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CHAPTER V.
REDEMPTION. " On the knowledge and acknowledgment of God depends the salvation of every one."-Swedenborg.
" This great, unborn, undecaying, immortal, fearless soul is Brahman : Brahman is verily fearless : he who thus knows, becomes the fearless Brahman."-Bri. Up. IV. 4. 25.
In a community dominated by deistic thought, which separates God and man by an impassable gulf, it is not surprising that the conception of salvation should be no broader, or fuller, than that of forgiveness of sin by the favour of some one nearer and dearer to the Lord than man. The Christian conception of salvation is typical of this form of belief. Whatever it may be taken to represent, whether the purchase of God's favour, by the suffering and death of Christ, or the ransom and deliverance of sinners from the bondage of sin and the consequent liability to punishment for the violation of the laws of God by the atonement of Jesus, the idea of redemption in the modern Christian Church does not aspire higher than the securing of heaven for man, by the favour, compassion and mercy of an agency outside his own self, and, consequently, not only leaves him as finite, and limited, and dependent on the will of another, as ever, but is, also, utterly incompatible with the true sense of the words 'salvation' and 'redemption,' employed to give it expression. If the blood of Jesus, which was
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