debt paid and cancelled. The conscience of the worshipper under the Law could never have been purged from guilt, for the light of nature would teach him that his sacrifices were ineffectual to this end, and the Law by its withholding the grant of plenary remission would but confirm the painful misgiving. To obliterate completely and for

• The language used in reference to the sacrifices of the day of atonement may be thought to imply even more than the view above taken ascribes to them, and to have conveyed to the Israelite an assurance of complete remission. "On that day shall the priest make an atonement for you, to cleanse you, that ye may be clean from all your sins before the Lord," Levit. xvi. 30. To the present writer it does not appear that much stress can be laid on the absence of a promise of forgiveness throughout this chapter, (see Dr. Hawkins's Sermon &c. p. 182.), for it seems difficult to draw a distinction between the promise of a cleansing from sin and of forgiveness (in the Old Testament sense); but there were two circumstances which must, it should seem, have impressed on the reflecting Israelite the inherent imperfection of these atonements: first, that the same phrase of atonement and cleansing was applied to the tabernacle and altar (v. 20.); and secondly, that the sacrifices were to be repeated annually. It is on this latter point that the Epistle to the Hebrews principally insists in its exposition of the inferiority of the Mosaic sacrifices to that of Christ. (See c. x. 1—14.) That the former should have possessed the real, though limited, efficacy, ascribed to them in the text, need occasion no difficulty to the Christian, who believes that the Mosaic atonements were constructed with a reference to Christ and His work, and therefore, from that connexion, may have been invested with a virtue not naturally belonging to them. To God the sacrifice of Christ was always present, and therefore in His sight, the Old Testament substitute for it

ever the condemning record, and for the spirit of bondage to impart the consciousness of forgiveness, is the prerogative of the greater sacrifice offered on Calvary, to which the legal appointments, as we believe, bore a typical reference, and the correspondence of which with its typical adumbration it will be my endeavour in the succeeding Lecture to demonstrate.

I conclude with one remark. We know what the general character of heathen sacrificial systems was; their cruelty, their frivolity, their unutterable pollutions. Some true and just ideas appear struggling for utterance under the superincumbent load of superstition and impurity. From the chief seat of these corruptions an infant people goes forth into the desert, and suddenly appears settled under a religious polity, which, while embodying the true and just utterances of human nature, is entirely exempt from the impurities of surrounding modes of worship. No human victims bleed on the Jewish altars; no vile debaucheries stain the tabernacle; no disgusting exhibitions defile the moral sense. Human priests and animal sacrifices indeed are there, because the religion is but pre

possessed a real atoning power; to the Jew, to whom the typical relation was not revealed, or revealed imperfectly, his sacrifices must have appeared in every way defective, and could never have made the conscience perfect. But the atoning power of them was not made dependent on the amount of knowledge possessed by the offerer, but on the simplicity of his faith and obedience.

paratory; but the whole system proclaims the holiness of God, and the necessity of holiness in those who would worship Him. What explanation are we to give of so remarkable, so isolated, a phenomenon in the history of the world? If we suppose the Mosaic religion to be of divine origin, the fact is accounted for; to infidelity it must ever appear inexplicable.

LECTURE IV.

HEB. X. 12.

But this Man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins, for ever sat down on the right hand of God.

To discover the symbolical import of the Mosaic sacrificial system it is not necessary to call in the aid of the New Testament; the Law, under this aspect, sufficiently declares its own meaning. We may, and I think should, conduct the interpretation of the Mosaic symbols on the same principles on which we should endeavour to unfold the ideas embodied in any other symbolical religion of antiquity; that is, dismissing from our view any ulterior, or typical, references, we should simply inquire what doctrines the religion aimed at representing under symbol to those by whom it was constructed, or upon whom it was imposed. We thus avoid any suspicion of introducing from the New Testament ideas which do not properly belong to the Old, of forcing the latter to speak a language which is really the language of the Gospel. Especially is this mode of treating the