Page Certain Sacrificial Rites; particularly, the Offering and The Nature and Design of a Sacred Type. Which of the Proofs that the Jews considered their Sacrifices as having respect to God, and that the Heathens believed their Sacri- That Piacular Victims, by a Vicarious Punishment, expiated those Sins on Account of which they were sacrificed, shown to have been, the Opinion of the ancient Christians and Jews, Page The general Business of Christ's Priesthood; the Order to The Oblation by which Christ presented himself to God in Heaven, as a Piacular Victim previously slain for our Sins. Arguments to show that Christ did this in order to commend to God both Us and our Services in general, INTRODUCTION. SOME years ago, in a conversation with that very venerable prelate John Lord Bishop of Rochester, respecting the Sacrifice of Christ, I recited my opinion on that subject from a sermon which I had preached a great while before. When I had finished reading it, the Right Reverend Father, whose authority and judgment both had considerable weight with me, immediately advised me to a more extended discussion in Latin, of those points which I had touched on in a brief and cursory manner in my English discourse. As soon as I had undertaken it, I considered that my first task must be an attentive examination of the principal Socinian writers, with whom I perceived my controversy would chiefly lie. Whoever peruses their works will find them to have formed such notions of the death of Jesus Christ, and of his sacrifice which they always separate from his death, that they have expressly denied every idea of vicarious suffering to the former, and supposed that no favour with God is obtained for us by the latter; concluding that though the influence of his death may in some respect extend to God, yet the efficacy of his sacrifice terminates upon men. And these sentiments are still maintained by all the followers of Socinus. B |