization so superior to every other, and so affluent in the elements of personal and social welfare,—in one word, all that is included in our redemption, here or hereafter, bears the impress of the cross, and comes to us at Christ's cost—as the fruit of some pang ​by which he was tortured, of some drop of the blood that trickled from his brow or side, of some sorrow that he bore, or of some self-denial that he accepted for our sake: and could we but for once distinctly gather up in our thought all that this price involved—the wrestle and the travail,—the homelessness and the weariness,—the isolation from all human sympathy, because his best friends even could so little understand him,—the haunting sense of being constantly dogged, hunted, hated, without cause,—the garden agony,—the betrayal and the desertion,—the stripes and mockery and buffetings,—the walk to Calvary, fainting beneath the cross, and the excruciating anguish of slowly dying upon it, and then feel, each one of us, All this was for me, we should never again be indifferent, or fail to feel, or to make others feel, what such a price demands.
To make real to ourselves and others, then, this price at which we have been bought, is the one thing we have to do, if we would have our Church mighty in winning souls to Christ, feeling that they belong to him. "Christ and him crucified" was the burden of Apostolic faith and labor. It must be no less the burden of ours; and if God is speaking any word to us as a Church, this clearly is part of it, "By this conquer." The cross is the symbol of Christ's power: and always, we shall, personally, have the richest Christian experience in proportion as we cling to it, appreciating its meaning; and as a Church, we shall attract and help to save souls on the same condition. Nor must the cross lose a whit of its New Testament significance, or glory, at our hands. Our failure is certain so far as it does. Mothers, watching in the sick rooms of their children, and patriots, periling life for their country, were just now referred to as exemplifying how Christ has bought us. But all such examples fall far short of paralleling his whole work in our salvation. They indicate only the general nature of the price he paid. They do not at all illustrate its exact relations and spiritual efficacy. Christ suffered and died as a martyr, but not simply as a martyr. Rationalize upon the subject as we may, we still have to say with Paley, "that the death of Jesus Christ is spoken of in reference to human salvation in terms and in a manner in which the death of no ​person whatever is spoken of besides. Others have died martyrs as well as our Lord. Others have suffered in a righteous cause as well as he. But that is said of his death and sufferings which is not said of any one else. An efficacy and a concern are ascribed to them in the business of human salvation which are not ascribed to any other." It is a part of the honorable record of the Universalist Church, that to this view of the subject it has been, theoretically, steadfastly committed. Our call is, if we are more effectually to do the work of a Church, that not only shall we continue thus theoretically committed to this view, but that we give it increased stress and prominence, and therefore increased power.
Increased power, I say: for let it not be forgotten that the crucified Christ is the final power by which the world is to be saved. "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me," said our Lord (John xii. 32). Only in the cross did his ability to save souls, and therefore the means for the world's redemption, become complete. And why? For many reasons—chief among which was the fact that only thus could a superior ownership in us be best asserted, and we be brought to surrender ourselves to its will. "We are not our own:" this is the grand lesson of the cross. The general assumption is, first, that we are our own, and second, that we have a right, therefore, to be, or to do, what we please. Hence the unbridled self-assertion which is the one root of all wrong and sin. Of course, there is a sense in which both these assumptions are true. But in the highest sense neither is true. Even in our mere human relations, considering the vast net-work in which we are woven, we are not our own. We belong to the Past, as the heirs of its blessings; to the Present, as the stewards of its responsibilities; to the Future, as the guardians of its welfare. We belong to our parents; to our brothers and sisters, if we have them; to our families and homes; to our associates and friends; to every human being who has done us a kindness, or who needs our aid; to our country; to our race. How much more, then, to Christ and to God! We have not a faculty—of body or of mind, we have not a gift​—of money, position, or privilege, which we are at liberty to use with sole reference to our own wills, without regard even to these human relations,—much less as if we did not belong to God, and to the Saviour who has so purchased us. This is the central fact of which God, through Christianity, is seeking to make us aware. This is the meaning of His Fatherhood. It is equally the meaning of our Brotherhood. The cross is the consummate proclamation of this fact, in concrete. It is God's sense of ownership and His great consequent interest in us,—it is Christ's marvellous love, willing at any price to gain possession of us, put into sensible form; and in whomsoever its power is at all felt, self-assertion is so far vanquished, and the will of God, as expressed in Christ, becomes supreme.
Here, then, summarily, in this particular, is our new work—to so hold and preach the crucified Christ as to fill souls with the consciousness that they are not their own, because bought with a price, and thus to inspire them with the purpose in all things to make God's will in Christ supreme. Theoretically, there is little occasion for labor on these points. Theoretically, whoever believes in God and Christ, more or less accepts the lessons of the cross as to their ownership in us; and Universalists especially, however nominal, are fond of appealing to these ties which link us to God and the Saviour as, in their nature, indissoluble, and thus to demonstrate that no soul can be finally lost. And in our distress and sorrow, when disappointment comes and our earthly props fail us, who does not find it pleasant to think of what Christ has done to comfort and save us, and to fall back on God, assured that through whatever gloom we may be led, or however we may seem to be forsaken, He reckons us as His own, and will never leave nor forget us? What we want is a practical faith in what is now, to a great extent, only theory. What we want is a new unction and emphasis in urging these conceded truths as elements of a sanctifying experience—so that theory, argument, and comfortable assurance shall be translated into reverent and holy living, and become the intellectual basis upon which our Church shall make itself widely felt in Christ's behalf for the salvation of souls.