m it is at all understood.

The cases are not at all parallel. In the first place, no human government
has a right to doom a virtuous man to bear the punishment due to the
criminal; and if he were willing to suffer in the place of the culprit, no
government on earth has a right to accept of such a substitute. The life
of the virtuous citizen is the gift of God, and no earthly power has the
authority to take it for any such purpose. It would be a violation of the
will of God for any human government to admit of such a substitution. On
the contrary, Christ had the power to lay down his life; and he did so, in
perfect accordance with the appointment of God. In submitting to the death
of the cross, he did not subvert, he fulfilled the end of his earthly
existence.

Secondly, it would overthrow the ends of public justice for any human
government to permit a good man, the ornament and blessing of society, to
die in the room of the criminal, its scourge and plague. The sufferings of
the good citizen in such a case would be pure and unmitigated evil. While
they would deprive society of his services, they would throw back upon it
the burden of one who deserved to die. They would tend to render the
punishment of crime uncertain; they would shock the moral sentiments of
mankind, and cover with odium and disgrace the government that could
tolerate such a proceeding. But not so in relation to the sufferings of
Christ. He assumed his human nature for the express purpose of dying upon
the cross. He died, not to deliver an individual and turn him loose to
commit further depredations upon society, but to effect the salvation of
the world itself, and to deliver it from all the evils under which it
groans and travails in pain. He died for sinners, not that they might
continue in their sins, but in order to redeem unto himself a peculiar
people zealous of good works.

In the third and last place, the death of a good man is the end of his
existence, the entire extinction of his being, in so far as all human
government is concerned; whereas the death of Christ, in relation to the
government of God, was but the beginning of his exaltation and glory. He
endured the cross, despising the shame, in view of the unbounded joy that
was set before him. The temporal evils which he endured, unutterably great
as they were, if viewed merely in relation to himself, were infinitely
more than counterbalanced by the eternal satisfaction and delight that
re