of all mankind; that the duplicity of the child, and the crime of the
assassin, and every unholy thought that has ever passed through a
human bosom, were present to His mind in that awful hour as if they
were His own. This is utterly unscriptural. Where is the single text
from which it can be, except by force, extracted? Besides this, it is
fanciful and sentimental; and again it is dangerous, for it represents
the whole Atonement as a fictitious and shadowy transaction. There is
a mental state in which men have felt the burthen of sins which they
did not commit. There have been cases in which men have been
mysteriously excruciated with the thought of having committed the
unpardonable sin. But to represent the mental phenomena of the
Redeemer's mind as in any way resembling this--to say that His
conscience was oppressed with the responsibility of sins which He had
not committed--is to confound a state of sanity with the delusions of
a half lucid mind, and the workings of a healthy conscience with those
of one unnatural and morbid.

There is a way however, much more appalling and much more true, in
which this may be true, without resorting to any such fanciful
hypothesis. Sin has a great power in this world: it gives laws like
those of a sovereign, which bind us all, and to which we are all
submissive. There are current maxims in church and state, in society,
in trade, in law, to which we yield obedience. For this obedience
every one is responsible; for instance in trade, and in the profession
of law, every one is the servant of practices the rectitude of which
his heart can only half approve--every one complains of them, yet all
are involved in them. Now, when such sins reach their climax, as in
the case of national bankruptcy or an unjust acquittal, there may be
some who are in a special sense, the actors in the guilt; but
evidently, for the bankruptcy, each member of the community is