This is free to all. As the brazen serpent was hoisted in the
wilderness, and the scorpion bitten Israelites invited to look on
it and be healed, so the crucified God is lifted up, and all men,
everywhere, are urged to kneel before him, accept his atonement,
and thus enable his righteousness to be imputed to them, and their
souls to be saved. The vital condition of salvation is an
appropriating faith in the vicarious atonement. Without this no
one can be saved. Thus with one word and a single breath whole
nations and races are whiffed into hell. All that the good hearted
Luther could venture to say of Cicero, whom he deeply admired and
loved, was the kind ejaculation, "I hope God will be merciful to
him!" To those who appreciate it with hostility, and look on all
things in its light, the thought that there can be no salvation
except by belief in the expiatory death of Christ, hopelessly
dooming all the heathen,8 and all infant children, unless baptized
in a proxy faith,9 builds an altar of blood among the stars and
makes the universe reek with horror. Other crimes, though stained
through with midnight dyes and heaped up to the brim of outrageous
guilt, may be freely forgiven to him who comes heartily to credit
the vicarious death of the Savior; but he who does not trust in
that, though virtuous as man can be, must depart into the
unappeasable fires. "Why this unintelligible crime of not seeing
the atonement happens to be the only sin for which there is no
atonement, it is impossible to say." Though this view of the
method, extent, and conditions of redemption is less revolting and
incredible than the other, still, it does not seem to us that any
person whose mental and moral nature is unprejudiced, healthy, and
enlightened, and who will patiently study the subject, can
possibly accept either of them. The leading assumed doctrines
common to them, out of which they severally spring, and on which
they both rest, are not only unsupported by adequate proofs, but
really have no evidence at all, and are absurd in themselves,
confounding the broadest distinctions in morals, and subverting
the best established principles of natural religion.10

The fourth scheme of Christian salvation is that which predicates
the power of insuring souls from hell solely of the Church. This
is the sacramental theory. It is assumed that, in the state of
nature subsequent to the transgression and fall of Adam, all men
are alienated from God, and