But note what quaint, naive ideas possessed the minds of people at that time. Satan did not know that Jesus possessed a divine nature, and that, consequently, he could not beholden of death; and so, when he entered into this bargain, he was cheated, he found out to his dismay that he had lost not only humanity, but Christ also, had been defrauded of them both. This was the doctrine of the atonement that was preached during the early centuries of the Christian Church, at least in certain parts of Europe. But later there came another doctrine, the belief that the sufferings of the Christ were a substitute offered to God for what would have been the sufferings of the lost. He was made sin for us, he who had known no sin, as the New Testament phraseology has it. So that he, being infinite, in a brief space of time during his little earthly career, during his suspension on the cross and his descent into hell, was able to suffer as much pain as all the lost would have suffered throughout eternity. And this suffering of the Christ was supposed to be accepted on the part of God as the substitute for that which he would have exacted on the part of the souls of those that for his sake were to be saved. There is still another theory that I must mention briefly, that which is called the governmental theory, that which I was taught during my course of theological instruction. The idea was that God had a moral government to maintain, not only on this earth, but throughout the range of the universe among all his intelligent creatures, and, if he permitted his laws to be broken without exacting an adequate penalty, then all governmental authority would be overthrown. In other words, men took their poor human legal devices, their political ideals, and lifted them into the heavens, made them the models after which it was supposed God was to govern his great, intelligent universe. So they said that God would be willing to forgive, he would like to forgive, he was loving and tender and kind, but it was not safe, safe for the interests of his universal government, for him to forgive any one until an adequate penalty had been paid in expiation of human sin. You see, according to this theory, it does not apparently make much difference who it is that suffers, whether it is the person who has committed the sin or not; but somebody must pay an adequate penalty, and Jesus volunteered to do this, to be the victim, and so to deliver man from the righteous deserts which he had incurred as a transgressor of the law of God.