altar must be wrong because they cannot afford it, we still do
not feel "saved" without a sacrifice and a victim. In vain do we
try to substitute mystical rites that cost nothing, such as
circumcision, or, as a substitute for that, baptism. Our sense of
justice still demands an expiation, a sacrifice, a sufferer for
our sins. And this leaves the poor man still in his old
difficulty; for if it was impossible for him to procure rams and
goats and shekels, how much more impossible is it for him to find
a neighbor who will voluntarily suffer for his sins: one who will
say cheerfully "You have committed a murder. Well, never mind: I
am willing to be hanged for it in your stead?"

Our imagination must come to our rescue. Why not, instead of
driving ourselves to despair by insisting on a separate atonement
by a separate redeemer for every sin, have one great atonement
and one great redeemer to compound for the sins of the world once
for all? Nothing easier, nothing cheaper. The yoke is easy, the
burden light. All you have to do when the redeemer is once found
(or invented by the imagination) is to believe in the efficacy of
the transaction, and you are saved. The rams and goats cease to
bleed; the altars which ask for expensive gifts and continually
renewed sacrifices are torn down; and the Church of the single
redeemer and the single atonement rises on the ruins of the old
temples, and becomes a single Church of the Christ.


RETROSPECTIVE ATONEMENT, AND THE EXPECTATION OF THE REDEEMER

But this does not happen at once. Between the old costly religion
of the rich and the new gratuitous religion of the poor there