And this leads us to consider another error, or rather another form of the same error. Nothing is more common than to hear the doctrine of Atonement stated as if the work of Christ consisted in His endurance of our punishment in order that we might not endure it. This view of the doctrine leads to the objections--perhaps the commonest of all the difficulties found in what men take for Christianity--that the punishment of the innocent instead of the guilty is unjust, and that punishment cannot be borne by anyone but the sinner. We have seen that the real vicariousness of our Lord's work lay in the offering of the perfect sacrifice: the theory we are now considering holds, on the contrary, that it lay in the substitution of His punishment for ours. A partial truth is contained in this theory; for our Lord did endure sufferings, and, as has been already said, they were the very sufferings which are, in sinners, the penalties of sin. But as a simple matter of fact and experience, the sufferings and the pains of death which He endured have not been remitted to us; and that which is remitted, the eternal penalty of alienation from God, was not, could not be endured by Him. For alienation from God is, essentially, a state of sin; it is sin, regarded both in its origin and in its necessary result. It could not, therefore, be borne by Christ, 'in Whom was no sin,' between Whom and the Father was no alienation. Attempts have been made to establish a quantitative relation between our Lord's sufferings and the punishment which is thereby remitted to us, to prove that the eternal nature of the Sufferer made His death equivalent to eternal punishment. But even if such attempts, in so mysterious a region, could succeed, it would be vain to establish a quantitative equivalence where there is no qualitative relation. Eternal punishment is 'eternal sin[243],' and as such could never be endured by the sinless Son of God.