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The doctrine which I used to read as a boy, taught that a vast sum of punishment was due to God for the sins of men. This vast sum was made up of all the woes due through eternity to the whole human race, or, as some said, to the elect. Christ on the cross bore this punishment himself and thereby took it away: thus God is enabled to forgive without violating justice.—But I early encountered unanswerable difficulty on this theory, as to the question, whether Christ had borne the punishment of all or of some only. If of all, is it not unjust to inflict any of it on any? If of the elect only, what gospel have you to preach? for then you cannot tell sinners that God has provided a Saviour for them; for you do not know whether those whom you address are elect. Finding no way out of this, I abandoned the fundamental idea of compensation in quantity, as untenable; and rested in the vaguer notion, that God signally showed his abhorrence of sin, by laying tremendous misery on the Saviour who was to bear away sin.
I have already narrated, how at Oxford I was embarrassed as to the forensic propriety of transferring punishment at all. This however I received as matter of authority, and rested much on the wonderful exhibition made of the evil of sin, when such a being could be subjected to preternatural suffering as a vicarious sinbearer. To this view, a high sense of the personal dignity of Jesus was quite essential; and therefore I had always felt a great repugnance for Mr. Belsham, Dr. Priestley, and the Unitarians of that school, though I had not read a line of their writings.
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.
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.
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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.
But it gradually broke upon me, that when Paul said nothing stronger than heathen moralists had said about human wickedness, it was absurd to quote his words, any more than theirs, in proof of a Fall,—that is, of a permanent degeneracy induced by the first sin of the first man: and when I studied the 5th chapter of the Romans, I found it was death, not corruption, which Adam was said to have entailed. In short, I could scarcely find the modern doctrine of the "Fall" any where in the Bible. I then remembered that Calvin, in his Institutes, complains that all the Fathers are heterodox on this point; the Greek Fathers being grievously overweening in their estimate of human power; while of the Latin Fathers even Augustine is not always up to Calvin's mark of orthodoxy. This confirmed my rising conviction that the tenet is of rather recent origin. I afterwards heard, that both it and the doctrine of compensatory misery were first systematized by Archbishop Anselm, in the reign of our William Rufus: but I never took the pains to verify this.