“A new way of Looking at the World.” Review of a Lecture on the Atonement. By Rev. Arthur Paul, Free Presbyterian Church, St. Kilda, Victoria. Melbourne: Stillwell & Co.
“Latter Day Light on the Apocalypse.” A new method, Exegetical and Historical. By Rev. Arthur Paul, Victoria. London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co.
Of these two publications by the same author, the one is a pamphlet exposing the errors of an Australian University Professor on the subject of the Atonement; the other is a long, closely reasoned exposition of the Apocalypse, unfolding the author’s new scheme for the interpretation of that book. Mr. Paul, who is the Free Presbyterian minister of St. Kilda, Victoria, thinks clearly and writes well. The learned Professor whose opinions he combats has in view the benefit of University students and other persons of intellectual tendencies. The Professor generously grants that the old orthodox view of the Atonement may be serviceable to weaker minds, but University students and other thorough thinkers require something more philosophical, which the Professor accordingly supplies. Briefly stated, the Professor’s theory is that the sufferings of the Surety were all the result of His sympathy with fallen man. He repudiates the idea that God as a Judge was actively bringing upon Christ the curse due for sin. The judicial relations of the Supreme Lawgiver to One who had assumed the responsibilities of an offending people are wholly denied, and the significance of Gethsemane and Calvary is found altogether in the intense sensitiveness of a perfectly holy nature to the facts of moral evil. In conformity with this low and limited account of the transactions of the Cross, the Professor diminishes the punishment of unsaved sinners both in this world and the next, to the “ruin and withering of the nature which sin inevitably produces.” A direct revelation of wrath from Heaven in the active infliction of the curse by the direct hand of God is quite denied. As Mr. Paul remarks, “the lecturer is saturated with erroneous conceptions” of God and man. Mr. Paul’s handling of this elegant errorist is smart and effective. He brings the findings of Scripture and right reason to bear very powerfully upon the Presbyterian professor’s new exposition of the old Socinianism, and we are glad that Australia is privileged to have such an able and zealous champion of sound doctrine on her soil.
Mr. Paul’s long volume on the Apocalypse, broaching, as it does, a somewhat revolutionary scheme of interpretation, and presenting various contentious points, might well elicit an extended notice. However, a comparatively short review must presently suffice us. The reading and thinking implied in the production of this volume are evidently very great, and no doubt Mr. Paul has noted that difficulties and drawbacks attend all the schemes of interpretation yet attempted by students of this sublime and mysterious portion of Holy Writ, and his scheme is doubtless put forth as an honest effort to throw light upon what is dark. Nevertheless, while we have perused his book with interest, and are pleased with individual parts of it, we are constrained to dissent from the foundation idea of his scheme. There are two main lines along which all expositors of this book travel—the Futurist plan of interpretation which assumes the Antichrist of Paul and John to be a dread person or power not yet revealed, and the other scheme which identifies the Church of Rome as a phenomenon terrible enough to be the prototype of the Scripture Antichrist, and which regards this power as having already fulfilled the main part of its career on the stage of time. This is the proposition supported by Durham, Goodwin, Fleming, Mede, Newton, and a host of other Protestant commentators. It is, however, anticipated by all these theologians that Rome is yet destined to have a brief but terrible day of supremacy before her final overthrow, and the signs of the times lend much support to such a surmise. The Futurist scheme is that canvassed by all the Romanist, Ritualist, and Plymouthist school of interpreters, and it has not hitherto been found allied with sound Protestant sentiment. However, the singularity of Mr. Paul as a student of the Apocalypse is that while Futurist in respect that he looks for a coming confederacy of evil tenfold more terrible in its antipathies to Godliness than was the persecuting Church of Rome, he is still profoundly Protestant in his views, and gives no quarter at all to the Church of Hildebrand and Tetzel. One fundamental idea of Mr. Paul’s scheme is that the preliminary struggle of the Christian church with Pagan Rome is an episode that finds no place in John’s vision, and that the career of the four horsemen in the sixth chapter, which by common consent of commentators is a representation of the terrible things done by Christ in order to the ruin of Pagan Rome, has nothing to do with that memorable crisis in the history of the world, but is a symbolic view of events beginning with the establishment of Popery, and reaching down to the time of the end. In the rider on the red horse Mr. Paul identifies the bloody Romish Church. The rider of the black horse, who carries in his hand the pair of balances, Mr. Paul asserts to be a delineation of the commercial and beneficent power of Protestant Britain, and the dreadful succeeding figure of Death on the pale horse is the destroyer more terrible than old Rome, who is to take peace from the earth when Britain’s day of ascendancy is over. This interpretation, whether acceptable on strict grounds or not, is, at least, interesting, and well suffused with patriotism. Mr. Paul’s interpretation of the two witnesses whose dead bodies lie on the street of the great city for three days and a half is also different from any of the solutions of that prophetic enigma we have yet seen. The one witness he regards as symbolical of the whole body of martyrs who fell prior to the Reformation—who were killed in fact by the rider of the red horse. The other witness is the representative of the whole company of future martyrs to be killed by the more terrible destroyer on the pale horse. In Mr. Paul’s interpretation of the resurrection of the witnesses, as depicted in Rev. xi. 11, there is a curious infusion of some ideas of the pre-Millennial school of prophecy. For example, Mr. Paul takes the resurrection to be a literal physical resurrection, accomplished in view of the astonished enemies of the Church. Stranger still, Mr. Paul looks upon “the sign of the Son of Man in heaven,” predicted in Matt. xxiv. 30, to be a transient revelation of the glory of the risen Christ to the eyes of a hostile world. Literalism such as this in the interpretation of these mysteries has always seemed to us incompatible with the analogy of the faith, and with other express Scriptures. We dissent, as we have said, from the theory which is the starting point of Mr. Paul’s scheme. That the great Prophet of the Church, about to reveal things which must shortly be done, passed over the first five or six centuries of Church history, and gave no place to such a far-reaching and glorious revolution as the overthrow of Paganism and the ascent of Christianity to the Imperial throne, is a thing hardly credible. So, dissenting from Mr. Paul’s premises, we dissent also from many of his conclusions. However, we have read his book with interest and profit, and commend it to the candid attention of the religious public.
J. M’N.