For God has no more given us our reason to _settle_ the nature of an atonement for sin; or to find out what can, or cannot, take away its guilt, than he has given us _senses_ and _appetites_ to state the nature, or discover the ingredients of future happiness. And he who rejects the _atonement_ for sins made by the Son of God, as _needless_, because he cannot prove it to be _necessary_, is as extravagant, as he that should deny that God created him by his _only Son_, because he did not remember it. For our memory is as proper a faculty to tell us, whether God at first created us, by his only Son, as our _reason_ is to tell us, whether we ought to be restored to God, with, or without the mediation of Jesus Christ. When therefore this writer says, _Can any thing be more evident, than that if doing evil be the only cause of God’s displeasure, the ceasing to do evil, must take away that displeasure?_¹ ¹ Page 4. * Just as if he had said, if conversing with a _leper_ has been the only cause of a man’s getting a _leprosy_, must not departing from him, be the removal of the _leprosy_? For if any one, guessing at the _guilt_ of sin, and its _effects_ on the soul, should compare it to a _leprosy_ in the body, he can no more say, that he has reached its _real, internal_ evil, than he, that comparing the happiness of heaven to a crown of glory, can be said to have described its real happiness. This _writer_ has no occasion to appeal to the nature of things, if he can be thus certain about things, whose nature is not only obscure, but _impossible_ to be known. For it is as impossible for him to know the _guilt_ and _effects_ of sin, as to know the shape of an angel. It is as impossible to know by the mere light of reason, what God’s _displeasure_ at sin is, what _separation_ from sinners it implies, or how it _obliges_ God to deal with them; as to know what the internal essence of God is. Our author therefore has here found the utmost degree of evidence, where it was _impossible_ for him to have the _smallest degree_ of knowledge. If a man, having _murdered_ twenty of his fellow-creatures, should afterward be sorry for it, and wish that he had a power to bring them to life again, or to create others in their stead, would his ceasing to kill, and wishing he had a power to create others in their stead, put him just in the _same state_ with God, as if he had never murdered a man in his life? But unless this can be said, it cannot be said that repentance is sufficient to put a man in the _same state_, as if he never had sinned. The writer has two more objections against the atonement for sin, made by Jesus Christ. _First_, as it is an _human sacrifice, which nature itself abhors_: and which was looked upon as the great abomination of idolatrous _Pagan_ worship.