Why should we atone for our sins?

Salvation is the keystone to happiness.

Salvation is that elevating tendency, which lessens the hold of evil inclinations, and plants, in its stead, right precepts, which germinate within the sanctum of each individual breast.

An ideal is a tendency.

Salvation is overcoming past conditions by those, which are better, forming and transforming anew, so that each step in advance becomes salvation to its predecessor, regenerating by a better understanding of what duty requires and subjecting the faculties to a high moral dictation of right. But custom, and so-called divine law, have made salvation to be a saving ordinance through our Lord Jesus Christ.

What an idea to suppose that upon the head of another depends the redemption of what concerns nobody, but yourself! Why should you seek to cast upon another that which is to you a bone of contention? Had I done wrong, would it not be my duty to repair that wrong? Then, what has a third person to do with the injury inflicted or absolved? Why should you start at the idea of atoning for your own sins?

Can you not rise by strength of intellect to become master of your own wrongs?―or must you cast them upon another, expecting to be cleansed from worldly ambition, pride, and all vice connected with your earth life, indulging in the idea that this can take place at any time before the spirit leaves the body? 

What an opportunity it presents, for continuing in sin, and practicing that, for which you expect him to atone, baseness of too low a character, for you to make the least attempt to overcome.

Instructive Communications from Spirit Life