And, indeed, Felix Kennaston found that his theory of the Atonement was in harmony with quite orthodox teachings. The library at Alcluid revealed bewildered and perturbed generations at guess-work. How could a God have been placated, and turned from wrath to benevolence, by witnessing the torment of His own son? What pleasure, whereby He was propitiated, could the God have derived from watching the scene on Calvary? Or was the God, as priests had taught so long (within the same moment that they proclaimed the God’s omnipotence) not wholly a free agent, because bound by laws whereby He was compelled to punish some one for humanity’s disobedience, with the staggering option of substituting an innocent victim? For if you granted that, you conceded to be higher than the God, and overruling Him, a power which made for flat injustice. Since Schleiermacher’s time, at least, as Kennaston discovered, there had been reasoning creatures to contest the possibility of such discrepant assumptions, and a dynasty of teachers who adhered to the “subjective” theory of propitiation. For these considered that Christ came, not primarily to be crucified, but by his life to reveal to men the nature of their God. The crucifixion was an incidental, almost inevitable, result of human obtuseness; and was pregnant with value only in that thereby the full extent of divine love was perfectly evinced. The personality, rather than the sufferings, of the Nazarene had thus satisfied, not any demand or attribute of the God by acting upon it from without, “but God’s total nature by revealing it and realizing it in humanity.” The God, in short, had satisfied Himself “by revealing and expressing His nature” in the material universe, precisely as lesser artists got relief from the worries of existence by depicting themselves in their books. Just as poets express themselves communicatively in words, so here the Author had expressed Himself in flesh. Such, in effect, had been the teaching of Karl Immanuel Nitzsch, of Richard Rothe, and of von Hofman, in Germany; of Auguste Bouvier in Geneva; of Alexandre Vinet, and of Auguste Sabatier, in France; of Frederick Denison Maurice, and John Caird, and Benjamin Jowett, in England; and in America of Horace Bushnell, and Elisha Mulford, and William Newton Clarke. The list was imposing: and Kennaston rejoiced to find himself at one with so many reputable theologians. For all these scholars had dimly divined, with whatever variousness they worded the belief, that the God’s satisfaction sprang, in reality, from the consciousness of having at last done a fine piece of artistic work, in creating the character of Christ....