Into this view I entered with so eager an interest, that I felt no bondage of the letter in Paul’s own words:  his wisdom was too much above me to allow free criticism of his weak points.  At the same time, the systematic use of the Old Testament by the Puritans, as if it were “the rule of life” to Christians, I saw to be a glaring mistake, intensely opposed to the Pauline doctrine.  This discovery, moreover, soon became important to me, as furnishing a ready evasion of objections against the meagre or puerile views of the Pentateuch; for without very minute inquiry how far I must go to make the defence adequate, I gave a general reply, that the New Testament confessed the imperfections of the older dispensation.  I still presumed the Old to have been perfect for its own objects and in its own place; and had not defined to myself how far it was correct or absurd, to imagine morality to change with time and circumstances.

Before long, ground was broken in my mind on a still more critical question, by another Fellow of a College; who maintained that nothing but unbelief could arise out of the attempt to understand in what way and by what moral right the blood of Christ atoned for sins.  He said, that he bowed before the doctrine as one of “Revelation,” and accepted it reverentially by an act of faith; but that he certainly felt unable to understand why the sacrifice of Christ, any more than the Mosaic sacrifices, should compensate for the punishment of our sins.  Could carnal reason discern that human or divine blood, any more than that of beasts, had efficacy to make the sinner as it were sinless?  It appeared to him a necessarily inscrutable mystery, into which we ought not to look.—­The matter being thus forced on my attention, I certainly saw that to establish the abstract moral right and justice of vicarious punishment was not easy, and that to make out the fact of any “compensation”—­(i.e. that Jesus really endured on the cross a true equivalent for the eternal sufferings due to the whole human race,)—­was harder still.  Nevertheless I had difficulty in adopting the conclusions of this gentleman; FIRST, because, in a passage of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the sacred writer, in arguing—­“For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats can take away sins,” &c., &c....—­seems to expect his readers to see an inherent impropriety in the sacrifices of the Law, and an inherent moral fitness in the sacrifice of Christ.  SECONDLY:  I had always been accustomed to hear that it was by seeing the moral fitness of the doctrine of the Atonement, that converts to Christianity were chiefly made:  so said the Moravians among the Greenlanders, so Brainerd among the North American Indians, so English missionaries among the negroes at Sierra Leone:—­and I could not at all renounce this idea.  Indeed I seemed to myself to see this fitness most emphatically; and as for the forensic difficulties, I passed them over with a certain conscious reverence.  I was not as yet ripe for deeper inquiry:  yet I, about this time, decidedly modified my boyish creed on the subject, on which more will be said below.