Nevertheless, my own view seemed mere and more unmeaning the more closely it was interrogated.  When I ascribed death to Christ, what did death mean? and what or whom did I suppose to die?  Was it man that died, or God?  If man only, how was that wonderful, or how did it concern us?  Besides;—­persons die, not natures:  a nature is only a collection of properties:  if Christ was one person, all Christ died.  Did, then, God die, and man remain alive!  For God to become non-existent is an unimaginable absurdity.  But is this death a mere change of state, a renunciation of earthly life?  Still it remains unclear how the parting with mere human life could be to one who possesses divine life either an atonement or a humiliation.  Was it not rather an escape from humiliation, saving only the mode of death?  So severe was this difficulty, that at length I unawares dropt from Semi-Arianism into pure Arianism, by so distinguishing the Son from the Father, as to admit the idea that the Son of God had actually been non-existent in the interval between death and resurrection:  nevertheless, I more and more felt, that to be able to define my own notions on such questions had exceedingly little to do with my spiritual state.  For me it was important and essential to know that God hated sin, and that God had forgiven my sin:  but to know one particular manifestation of his hatred of sin, or the machinery by which He had enabled himself to forgive, was of very secondary importance.  When He proclaims to me in his word, that He is forgiving to all the penitent, it is not for me to reply, that “I cannot believe that, until I hear how He manages to reconcile such conduct with his other attributes.”  Yet, I remembered, this was Bishop Beveridge’s sufficient refutation of Mohammedism, which teaches no atonement.

* * * * *

At the same time great progress had been made in my mind towards the overthrow of the correlative dogma of the Fall of man and his total corruption.  Probably for years I had been unawares anti-Calvinistic on this topic.  Even at Oxford, I had held that human depravity is a fact, which it is absurd to argue against; a fact, attested by Thucydides, Polybius, Horace, and Tacitus, almost as strongly as by St. Paul.  Yet in admitting man’s total corruption, I interpreted this of spiritual, not of moral, perversion:  for that there were kindly and amiable qualities even in the unregenerate, was quite as clear a fact as any other.  Hence in result I did not attribute to man any great essential depravity, in the popular and moral sense of the word; and the doctrine amounted only to this, that “spiritually, man is paralyzed, until the grace of God comes freely upon him.”  How to reconcile this with the condemnation, and punishment of man for being unspiritual, I knew not.  I saw, and did not dissemble, the difficulty; but received it as a mystery hereafter to be cleared up.