That seemed a great puzzle to me, because, although it might account for what happened before Christ came and until He came, I could not understand why God should go on letting people come into the world who would break His laws, and make Him still more angry for centuries and centuries. That seemed to me, as a child, so unnecessary.
Later I was told it was not God's anger but His sense of justice that had to be appeased and satisfied, which was a distinct step in advance.
A little later, however, I read that this was not the hidden truth of the doctrine. The religious world (the thoughtful section of it) now arrived at the idea that it was not God who needed to be satisfied or appeased in any of His attributes, but MAN, and that GOD—in the person of his Son—came into the world to reconcile the world to Him, and not Himself to the world.
This was a complete bouleversement of the whole situation, though it came so gradually that few appreciated that fact.
The last suggestion appeared to me by far the most luminous. In human life it is invariably the lower nature that needs to be reconciled and conciliated; whilst the higher nature, in proportion to its development, is forgiving and tolerant and wide-minded, and does not prate about its own high sense of justice requiring to be appeased. The best type of man punishes a wrong-doer in order that he may learn to do better and leave off tormenting and wronging his fellow-creatures; not to appease any instinct in his own breast, for that would be egotism, no matter how we might try to disguise the fact.
Now if it would be a blot upon the best conceivable man to be egotistical, a fortiori must it be upon God.
To conceive otherwise is to make God in the likeness of the lower and not the higher humanity. I thought all that out very clearly.
Still this crux remained for me, that to be suddenly, at any arbitrary moment in the world's history, obliged, as it were, to send an absolutely divine part of Himself into the world, was the way a man would act faced by an unforeseen catastrophe, but not the way in which God has acted throughout the rest of our history.
A succession of teachers, enlightening the world by degrees, and culminating in the ANOINTED Son of God—the Flower of Humanity—this is entirely in line with the processes of Nature and the laws of God, so far as we know them.
All progress has its culminating point.