4. Dr. Bushnell is at fault in the most essential features of his theory of the sacrificial system and its symbolic import.

We say the most essential features of this theory-for with very many of his positions we heartily concur. We agree with him that the sacrificial system is natural to all rude nations, and that whether it originally sprung from divine institution or not, it could not have been accepted unless it satisfied a want in man's nature, and spoke directly to his heart. What this natural import is, should be gathered not from any possible accommodation of it to the work of Christ, or any typical foreshadowing which was found to be convenient or thought to be desirable, and therefore was assumed to be real. The sacrificial system could not serve as a system of types, unless it had a primary and obvious import of its own, which would qualify it to prefigure a spiritual reality; nor will the reasoning from any correspondence or fulfillment hold unless the system to be fulfilled had an import which corresponded in part to that which fulfilled it. Moreover, we concede that sacrifices, even sacrifices involving death, were used on occasions of thanksgiving and consecration, as well as those of penitence and the deprecation of evil. We hold with him that these acts of sacrifice constituted a symbolic liturgy which was used on every occasion, and was fitted to serve as the medium of every form of feeling and every attitude of worship. It was required by and for a people who had "not yet come to the age of reflection. They know nothing about piety or religious experience, as reflectively defined, preached, tested by words. * Of course they are religious beings, guilty beings, but these deep ground-truths of their nature work out in them, from a point back of their distinctive consciousness; felt only as disturbances, not discovered mentally in their philosophic nature and reality. Now to manage such a people and train them towards himself, God puts them in a drill of action, works upon them by a transactional liturgy, and expects, by that means, to generate in them an implicit faith, sentiment, piety," &c., &c. All this we hold to be true and important. We know no theologian whose opinion is worthy of respect who would not assent to all these propositions.

*

From these general views, the author proceeds to lay down

what he considers the starting point or key-note to the entire system. "It begins at a point," he says, "or base note of action, that, so far as I can recollect, is wholly unknown to the cultus, or the sacrifices of any heathen religion. Moving on results of purity or purification from sin, it supposes impurity, and lays this down as a fundamental figure, in what may be called the footing of ceremonial uncleanliness. Then the problem is to cleanse or hallow the unclean." This, and nothing besides, Dr. Bushnell thinks to be indicated by the Mosaic ceremonial and the sacrificial system. In other words, lustration or ceremonial cleansing, as symbolizing inward purity, is "the fundamental figure" which exhausts the entire import of this system. When ceremonies are employed to make pure that which is by the law unclean, when garments are changed, when water is sprinkled, when the victim is slain, over whom the priest had confessed the sins of one or many, and the blood is applied to those in whose behalf the victim was sacrificedthe whole import of each and all of these acts is expressed in the phrases to make inwardly pure and holy.

Of these points of the theory, as thus far explained, we observe that simple lustration is not unknown to the heathen ritual, would scarcely be denied. If we mistake not, it figures very largely in their ceremonies. Water, and fire, and incense, and all manner of preliminary rites, figure very prominently in these systems. We agree with the author that in those rites it is not specially significant of inward purity. On the contrary, lustration or ceremonial cleansing signifies in the heathen rites only consecration and acceptableness to the Deity. Uncleanliness of person or apparel, of the place and imple ments of worship, is offensive, because it is displeasing in itself, and because it betokens irreverence. This shows why it gave the fundamental figure to the ceremonial of the Jews. The Jews were taught to regard themselves as a chosen people, "a Kingdom of Priests," a holy, i. e., a consecrated nation. Hence, they were to be choice in their food, in their personal habits, in the thousand minute particulars of their ritual and manners, by which they were to be ever reminded of their special relation to God. When they had become unclean, when by accident or design they had broken these rules, they were to be

made clean again by appropriate ceremonies of lustration. Acceptableness to God, a state of rightness or favor with God, justification even, were much more directly suggested than purity of heart, even by what Dr. Bushnell takes to be the grand conception of the sacrificial system, viz., the conception of lustration or cleanness. It is true that inward purity was afterwards evolved, but not to the exclusion of the first and leading conception. Even the order of suggestion from the physical to the moral was not that indicated by Dr. Bushnell. Cleanness meant first physical cleanness, next acceptableness to God, or rightness with the ritual, next freedom from whatever is offensive in transgression, whether the sin were external or internal. The loss of God's favor enters always as an element into the idea of uncleanliness. This thought has greater importance than it seems to have at first, to any one who follows it out in the explanation of the kindred words which are used in the New Testament. To cleanse from sin, whether ritual or moral, suggests first the idea of the restoration of God's favor, and second the idea of internal purification.

Psychologically considered, also, the consciousness of guilt is in fact developed to the consciousness far earlier than that of the inward pollution of sin. That which in the order of time first awakens the soul to reflection upon and the discernment of moral distinctions, is the discovery that we have displeased others. We then ask ourselves is their displeasure reasonable or unreasonable. This puts us upon the efforts of inquiry whether we ourselves approve or disapprove our own acts. So in our relation to God, guilt, ill-desert, danger, are the conceptions which are first evoked and prominently expressed. The pollution of sin is a conception which comes later still, and so far as it is distinguishable from personal ill-desert, it signifies the degradation of the soul, from its high destiny, its base subjection to animal and irascible passions, and its entangling servitude to evil habits. Even when this conception is matured and developed, it by no means displaces or removes the sense of guilt or ill-desert from ourselves and from other good beings, and above all from God.

But should we admit that lustration or ceremonial cleansing had respect to the inward purification only, it would be diffi

cult to see how the application of the blood of a slain victim could be limited to express inward cleansing, except by a sense which is obviously secondary and plainly derived.

But before we pursue this point further, we ought to consider positively whether the offering of a slain victim did not necessarily symbolize the confession, on the part of the worshiper, that his sin deserved an evil like that which his victim incurred. It is no answer to say that the taking of life in ordinary cases signified nothing to the Jews, nor that the pain attending the slaughter would not awaken a responsive feeling in the minds of a pastoral people. The question is not whether these evils and pains would be noticed in ordinary, but whether they could be left unconsidered in extraordinary circumstances. We know when covenants were made among the earliest and rudest tribes, that animals were slain by or in the name of both the contracting parties, and that the act was understood to declare that each invoked upon himself the fate of the slaughtered victims in case he should be false.* In all such cases death, painful death, is actually made to signify deserved evil. In this spirit and sense Moses ratified his law as a covenant with the people, by sprinkling the blood of calves and of goats, and saying "this is the blood of the testament which God hath enjoined unto you." If slaughter could symbolize to a rude people evil possibly or really incurred in the case of a covenant, it could do the same in the act of sacrifice.

Upon Dr. Bushnell's theory we cannot see the import of the application of the blood of the victim by sprinkling the worshiper. In blood there is nothing physically cleansing; it is only as the blood to a rude people is the most obvious physical symbol of the mysteriously departing life, and as the sprinkling of this blood upon the participants is conceived of

* The form which was used among the Romans in making the oath, when a Swine was sacrificed, was: Si prior defexit (populus Romanus) publico consilio, dolo malo, tu illo die Jupiter populum Romanum sic ferito, ut ego hunc porcum hic hodie feriam; tautoque magis ferito, quanto magis potes pollesque. Livy, 1, 24, 8; compare also 9, 5, 3. Compare Genesis xv. 8-24, for the vision of Abraham, in which the visible symbol of Jehovah, translated "a smoking furnace," &c., passes between victims that were slain to bind the covenant. See Hebrews ix. 19, 20, and Exodus xxiv. 5, 6, 8.

as connecting them most intimately with whatever purpose the slaughter of the victim signifies, making the victim, so to speak, to be their own, that we can explain its application at all. But if, in the case of the sin or trespass offering, there was signified the infliction of evil such as the offerer confessed he deserved, and the cleansing by blood meant the removal of deserved anger as well as the moral cleansing of the soul, then the application of it is natural and easy to be understood. It is far too refined a construction to say with Dr. Bushnell that it signifies the "sacred, mystic, new-creating touch of life." For a rude people such a conception is plainly too refined; to a cool critic it would seem to be only a dexterous conceit, used to dispose of the obvious import of the passage, "For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that maketh atonement for the soul."

Ani

Nor does it prove anything to the contrary of these views, to assert that slaughtered victims were offered on other occasions besides occasions of expiation. It is true they were. mals were slaughtered, and placed upon the altar, and burned with incense to serve as thank-offerings, as well as to express the confession and to relieve the fears of the guilty. The use of animal sacrifices, for all the occasions and acts of worship, was most natural as it was universal, for reasons and by tendencies which need not be explained. But this by no means justifies the inference that they could not naturally and legitimately also become the symbols of expiatory needs and deprecatory feelings, nor that when they served this use, the death, and sufferings, and banishment of the victim did not come distinctly into view and signify substituted evil.

This argument, which is so strongly urged by some modern German critics and theologians, and which is pressed so confidently by Dr. Bushnell, seems to us not only to fail, but to be entirely inconsistent with a proper historic estimate of the extensive import and varied uses of the sacrificial system among those tribes and nations to whom such a system constituted the only liturgy for all occasions and needs.

We should like to follow Dr. Bushnell in his remarks concerning "Atonement, Propitiation, and Expiation." But