nculcated of the possible and actual separation of guilt
and its punishment on the principle of vicarious suffering, education
has still proceeded, and moral discipline been enforced as if no such
false principle had ever been advocated. Children are swayed by hope and
fear of the consequences of their actions to themselves; and
self-government is enforced at a riper age by the same motives, though
enlarged and elevated. In religion alone has an error, as absurd in its
nature as injurious in its tendencies, been retained thus long by the
force of prejudice; and that it has not spread further we hold to be
owing to its manifest folly and to its evidently noxious influence when
applied to any case but that to which it is appropriated. There can be
no surer proof that the principle itself is false.

It is difficult to know where to begin in disproving a doctrine which is
repugnant to every other doctrine, inconsistent with every received
truth, and incompatible with every admitted divine and human relation,
with every known attribute of mind, divine or human. It will be
sufficient to state one reason for utterly rejecting as we do the
doctrine of vicarious suffering; that reason being suggested and
confirmed both by our own understandings and by Scripture.

It is clear that no man can sin for another. He may sin at the
instigation of another, or for the supposed benefit of another; but in
the first case, the sin remains with both, and in the last, with the
perpetrator only. Moral disease thus bears an exact analogy to natural
disease. Natural disease may be communicated, or even incurred for the
benefit of another, but it cannot be so transferred as to be annihilated
with respect to the person who was first subject to it. The case is
precisely the same with the pain which is the inseparable consequence of
sin. If endured by any but the sinner, it is actually and completely
disconnected with the sin. It is no longer a punishment, but a
gratuitous infliction. This is so evident that, if proposed in any court
of justice but that from which our purest conceptions of justice are
derived, the reason and conscience of every man would exclaim against
the monstrous notion of a substitution of punishment. If a man had
transgressed the laws of his country by theft, would he not be the most
unjust judge upon earth who would sentence his elder brother, known to
be innocent and virtuous, to imprisonment or death for the offence?

Woul