he never explicitly declared his attitude towards the doctrine of the suppressed tracts. In the end he substituted for it a different doctrine, and left the matter there. This may fairly be taken to imply retractation, but to exclude confession; and the inference is that Newton did not consider further confession called for,—or, to put it otherwise, that he deemed that his error had involved infirmity, rather than sin.
The explanation of this is surely very simple. The essence of the error of the two tracts had been the attribution to Christ of certain penal sufferings that were yet not vicarious and atoning. Newton’s ultimate position was that Christ actually endured such sufferings, but endured them vicariously and atoningly. This was of course a view that he was able to buttress abundantly by quotations from orthodox Protestant divines; nor did his adversaries, greatly as they disliked it, deny that it was compatible with essential orthodoxy. Now, it doubtless appeared to Newton that the position he had taken up in the two tracts merely marked a stage in the process by which his mind passed to the acknowledgment of a vicarious and atoning character in Christ’s sufferings in life. Indeed, there can be little doubt that his mind was taking this direction from 1835 at the latest. Under these circumstances it is likely that he thought it sufficient to formally abandon the position that Christ’s vicarious sufferings were confined to the Cross. As early as July, 1848, he was teaching that all Christ’s “living sufferings” were vicarious in the sense of being endured “exclusively on behalf of others”.[1] Afterwards he went further, and affirmed vicariousness in the full sense of substitution. It may be said therefore that he
- ↑ This was a change, not in Newton’s opinions, but in his use of the term vicarious.
