WJ the evolutionist, vs. “vicarious salvation”

"On June 16, the day before the last lecture, James sat down in Edinburgh with the whole scheme of his project in his head and wrote a long letter to Henry Rankin, his Christian correspondent, who had been an important interlocutor—and representative of at least half of his ideal audience—all along. He acknowledged Rankin's Christian beliefs, but went on to say,

"I believe myself to be (probably) permanently incapable of believing the Christian system of vicarious salvation, and wedded to a more continuously evolutionary mode of thought."

The parenthetical "probably" is deeply characteristic. James had a genius for isolating himself in a middle position. He could explain the appeal of religion to people who thought of themselves as unbelievers, and he could explain to the religious how the entire subject could be grasped and accepted as processes that took place in the human mind, broadly conceived—yet he is too religious for the unbelievers and not religious enough for the believers."

— William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert D. Richardson
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