heaven....
Reconciliation is accomplished by Christ; by all that he was and is; all
that he taught, did, and is doing; and by all that he suffered for our
sake. Not by one but by all of these are we saved."[254] Christ's
sacrifice was not made to God, for he did not need to be propitiated or
rendered merciful, but simply with reference to man alone,--for his
good; God's justice needed no pacification. "There can be no greater or
more blinding heresy than that which would teach that Christ's
sufferings, or any sufferings in behalf of virtue and human sins and
sorrows, are strictly substitutional, or literally vicarious. The old
theologies, perplexed and darkened with metaphysics and scholastic
logic--the fruit of academic pride and the love of ecclesiastical
dominion--labored to prove and to teach that Christ, in his short agony
upon the cross, really suffered the pains of sin and bore the actual sum
of all the anguish from remorse and guilt due to myriads of sinners,
through the ages of eternity.... Our sense of justice and goodness so
far as God himself is concerned, is vastly more shocked by the proper
penalties of sin being placed upon the innocent than had they been left
upon the guilty, where they belong.... The truth is, literal
substitution of moral penalties is a thing absolutely impossible!
Vicarious punishment, in its technical and theological sense, is
forbidden by the very laws of our nature and moral constitution."[255]

REGENERATION. This is a universal want, but it is entirely consistent
with the purity of human nature. The natural birth gives no moral
character; it is to be formed, and when formed, is called the "new
birth." This is all that Christ meant when he said to Nicodemus, "Except
a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God." Regeneration must
not, therefore, be considered a consequence of human depravity, but a
result of human purity. It is the development of that which is already
good within us.

FUTURE PUNISHMENT. The Unitarians of America have, for the most part,
adopted the Restitutional theories of Hartley and Priestley. Mr. Ballou
claims "the whole body of Unitarians as Universalists." Punishment may
be inflicted after death, but it will be temporary. "The punishments of
hell are disciplinarian, and do not forbid the hope of remission and
relief."[256]

The best method of determining the present spirit of Unitarianism is to
observe the reception which it gives to the Rationalis