Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. EMBARRASSMENTS IN A HUMAN GOVERNMENT FROM THE WANT OF AN ATONEMENT. All governments, in the administration of the laws, experience such difficulties as are proposed to be remedied by an atonement. Whether those difficulties would be removed by such a device as that of the atonement is a fair question for consideration; but it will be admitted, on the slightest consideration of the subject, that the difficulties which are proposed to be remedied by an atonement actually exist in all forms of human administration, and that, in spite of any arrangement which can be made by human wisdom, they create constant embarrassment. It is important, in order to prepare the way for the consideration of the doctrine of the atonement, to show what those difficulties are, and what devices have been resorted to in order to remove them. I. The embarrassments which are felt may be specified under four heads:? 1. The first arises from the difficulty in respect to the magistrate, the impossibility of his cherishing and carrying out as a magistrate the feelings which he is permitted and required to cherish as a man. As a man, in his private transactions, he can fullycarry out the promptings of humanity and the principle of religion in forgiving an offence; as a magistrate, appointed to administer and execute the laws, these feelings are never to be indulged. There springs up a conflict between the promptings of his nature and the demands of duty; and one or the other of these must be suppressed if he extends pardon to the guilty. The difficulty consists in making the private virtues of the man harmonize with the duties of the magistrate, for there are feelings of our nature which require us to show mercy to the guilty, and it is universally regarded as a virtue for one who has…
