Did Jesus Redeem Mankind? — Page 25
? 18 not. He said there was no such undertaking as either one of them could and the other one could not do. Then I asked him what all this fuss meant: that if two gods sat idle, it really became great predicament that they could do a job but were wasting their time, and if all three jointly undertook a business, while each one could do it equally well, it looked something mad. He lost his equanimity and remarked that vicarious atonement constituted the basis of Christianity and that one understood Trinity only after he believed in Christianity. I observed that his theory led from one hypothesis to another in that one could not believe until one understood Trinity, and one could not understand Trinity until one believed and that as such, all logic rejected this as an impossible thing. He begged to be excused and wanted the talk to be confined only to the theory of vicarious atonement. The theory of vicarious atonement is deeply connected with the Trinity. If the former is proved to be untenable, the latter falls to the ground. Since this belief is polytheistic, the Divine attribute of knowledge has, therefore, been stressed explicitly in this context. The Promised Messiah (peace be on him) has in his books, discussed threadbare the point that if one is endowed with perfect knowledge of a thing, one could certainly make it. If, for instance, a man knows that a house can be built by laying bricks together in a certain order, he can be enabled to build one therewith. Or, if one knew