God forgive me,--or those who first set abroad this strange [Greek:
metabasis eis allo genos], this debtor and creditor scheme of expounding
the mystery of Redemption, or both! But I never can read the words, 'God
himself could not; and therefore took a body that could'--without being
reminded of the monkey that took the cat's paw to take the chestnuts out
of the fire, and claimed the merit of puss's sufferings. I am sure,
however, that the ludicrous images, under which this gloss of the
Calvinists embodies itself to my fancy, never disturb my recollections
of the adorable mystery itself. It is clear that a body, remaining a
body, can only suffer as a body: for no faith can enable us to believe
that the same thing can be at once A. and not A. Now that the body of
our Lord was not transelemented or transnatured by the 'pleroma'
indwelling, we are positively assured by Scripture. Therefore it would
follow from this most unscriptural doctrine, that the divine justice had
satisfaction made to it by the suffering of a body which had been
brought into existence for this special purpose, in lieu of the debt of
eternal misery due from, and leviable on, the bodies and souls of all
mankind! It is to this gross perversion of the sublime idea of the
Redemption by the cross, that we must attribute the rejection of the
doctrine of redemption by the Unitarian, and of the Gospel 'in toto' by
the more consequent Deist.

Ib. p. 2. C.

And yet, even this dwelling fullness, even in this person Christ
Jesus, by no title of merit in himself, but only 'quia complacuit',
because it pleased the Father it should be so.

This, in the intention of the preacher, may have been sound, but was it
safe, divinity? In order to the latter, methinks, a less equivocal word