It would be tedious to note the various views that have prevailed among theologians to the present day. Some hold that the offering was made to God to satisfy divine justice; others hold that it was a commercial transaction—so much blood for so many souls; and still others regard the whole as a governmental display to impress the world with a sense of the hatefulness of sin. Calvinists seem to think that the atonement was only made for the elect, but that the blood of Christ had sufficient merit to save the whole world. Roman Catholics hold that it is the literal, material blood of Christ that saves the sinner, and hence their extreme belief in the dogma of _transubstantiation_, the real body and blood of Jesus being offered in the sacrifice of the Mass, and taken by the penitent in the Holy Communion. Protestants generally hold to a sort of consubstantiation—a sort of real presence in the sacrament; while persons of intelligence profess to believe that this whole theory of blood-salvation is only to be accepted in a figurative sense. The fact is, that the whole scheme of vicarious atonement is an ancient superstition, though taught in the New Testament, and is absurd and unphilosophical, and false in principle and in practice, as we shall hereafter show. We leave altogether out of view the logical conclusion that if the blood shed by Jesus was the blood of a man, it could have had no more efficacy than the blood of any other human being, and that if the blood shed was the blood of a God, the very mention of the thought is absurd and blasphemous in the extreme. It is nonsense to say that it was the union of the divine with the human nature that gave the blood of Christ its peculiar efficacy—that the altar sanctifies the gift for if the blood was changed by the man being united with the God, it was not human blood, but the blood of a divine man. Now, there is no evidence that the blood of Jesus (supposing that he was crucified) differed in its essential qualities from other human blood. If analyzed by the chemist, it would have been found to contain only the constituent particles which belong to human blood. The white and red corpuscles and other chemical properties would have been found in it. _The dogma of blood-salvation as held by Romanists is cannibalism, pure and simple, and as held by Protestants it is sheer superstition, without one grain of reason to support it._ It has no analogy in nature, nor in the philosophy of legal jurisprudence as held and practised by the most enlightened nations of the world.