The reason of this difference is easily perceived. Debts are transferable; but crimes are not. A third person may cancel the one; but he can only obliterate the _effects_ of the other; the _desert_ of the criminal remains. The _debtor_ is accountable to his creditor as a _private_ individual, who has power to accept of a surety, or if he please, to remit the whole, without any satisfaction. In the one case he would be just; in the other merciful: but no place is afforded by either of them for the _combination_ of justice and mercy in the same proceeding. The _criminal_, on the other hand, is amenable to the magistrate, or to the head of a family, as a _public_ person, and who, especially if the offence be capital, cannot remit the punishment without invading law and justice, nor in the ordinary discharge of his office, admit of a third person to stand in his place. In extraordinary cases, however, extraordinary expedients are resorted to. A satisfaction may be made to law and justice, as to the _spirit_ of them, while the _letter_ is dispensed with. The well-known story of Zaleucus, the Grecian law-giver, who consented to lose one of his eyes to spare one of his son’s eyes, who by transgressing the law had subjected himself to the loss of both, is an example. Here, as far as it went, _justice and mercy were combined_ in the same act: and had the satisfaction been much fuller than it was, so full that the authority of the law, instead of being weakened, should have been abundantly magnified and honoured, still it had been _perfectly consistent with free forgiveness_. Finally: In the case of the debtor, satisfaction being once accepted, justice _requires_ his complete discharge: but in that of the criminal, where satisfaction is made to the wounded honour of the law, and the authority of the lawgiver, justice, though it _admits_ of his discharge, yet no otherwise _requires_ it than as it may have been matter of promise to the substitute. I do not mean to say that cases of this sort afford a competent representation of redemption by Christ. That is a work which not only ranks with extraordinary interpositions, but which has no parallel: it is a work of God, which leaves all the petty concerns of mortals infinitely behind it. All that comparisons can do, is to give us some idea of the _principle_ on which it proceeds. If the following passage in our admired _Milton_ were considered as the language of the law of innocence, it would be inaccurate— “——Man disobeying, He with his whole posterity must die: Die he, or justice must; unless for him Some other able, and as willing, pay The rigid satisfaction, death for death.”