By mid-1878, Brother Russell had, for about a year and a half, been an assistant editor of the magazine Herald of the Morning, of which N. H. Barbour was principal editor. But when Barbour, in the August 1878 issue of their magazine, belittled the Scriptural teaching of the ransom, Russell responded with a vigorous defense of that vital Bible truth.

Under the heading “The Atonement,” Barbour had illustrated how he felt about the teaching, saying: “I say to my boy, or to one of the servants, when James bites his sister, you catch a fly, stick a pin through its body and impale it to the wall, and I’ll forgive James. This illustrates the doctrine of substitution.” Though professing to believe in the ransom, Barbour referred to the idea that Christ by his death paid the penalty for sin for the offspring of Adam as being “unscriptural, and obnoxious to all our ideas of justice.”h

In the very next issue of Herald of the Morning (September 1878), Brother Russell took strong exception to what Barbour had written. Russell analyzed what the Scriptures really say and their consistency with “the perfection of [God’s] justice, and finally his great mercy and love” as expressed by means of the ransom provision. (1 Cor. 15:3; 2 Cor. 5:18, 19; 1 Pet. 2:24; 3:18; 1 John 2:2) By the following spring, after repeated efforts to help Barbour to see things Scripturally, Russell withdrew his support from the Herald; and as of the issue of June 1879, his name no longer appeared as an assistant editor of that publication.