To this view, a high sense of the personal dignity of Jesus was quite essential; and therefore I had always felt a great repugnance for Mr.
Belsham, Dr.Priestley, and the Unitarians of that school, though I had not read a line of their writings.
A more intimate familiarity with St.Paul and an anxious harmonizing of my very words to the Scripture, led me on into a deviation from the popular creed, of the full importance of which I was not for some time aware.

I perceived that it is not the _agonies_ of mind or body endured by Christ, which in the Scriptures are said to take away sin, but his "death," his "laying down his life," or sometimes even his _resurrection_.

I gradually became convinced, that when his "suffering," or more especially his "blood," is emphatically spoken of, nothing is meant but his _violent death_.

In the Epistle to the Hebrews, where the analogy of Sacrifice is so pressed, we see that the pains which Jesus bore were in order that he might "learn obedience," but our redemption is effected by his dying as a voluntary victim: in which, death by bloodshed, not pain, is the cardinal point.

So too the Paschal lamb (to which, though not properly a sacrifice, the dying Christ is compared by Paul) was not roasted alive, or otherwise put to slow torment, but was simply killed.