My Path to Atheism. Annie Besant

They feel obliged to acknowledge that some unusual benefit to the race must result from the incarnation and death of a God, and are swayed alternately by their reason, which places the crucifixion of Jesus in the roll of martyrs' deaths, and by their prejudices, which assign to it a position unique and unrivalled in the history of the race. There are, however, many signs that the deity of Jesus is, as an article of faith, tottering from its pedestal in the Broad Church school. The hold on it by such men as the Rev. J. S. Brooke is very slight, and his interpretation of the incarnation is regarded by orthodox divines with unmingled horror. Their moral atonement, in turn, is as the dawn before the sunrise, and we may hope that it will soon develop into the real truth: namely, that the dealings of Jesus with the Father were a purely private matter between his own soul and God, and that his value to mankind consists in his being one of the teachers of the race, one "with a genius for religion," one of the schoolmasters appointed to lead humanity to God.

      The theory of M'Leod Campbell stands alone, and is highly interesting and ingenious—it is the more valuable and hopeful as coming from Scotland, the home of the dreariest belief as to the relations existing between man and God. He rejects the penal character of the Atonement, and makes it consist, so to speak, in leading God and man to understand one another. He considers that Christ witnessed to men on behalf of God, and vindicated the father's heart by showing what he could be to the son who trusted in him. He witnessed to God on behalf of men—and this is the weakest point in the book, verging, as it does, on substitution—showing in humanity a perfect sympathy with God's feelings towards sin, and offering to God for man a perfect repentance for human transgression. I purposely say "verging," because Campbell does not intend substitution; he represents this sorrow of Jesus as what he must inevitably feel at seeing his brother-men unconscious of their sin and danger, so no fiction is supposed as between God and Christ. But he considers that God, having seen the perfection of repentance in Jesus, accepts the repentance of man, imperfect as it is, because it is in kind the same as that of Jesus, and is the germ of that feeling of which his is the perfect flower; in this sense, and only in this sense, is the repentance of man accepted "for Christ's sake." He considers that men must share in the mind of Christ as towards God and towards sin, in order to be benefited by the work of Christ, and that each man must thus actually take part in the work of atonement. The sufferings of Jesus he regards as necessary in order to test the reality of the life of sonship towards God, and brotherhood towards men, which he came to earth to exemplify. I trust I have done no injustice in this short summary to a very able and thoughtful book, which presents, perhaps, the only view of the Atonement compatible with the love and the justice of God; and this only, of course, if the idea of any atonement can fairly be said to be consistent with justice. The merits of this view are practically that this work of Jesus is not an "atonement" in the theological sense at all. The defects of Campbell's book are inseparable from his creed, as he argues from a belief in the deity of Jesus, from an unconscious limitation of God's knowledge (as though God did not understand man till he was revealed to him by Jesus) and from a wrong conception of the punishment due to sin. I said, at starting, that the Atonement was the raison d'être of Christianity, and, in conclusion, I would challenge all thoughtful men and women to say whether good cause has or has not been shown for rejecting this pillar "of the faith." The Atonement has but to be studied in order to be rejected. The difficulty is to persuade people to think about their creed, Yet the question of this doctrine must be faced and answered. "I have too much faith in the common sense and justice of Englishmen when once awakened to face any question fairly, to doubt what that answer will be."