But Barbour could not dismiss his errors quite so readily. Clearly rattled by his latest failure, he went back to the drawing board and radically revised, not just his date-setting, but his entire approach to Christianity. Among the casualties of his doctrinal purge was “substitution”—the notion that Christ’s death was required as a vicarious atonement for the sin of mankind. Barbour was unequivocal in divorcing himself from this teaching in an article of the August 1878 issue of Herald of the Morning that would be identified today as surprisingly atheist in tone. “The doctrine of
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