other's
transgression, we are taught, as a direct corollary from this, that the
Deity is no more moral in his emotions than ourselves; for, in order to
right the first wrong, he is made to perpetrate another which no one
would hesitate to pronounce immoral in us, _viz._, the chastisement of
the innocent in the place of the guilty. We need say nothing of the
lie direct and overwhelming which the unanswerable facts of science, in
many of its departments, give to the whole story of "the fall" of a
first man, and the consequent superstructure which the perverse
ingenuity of man has erected upon it. We need only confine ourselves
to the plain fact that the so-called scheme is an outrage upon the
ethical nature of man, and therefore that it can never have emanated
from God. In the latest explanations of "the Atonement," the Anglican
theologians explain it away, "the redemption" of Jesus being no more
than the example of his saintly life and his uncomplaining submission
to death. The angry God, who will not relax his frown save at the
sight of blood, is conveniently forgotten in the more refined circles
of ecclesiasticism, and is now left to the meditations of Little Bethel
or Breton peasants.

And this is a Divine revelation, a heavenly system of truth so far
beyond human reason, and so intrinsically unrelated to any of our
faculties, that it could never have been discovered by man's
intelligence, but only preternaturally communicated from without! To
Paul, who is alone responsible for the famous scheme, this is the
"wisdom hidden from the ages, which none of the princes of this world
ever knew"--his peculiar way of describing the superiority of his
teaching to that of the Greek masters like Plato and Aristotle. But
the civilised world--the _orbis terrarum_ of the nineteenth
century--holds with Socrates that the moral law is supreme over gods
and men, and believes that Mill and Carlyle are safer guides when they
teach, that no less than the best moral emotion discoverable in man may
be ascribed to the God of men. "Depend upon it," says the great man of
his hero, Frederick the Great, "it is flatly inconceivable that moral
emotion could have been put into him by an entity which had none of its
own."

Meanwhile, if the universe be good at heart, if reason be indeed its
soul, the tendencies of modern thought must be leading mankind to some
predestined end. The movements known to history as the Renaissance,
Reformation