Preface to Androcles and the Lion | Page 9

corrupts the whole transaction. For example, the
shedding of innocent blood cannot be balanced by the shedding of
guilty blood. Sacrificing a criminal to propitiate God for the murder of
one of his righteous servants is like sacrificing a mangy sheep or an ox
with the rinderpest: it calls down divine wrath instead of appeasing it.
In doing it we offer God as a sacrifice the gratification of our own
revenge and the protection of our own lives without cost to ourselves;
and cost to ourselves is the essence of sacrifice and expiation. However
much the Philistines have succeeded in confusing these things in
practice, they are to the Salvationist sense distinct and even contrary.
The Baronet's cousin in Dickens's novel, who, perplexed by the failure
of the police to discover the murderer of the baronet's solicitor, said
"Far better hang wrong fellow than no fellow," was not only expressing
a very common sentiment, but trembling on the brink of the rarer
Salvationist opinion that it is much better to hang the wrong fellow:

that, in fact, the wrong fellow is the right fellow to hang.
The point is a cardinal one, because until we grasp it not only does
historical Christianity remain unintelligible to us, but those who do not
care a rap about historical Christianity may be led into the mistake of
supposing that if we discard revenge, and treat murderers exactly as
God treated Cain: that is, exempt them from punishment by putting a
brand on them as unworthy to be sacrificed, and let them face the world
as best they can with that brand on them, we should get rid both of
punishment and sacrifice. It would not at all follow: on the contrary, the
feeling that there must be an expiation of the murder might quite
possibly lead to our putting some innocent person--the more innocent
the better--to a cruel death to balance the account with divine justice.
SALVATION AT FIRST A CLASS PRIVILEGE; AND THE
REMEDY
Thus, even when the poor decide that the method of purchasing
salvation by offering rams and goats or bringing gold to the altar must
be wrong because they cannot afford it, we still do not feel "saved"
without a sacrifice and a victim. In vain do we try to substitute mystical
rites that cost nothing, such as circumcision, or, as a substitute for that,
baptism. Our sense of justice still demands an expiation, a sacrifice, a
sufferer for our sins. And this leaves the poor man still in his old
difficulty; for if it was impossible for him to procure rams and goats
and shekels, how much more impossible is it for him to find a neighbor
who will voluntarily suffer for his sins: one who will say cheerfully
"You have committed a murder. Well, never mind: I am willing to be
hanged for it in your stead?"
Our imagination must come to our rescue. Why not, instead of driving
ourselves to despair by insisting on a separate atonement by a separate
redeemer for every sin, have one great atonement and one great
redeemer to compound for the sins of the world once for all? Nothing
easier, nothing cheaper. The yoke is easy, the burden light. All you
have to do when the redeemer is once found (or invented by the
imagination) is to believe in the efficacy of the transaction, and you are
saved. The rams and goats cease to bleed; the altars which ask for
expensive gifts and continually renewed sacrifices are torn down; and
the Church of the single redeemer and the single atonement rises on the
ruins of the old temples, and becomes a single Church of the Christ.

RETROSPECTIVE ATONEMENT, AND THE EXPECTATION OF
THE REDEEMER
But this does not happen at once. Between the old costly religion of the
rich and the new gratuitous religion of the poor there comes an
interregnum in which the redeemer, though conceived by the human
imagination, is not yet found. He is awaited and expected under the
names of the Christ, the Messiah, Baldur the Beautiful, or what not; but
he has not yet come. Yet the sinners are not therefore in despair. It is
true that they cannot say, as we say, "The Christ has come, and has
redeemed us;" but they can say "The Christ will come, and will redeem
us," which, as the atonement is conceived as retrospective, is equally
consoling. There are periods when nations are seething with this
expectation and crying aloud with prophecy of the Redeemer through
their poets. To feel that atmosphere we have only to take up the Bible
and read Isaiah at one end of such a period and Luke and John at the
other.
COMPLETION OF THE SCHEME BY LUTHER AND CALVIN
We now see our religion as