"priest," "altar," with a prejudice. They were once God's ordinance. Are they so

still?

The Lord's Supper is manifestly a modification of the ancient prospective sacrificial system, for the edification of the Church in retrospect. In what particulars, as regards directions actually recorded, does the institution given under Mount Sinai differ from the Saviour's institution? In both the Saviour is typified by food at a meal. But in the latter there is no direction as to an "offering;" neither is the Church nor the individual instructed to "present" the bread and the wine before God, as under the former sacrificial system. There is no direction as to animal food; indeed, practically it is prohibited. There is, therefore, no ritual of blood. There is no command to confess sins in connection with an offering, as when under the older dispensation the offerer laid his hand on the head of the victim. There is no command to burn a portion of the food in the sacred fire; no sacred fire is vouchsafed. Hence no altar, of the same character as the Jewish altar, is required; nor is one mentioned by the Saviour. There is no mention made of a priest; those who were commanded to perpetuate the ordinance were not called cohens by Christ, but "apostles," missionaries. Nearly all the actual ancient sacrificial duties, both of priest and people, were practically abrogated at the institution of the Lord's Supper, the only point authoritatively preserved being the partaking of the minchah with wine. The Lord's Supper, then, in that it is a typical feast, a part of the ancient feast, picturing the blessed Redeemer in his sacrifice for the life of the world-"This is my body, which is given for you; "This is my blood of the new covenant"-has most distinctly a sacrificial aspect; but it is denuded of almost all the observances peculiar to the ancient sacrificial feast. It points to the same offering as the old-world sacrifices, and by the same method, but accompanied, as it is apparently intended to be, with much less elaborate circumstance. An adaptation, however, of the more ancient sacrificial system it most manifestly is; such an adaptation as seemed to him, who is the All-wise, best fitted for the edification of the future Church.

But is it not evident that, by the method of our Saviour's institution, many details were left to be otherwise determined? Nothing can be more distinct than the matter, the form, and the intention of the Lord's Supper; but there is no direction as to the how, the when, or the where. Under the Mosaic dispensation every, the most minute, particular was provided for by Divine ordinance. Time, place, person, and manner are most exhaustively described. But our Saviour did not in like manner appoint the priest, the vestments, the accompaniments, the ritual of the Holy Meal. The commission, "Do this in remembrance of me," was given to the sacred society of apostles, or missionaries, who afterwards received that further commission, "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature." They, therefore, were the first celebrants; but their exact method of procedure has not been handed down to us. They were inspired men; had they subsequently any Divine directions? All we know on this matter is found in 1 Cor. xi. Were the apostles left to their private judgments as to the arrangements necessary for the suitable celebration of the Lord's Supper? or were they divinely directed? We cannot know. But we do know that very early in the history of the Church the Lord's Supper was separated from the agapa, and administered at a special service; that at this service there were customs which seem to be a modified revival of the customs of the ancient sacrificial system, notably the confession of sins by the congregation, and the public declaration of God's acceptance on repentance. It could not have escaped the early Christians, especially the Jewish converts, that the Lord's Supper (established, too, as it had been, during the observance of the most significant and important of the Jewish sacrificial feasts) was a

retrospective adaptation of the once prospective sacrifice. We cannot wonder, therefore-though we know not the exact customs of the apostles themselves—that we should early read of the Christian sacrifice, the Christian priest, the Christian altar. The "elements" of the feast were a continuation of the "meat offering," the minchah, part of every former sacrifice; the presbyter, elder, or president, who served at the table, though not a priest of the Aaronic line, yet might well be called, in a certain though modified sense, a priest; and the table at which he served, though no longer the seat of the sacred fire, or sprinkled with blood, was to the Christian what the altar had been to the Jew-that from which he fed on the picture of Christ. And I cannot doubt, on a candid examination of the expression, though I once held to the contrary, that there is a reference to the table of the Lord's Supper in Heb. xiii. 10, "We (Christians) have an altar, whereof they have no right to eat which serve the tabernacle." True it is that Christ's divinity is the actual altar of the universe, which upheld, sustained, and sanctified the humanity of Jesus in his sacrifice of himself; yet, as the Jewish altar was that which held the picture of the Sacrifice to come, and from which the Jew ate the emblematic feast, so the holy table from which we Christians feed in memory of Christ's death, is, in a parallel though modified sense, an altar. To refuse to the Christian Church, then, the very names of sacrifice, priest, and altar would seem almost to be to deny the propriety and solemnity of the words under the earlier dispensation, and to interfere materially with our understanding the real significance of our Saviour's institution as an adaptation of the divinely appointed sacrificial system to the Christian dispensation.

Yet as different views may, no doubt, lawfully be taken as to the intention of our blessed Saviour's silence at the moment of the institution of the Lord's Supper, we should surely allow that latitude of thought to others who, like ourselves, love the Lord Jesus in sincerity.

What is the error that has grown up about the words "sacrifice," "priest," and "altar"? It is idolatry; that is, making the picture more than a picture. When the Jew believed that the blood of bulls and of goats could take away sin, he perverted the truth and the ordinance of God; and when the Christian holds that there is in the Lord's Supper a propitiatory sacrifice for the quick and the dead for the remission of sins, he equally abuses the truth of God and the beauty of the ordinance. It is the confounding of the inward spiritual grace in the sacraments with the rite itself that has been at the root of the chief of the religious errors of mankind. The inward spiritual grace is the apprehension and appropriation by the intelligence and the affections of that which the outward observance typifies, and therefore to the faithful the actual reception of its benefit; and the observance itself, when rightly understood, becomes an instrument in arousing that apprehension, as well as a pledge and means, by virtue of its institution, of our receiving that grace. But to make a sacrament an opus operatum, to convert the image into that which it represents, is idolatry. It is this astounding, though truly human, error that plunged the ancient world into heathenism, the Jewish world into Pharisaism, and the Christian world into what is now commonly called Popery. The fall of the intelligence when the floods of superstition are let in upon the soul, is great indeed; so that a man can even hold the blasphemous doctrine that the blessed Redeemer can become incarnate in the sacramental elements of bread and wine in the hands of the priest, and that it is necessary for salvation that the body, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ should be digested in the human stomach. This is a fall sorer than any fall on record of the Jews; however much we may pity their unbelief, we have no evidence that any Jew ever taught that every Passover lamb and every victim brought to the altar was God incarnate; and yet, if it be true

of the Christian element of sacrifice, it must have been true of the Jewish. We cannot wonder at the reformers of the English Church expunging the word “altar" from the Prayer-book, when we know how the idea of the Christian altar was perverted to serve the purposes of the grossest idolatry. But in meeting the doctrinal errors that have entwined themselves, like Laocoon's snakes, around the Christian altar, it is surely not necessary for us to blind ourselves to the fact that our Saviour did perpetuate for the Church the principle and method of the ancient sacrificial feast; and that, therefore, in some sense at least, we have, as the Church seems from very early times to have expressed herself, a sacrifice, a priest, and an altar; always remembering that, in reference to sacrifice, that sense, as defined by St. Chrysostom and others in the early Church, who speak of the Eucharist as a sacrifice, is that it is a "commemoration of a sacrifice" (vide St. Chrysostom on Heb. x. 9).

The points to be kept, then, constantly and prominently before the Church are. first, that we must not misinterpret the character of the Jewish sacrifice itself; second, that we must maintain, as a truth for all time, that an image of a thing cannot be the thing itself; and third, that as the Jewish sacrifice was not truly in itself propitiatory, but only the figure and pledge of propitiation and spiritual life, so there is no propitiation, but only a figure and pledge of the propitiatory and life-giving office of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. And then we need not fear to use the Old Testament terms, as in one instance appears to me to have been done in the Epistle to the Hebrews, for designedly parallel Christian ordinances.

And the conclusion of the whole matter seems to be, that the Church still has, in a reasonable though modified sense, not an offering for sin, but still a sacrifice, which the Church of England calls a "sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving."

THE LEVITICAL SACRIFICES LITERALLY CONSIDERED.

BY THE

REV. PROFESSOR ALFRED CAVE, B.A.

THAT man of steel, as he was called, Origen, the greatest of the great Fathers of Alexandria, had, to judge from his Eclogues and his Homilies on Leviticus, a very poor opinion of the literal interpretation of the ritualistic sections of the Book of the Law. The circumstantial and realistic observances of the Jew, based upon an unquestioning acceptance of the Levitical injunctions, were considered by Origen both inappropriate and useless. Nay, the literal interpretation of this diversified rubric made, he thought, cavillers and infidels; for it led some, to use his own words, to "despise the Law as a vile thing unworthy of the Creator," and others to "impiously condemn the Creator himself who could ordain such vile commands." Hence his so-called spiritual sense— a gross misnomer, unless the spiritual is synonymous with the imaginative-was Origen's great panacea for all the apparent inanities of the sacred records, the infallible harmonizer of all its seeming contradictions. And his talented lead has, alas! been followed by only too many eminent successors. It was but an application of the same method of forcibly squaring Law with Gospel, when in the next age such moulders of opinion as Augustine and Ambrose descended—the former to expound in his treatise, ‘De Isaak et Anima,' the simple fact of Rebekah's filling her pitcher at the well, as “the soul descending to the fountain of wisdom to draw the discipline of pure knowledge," and the latter to find a reference in circumcision to the resurrection of Christ, quæ desideria carnalia aufert. Even when the reign of Augustine in Biblical hermeneutics gave way before the influence of that delicate exegete, Isidore of Hispala, whose work, 'De Allegoriis,' became a type of scriptural exposition in the Middle Ages, it was virtually the same allegorizing principle which was advocated and exemplified. Nor was the case different at the Reformation. When, at that epoch, the close study of Scripture became a vital necessity for the consolidation of belief, the writings of Melancthon and Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, abundantly testify to the predominant fondness for "spiritualizing;" whilst the subsequent history of the Lutheran and Reformed Churches further witnesses to the potency of these revered leaders, until spiritualizing blossomed into such amusing, if not appalling, extravagances as are to be found in Coccejus and his school. To Lund, for example, Aaron's rod that budded was a type of the rod out of the stem of Jesse; its supernatural greenness was a type of Christ's supernatural conception; the mystery of its sprouting a type of the mystery of the birth of the Son of the Virgin; the night of its blossoming was a type of the night in which the miraculous birth of Christ occurred; there were three things on the rod, after the miracle, which were not there before leaves, flowers, and fruits, whereby the threefold work of the Redeemer is prefigured; and, not to linger further upon this illustration, in the preservation of the rod within the holy of holies we have foreshadowed, he supposed, the

LEVITICUS.

C

passing of the risen Christ into the heavens, there to await the advent of his elect.1 Could exegetical caprice go further?

That this "spiritualizing" method of interpretation has fallen somewhat into disrepute is due to an unexpected source of enlightenment. "It is an ill wind that blows no one good," and a more vivid conception of the historical character of the Old Testament has been one of the good things which the ill wind of rationalism, with its microscopic and carping criticism of the letter, has blown to the Christian Church. When the rationalists frigidly maintained that the Old Testament was but a collection of the historical records of Judaism, to be regarded in the same light as a collection of the archives of Greece say, or Rome, the Church could at least cheerfully accept one part of the contention, and believe that the Old Testament was a historical record. Thus the Old Testament came to be studied for itself, as well as for its connection with the New. Thus the Old Testament came to be considered at least as worthy of examination for its own sake, and apart from its relation to Christianity, as the sacred books of Mahomet or Zoroaster, Kakya-Mouni or Buddha. In fact, it is now readily acknowledged that the most repulsive details of the ceremonial law, to say nothing of the splendid eloquence of the prophets, are facts in religious history deserving of close investigation as such. Largely thanks to the indirect influence of the rationalistic movement, the Jews are now seen to have had a distinctive religion of contemporary as well as prospective value.

To trace the outline of that Old Testament faith, to authenticate the credibility and the historical character of its records, to contrast that faith with the other religions of the world, to demonstrate its advance upon the creeds of heathendom and towards the creed of Christ,-such a task of elucidation, comparison, and defence is one of the pressing needs of our day, to be satisfied only by the use of all modern appliances, and in view of all modern scholarship. One prominent phase of that Old Testament religion is that of Mosaism, or the religion of the Hebrews as far as it can be deduced from the Pentateuch. Further, of Mosaism the Levitical sacrifices form no unimportant section. To study the nature and significance of these Levitical sacrifices, as they are in themselves, rather than in their connection with Christianity, is the aim of this introduction. In other words, our purpose is to prosecute the literal interpretation of the injunctions of the Law which bear upon these sacrifices, and to see whither such interpretation will conduct us. The Levitical sacrifices will approve themselves a religious cultus not unworthy to be designated Divine.

The course which will be pursued is as follows. A classification of the Levitical sacrifices will first be given. Next, some principles will be deduced from the letter of Scripture by which the comprehension of the Levitical sacrifices will be facilitated. Thirdly, an application will be made of the principles thus deduced to the elucidation of the entire scheme of the Levitical sacrifices. Fourthly, the relation of this sacrificial worship to that of the patriarchal age will be pointed out. Fifthly, the relation of this sacrificial worship to the sacrificial views of the New Testament will call for some remark. And lastly, a few words may be bestowed upon the bibliography of the subject.

And at this point the writer may advisedly call attention to the different standpoint he here assumes to that occupied in his work upon 'The Scriptural Doctrine of Sacrifice.' To put that standpoint briefly, he would say that, whereas his view of the Jewish sacrifices was previously more analytic, he aims in this introduction at a synthesis, at building up into a consistent whole the numerous details of the Mosaic ritual, and dis

'Lundius, 'Die alten judischen Heiligthümer, Gottesdienste und Gewohnheiten dargestellet.' Hamburg, 1695, 1698, 1704, 1712; edited and annotated by Wolf, in a new edition, issued in 1738.