When therefore this writer says, Can any thing be more evident, than that if doing evil be the only cause of God’s displeasure, the ceasing to do evil, must take away that displeasure?[¹]
[¹] Page 4.
* Just as if he had said, if conversing with a leper has been the only cause of a man’s getting a leprosy, must not departing from him, be the removal of the leprosy? For if any one, guessing at the guilt of sin, and its effects on the soul, should compare it to a leprosy in the body, he can no more say, that he has reached its real, internal evil, than he, that comparing the happiness of heaven to a crown of glory, can be said to have described its real happiness.
This writer has no occasion to appeal to the nature of things, if he can be thus certain about things, whose nature is not only obscure, but impossible to be known. For it is as impossible for him to know the guilt and effects of sin, as to know the shape of an angel. It is as impossible to know by the mere light of reason, what God’s displeasure at sin is, what separation from sinners it implies, or how it obliges God to deal with them; as to know what the internal essence of God is. Our author therefore has here found the utmost degree of evidence, where it was impossible for him to have the smallest degree of knowledge.
If a man, having murdered twenty of his fellow-creatures, should afterward be sorry for it, and wish that he had a power to bring them to life again, or to create others in their stead, would his ceasing to kill, and wishing he had a power to create others in their stead, put him just in the same state with God, as if he had never murdered a man in his life? But unless this can be said, it cannot be said that repentance is sufficient to put a man in the same state, as if he never had sinned.
The writer has two more objections against the atonement for sin, made by Jesus Christ. First, as it is an human sacrifice, which nature itself abhors: and which was looked upon as the great abomination of idolatrous Pagan worship.
The cruelty, injustice, and impiety, of shedding human blood in the sacrifices of the Pagans is fully granted; but reason cannot thence bring the smallest objections against the sacrifice of Christ.
For how can reason be more disregarded, than in such an argument as this? The Pagans were unjust, cruel, and impious, in offering human blood to their false gods; therefore the true God cannot receive any human sacrifice, or allow any persons to die, as a punishment for sin.
For, if no human sacrifice can be fit for God to receive, because human sacrifices, as parts of Pagan worship, were unjust and impious; then it would follow, that the mortality, to which all mankind are appointed by God, must have the same cruelty and injustice in it. Now that death is a punishment for sin, and that all mankind are by death offered as a sacrifice for sin, is not only a doctrine of revealed religion, but the plain dictate of reason. But if reason must acknowledge the death of all mankind, as a sacrifice for sin, then it can have no just objection against the sacrifice of Christ, because it was human.
I need not take upon me to prove the reasonableness of God’s procedure in the mortality of mankind; revelation is not under any necessity of proving this; because it is no difficulty that arises from revelation, but equally belongs to natural religion; and both of them must acknowledge it to be reasonable; not because it can be proved to be so from the nature of things, but is to be believed to be so, by faith and piety.