[Note 26, Chapter One, in print version]
In George Eliot's "Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming." which first appeared in the 1855 Westminster Review , she took this clergyman to task for such ahistorical views:
According to Dr. Cumming, Abel had so clear an idea of the Incarnation and Atonement, that when he offered his sacrifice "he must have said, 'I feel myself a guilty sinner. and that in myself I cannot meet thee alive; I lay on thine altar this victim, and I shed its blood as my testimony that mine should be shed; and I look for forgiveness and undeserved mercy through Him who is to bruise the serpent's head, and whose atonement this typifies.'"
Print version published 1980; web version 1998