it or not, we could not get rid of it. The consequences of my sin,
moreover, are rendered less terrible by virtues not my own. I am
literally saved from penalties because another pays the penalty for me.
The atonement, and what it accomplished for man, were therefore a
sublime summing up as it were of what sublime men have to do for their
race; an exemplification, rather than a contradiction, of Nature
herself, as we know her in our own experience.

Now, all this was really intended as a defence of the atonement; but
the President heard me that Sunday, and on the Monday he called me into
his room. He said that my sermon was marked by considerable ability,
but he should have been better satisfied if I had confined myself to
setting forth as plainly as I could the "way of salvation" as revealed
in Christ Jesus. What I had urged might perhaps have possessed some
interest for cultivated people; in fact, he had himself urged pretty
much the same thing many years ago, when he was a young man, in a
sermon he had preached at the Union meeting; but I must recollect that
in all probability my sphere of usefulness would lie amongst humble
hearers, perhaps in an agricultural village or a small town, and that
he did not think people of this sort would understand me if I talked
over their heads as I had done the day before. What they wanted on a
Sunday, after all the cares of the week, was not anything to perplex
and disturb them; not anything which demanded any exercise of thought;
but a repetition of the "old story of which, Mr. Rutherford, you know,
we never ought to get weary; an exhibition of our exceeding sinfulness;
of our safety in the Rock of Ages, and there only; of the joys of the
saints and the sufferings of those who do not believe."

His words fell on me like the hand of a corpse, and I went away much
depressed. My sermon had excited me, and the man who of all men ought