A more intimate familiarity with St. Paul and an anxious harmonizing of my very words to the Scripture, led me on into a deviation from the popular creed, of the full importance of which I was not for some time aware.  I perceived that it is not the agonies of mind or body endured by Christ, which in the Scriptures are said to take away sin, but his “death,” his “laying down his life,” or sometimes even his resurrection.  I gradually became convinced, that when his “suffering,” or more especially his “blood,” is emphatically spoken of, nothing is meant but his violent death.  In the Epistle to the Hebrews, where the analogy of Sacrifice is so pressed, we see that the pains which Jesus bore were in order that he might “learn obedience,” but our redemption is effected by his dying as a voluntary victim:  in which, death by bloodshed, not pain, is the cardinal point.  So too the Paschal lamb (to which, though not properly a sacrifice, the dying Christ is compared by Paul) was not roasted alive, or otherwise put to slow torment, but was simply killed.  I therefore saw that the doctrine of “vicarious agonies” was fundamentally unscriptural.

This being fully discerned, I at last became bold to criticize the popular tenet.  What should we think of a judge, who, when a boy had deserved a stripe which would to him have been a sharp punishment, laid the very same blow on a strong man, to whom it was a slight infliction?  Clearly this would evade, not satisfy justice.  To carry out the principle, the blow might be laid as well on a giant, an elephant, or on an inanimate thing.  So, to lay our punishment on the infinite strength of Christ, who (they say) bore in six hours what it would have taken thousands of millions of men all eternity to bear, would be a similar evasion.—­I farther asked, if we were to fall in with Pagans, who tortured their victims to death as an atonement, what idea of God should we think them to form? and what should we reply, if they said, it gave them a wholesome view of his hatred of sin?  A second time I shuddered at the notions which I had once imbibed as a part of religion, and then got comfort from the inference, how much better men of this century are than their creed.  Their creed was the product of ages of cruelty and credulity; and it sufficiently bears that stamp.

Thus I rested in the Scriptural doctrine, that the death of Christ is our atonement.  To say the same of the death of Paul, was obviously unscriptural:  it was, then, essential to believe the physical nature of Christ to be different from that of Paul.  If otherwise, death was due to Jesus as the lot of nature:  how could such death have anything to do with our salvation?  On this ground the Unitarian doctrine was utterly untenable:  I could see nothing between my own view and a total renunciation of the authority of the doctrines promulgated by Paul and John.