Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/313

 words, in our place he achieved and suffered everything which was necessary for the remission of our sins. The possibility in general of such a substitution of one person for another before the judgment of the justice of God, of such an acquittal of a moral debt by one person in the place of another or of others, must necessarily be admitted by common sense: (a) when for this substitution we have the will of God and the consent of the Supreme Lawgiver and Judge; (b) when the person who has taken upon himself to pay the debt for other delinquent debtors does not himself stand in the place of debtor before God; (e) when he voluntarily determines to execute all the conditions of the debt that the Judge may impose upon him, and (d) when, at last, he actually offers the pay which fully satisfies the debt.

“All these conditions, which we have borrowed from the example of our Saviour and have only generalized, have all been fulfilled by him in his great deed for our sake: Our Lord Jesus suffered for us pain and death by the will and with the permission of his Father, our Supreme Judge. It was precisely for this purpose that he, the Son of God, came down upon earth, in order to do, not his will, not his own will, but the will of him who sent him (John vi. 38), and during his whole life busied himself only with doing the will of his Father.” (p. 148.)

I have quoted this as a specimen of that involuntarily blasphemous form of speech which is employed by the author, whenever the subject of his speech is a blasphemy. What kind of debt, and pay, and court is he talking about? What kind of an expression is this, “God busied himself only”?

And thus, (1) Christ suffered for obeying his Father; (2) he was sinless; (3) he suffered voluntarily; (4) the pay for the debt as offered by Christ surpasses the amount of the debt, and a surplus—some change—is left. It is