on the workers of iniquity. These two are totally distinct,distinct that it is only in the absence of the former, that there is any place for the latter. God is never represented as forbearing to punish sins which have been atoned for; the atonement once offered and accepted on behalf of the sinner, his sin is remitted and blotted out, and can come no more into mind. Fourthly: Though the word used to express the act of atoning, signify etymologically to cover, yet this can afford no shadow of support for Mr. Litton's hypothesis, because the covering implied by that word is such an one as virtually destroys or obliterates the thing covered. It may suffice to cite on this head the authority of one to whom Mr. Litton pays, and justly, much deference, Professor Baehr. According to the ground-signification,' says he, speaking of the word in the Piel form, to which usage has fixed the meaning of atone, 'nothing else can be intended by the conception of atonement than the covering of that which 'God cannot suffer to appear and be ever before Him; what is covered is no more to be seen-and consequently is as good as ' vanished, as no longer there. Hence, according to the Hebrew 'usage, to cover is equivalent to abolish, to take away, to annihilate . . . By atonement, consequently, that which was against 'God, opposed to Him, and hindered union and fellowship with 'Him, was obliterated, abolished, and annihilated.* If such be the idea of the word to which Mr. Litton has appealed, its whole force is clearly against the hypothesis he has suggested. In fine; this hypothesis receives no support from Romans iii. 25, 26, to which Mr. Litton appeals as confirming his view. He lays stress on the use by the Apostle of the expression πάρεσιν τῶν προγεγο νότων ἁμαρτήματων which he translates the passing over of bygone sins, and on this being ascribed to the forbearance of God.' But does he mean to insinuate that the sins to which Paul refers were passed over merely in the sense of not being punished at the time they were committed, though followed ultimately with their full deserts? This is the only exegesis of the Apostle's words which will make them yield any shadow of support to Mr. Litton's view; but it is one which cannot for a moment be admitted. On this interpretation what need was there for a vindication of God's righteousness in reference to these sins? He had not forgiven them; He had only delayed to punish them for a season; why, then, should his righteousness be supposed to be impeached thereby? or in what way could the propitiatory work of Christ afford the vindication of it supposed to be required? It seems plain from Paul's entire train of thought that

* Symbolik des Mos. Cult., ii. 202.

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πάρεσις here is substantially equivalent to ἄφεσις, that the passing over to which he refers is that of remission. The Apostle probably had in his eye such passages as Job vii. 21, Micah vii. 18, where the passing-by of sin is equivalent to the pardoning of it.*

We see no occasion for any such expedient as that to which Mr. Litton has resorted. The case is plain and intelligible as it stands. Sacrifice in its relation to the theocracy, was the mode of obtaining absolution from those penalties by which the institutions of the theocracy were sanctioned. Its immediate effect was limited to this. It atoned directly for no moral guilt whatever; it sanctified only to the purifying of the flesh.' In the nature of things it could not be otherwise; for it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sin.' Such fleshly ordinances have effect only to meet the requirements of a fleshly dispensation. For this, however, they were sufficient whilst they were utterly impotent directly to purify the conscience or relieve the sinner from moral guilt, they were certainly effectual in averting from him all theocratic penalties.

6

So far, we think, no Jew living under the theocracy could miss understanding his relation to God as King of Israel. But he could not understand this much without knowing along with it a great deal more. Even to the least reflective it would naturally occur to ask, 'What connexion is there between sacrifice ' and absolution? Whence arises the virtue of this act to remove the guilt and avert the penalty of offences committed against 'the theocratic King? Is it in the offering or in the suffering that that virtue lies? in other words, Is the sinner forgiven. 'because he has brought and yielded up to God the victim, or 'because the victim's blood has been shed upon the altar?' Now to these questions, which would naturally in some shape or other occur to every man who had any desire to apprehend the meaning of what he was continually required to do, the law under which he lived provided an answer. It taught him that whilst these sacrifices were to be gifts from his own proper good, the service itself was an expedient furnished to him by God for escaping the penalty he had incurred; and it at the same time proclaimed to him that the principle on which the act of sacrifice proceeded, and from which it derived its efficacy, was that of blood instead of blood, life instead of life, in short, the principle of vicarious substitution. The law thus precluded the Jew from taking the heathen view of sacrifice as a gift intended to propitiate an angry God; it represented Jehovah as merciful,

* Comp. the notes of Rosenmüller, Hirzel, and Heiligstedt (in Maurrei Comment. Crit.) on Job vii. 21, with Ewald's Translation.

+ Compare especially Lev. xvii. 11; xvi. 21.

as propense to forgiveness, and as himself providing a method by which the claims of his own law might be harmonized with it. It also forbade any such idea of the import of sacrifice as some modern theories on the subject propose, such as that it was a gift whereby man endeavoured to render his imperfect consecration of himself to God complete, or that it was a symbol of the surrender of the soul to God to be made partaker of his holinesstheories which have found advocates among some of the most enlightened of the German theologians, and which have not wanted able and eloquent expounders in our own country. All such theories, to say nothing of those grosser notions advocated by Spencer and Sykes, as applied to the Mosaic sacrifices are, as Mr. Litton has justly observed, essentially defective: they throw 'into the background the ideas which in these sacrifices are most 'prominent, those of a broken law, of consequent guilt, of lia'bility to punishment, and of forgiveness through vicarious 'suffering. At the same time, though defective, we think that in the better class of these theories there lies the recognition of a great truth. Sacrifice was not merely the offering of life instead of life; to be accepted the victim required to be the property of the offerer; so that the idea involved in the act was partly that of consecration, partly that of satisfaction. The sinner yielded up to God a victim that had the peculiarity of being his own, and he presented its life instead of his own to God. We are inclined, therefore, to say that both the offering and the suffering entered into the whole conception of sacrifice, and that the value of the rite was derived from this combination. The sacrifice was a symbol of personal surrender to God: so far we agree with Bähr, Tholuck, and Maurice. But we cannot stop here. These writers have overlooked the condition in which man is when he makes this surrender; they have thought of him simply as a wandering child who would return to his father, not as a rebellious subject who has contracted guilt before his Sovereign. In this light, however, no Jew was suffered to regard himself when he came with his sacrifice. The fact most forcibly obtruded on him was that he was guilty and deserved to die. To what, then, did a surrender of himself to God amount? It amounted to nothing less than a yielding of himself up to all that the law demanded of him, and consequently to the full penalty of his sin. But in this case how was he to escape? Here comes in the effect of the vicarious substitution of the victim. God graciously accepted it for him, its life for his; so that the man having made a surrender of himself unto God, returned justified through sacrifice. According to this view the virtue of sacrifice lay both in the offering of the victim. as pro

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perty, and in the suffering of the victim as a substitute for the sinner.

That this was the light in which the Jews actually regarded sacrifice, is rendered more than probable by the statements of some of the Rabbinical writers. Thus from one of these we have the following explanation of the import of the rite: 'It was 'just that his blood [that of the sinner] should be shed, and his 'body burnt. But the Creator, of his great clemency, accepts this victim from him as a vicarious thing and a ransom, that its 'blood should be shed in place of his blood, life for life.'* Of this much, then, we may rest assured that in the mind of every Jew, living under the ancient dispensation, the great truths of man's guilt and of God's righteousness and clemency must have been established, along with a perception of the fact that it was by means of sacrifice, as an act of surrender on the part of the sinner, and as a vicarious satisfaction to the Divine law, that the guilt of the sinner was removed, and the Divine clemency and righteousness brought into harmonious action. Beyond this point, however, it is easy to conceive that two separate tendencies might develop themselves in the minds of the Jewish people, and two separate paths of religious belief and activity might be pursued by them. Men of a worldly, carnal spirit would be content with the outward and carnal significancy of their ritual system: if they, by attending to its requirements, might escape temporal penalties and enjoy temporal privileges, they would be satisfied to inquire no further, and, destitute of moral and spiritual life, they would not trouble themselves to ascertain whether the system under which they lived had any relation to spiritual things or any bearing on moral responsibilities. But men of a serious, earnest, and religious spirit-men whose consciences were awake, and who felt that above and beyond the sphere of temporal interests there was a great world of moral and spiritual distinctions-could not be so satisfied. They must have felt that in whatever relation God was pleased to stand to them as a nation, He was still the God of the whole earth, the Universal Governor, whose law was written on the hearts of men, and who would reckon with men at last for their conduct as measured by that law. They were inheritors of a traditional faith in which the relations of man, as a moral agent, to God, as, a moral governor, were dealt with apart from any special relations of an outward or dispensational kind, into which He might be pleased to enter with any section of the race. They knew that sin was something more, something worse than a mere * See this, and many passages of similar import, in Outram, De Sacrificiis, 1. i. c. 22, § 10, ff.

breach of theocratic law, and that it exposed to penalties far more dreadful than those temporal calamities by which the interests of the theocracy were protected. They felt that there were claims upon them which no ceremonial righteousness could suffice to meet; and their consciences were burdened with a sense of guilt which no ceremonial observances could remove. They knew that though sacrifice was of Divine appointment, as part of their national institute, it was a thing of no value in the sight of God as a means of cancelling moral guilt; that He desired not sacrifice, nor delighted in burnt-offering, where moral guilt had to be expiated-nay, that when presented with this view the costliest oblations were vain, and the most fragrant incense an abomination to Him. When they returned therefore from their sacrificial observances, purged of theocratic guilt, they felt that the moral guilt still remained, and that the question had still to be asked, How were they to be freed from it?

Had Judaism any answer for this question-a question which, just in proportion as a man had religious feeling quickened in his soul, would press with absorbing interest upon him? Surely it had; surely during all those centuries men of earnest and pious minds, with the oracles of God in their possession, were not left to grope in darkness or tremble in despair for want of an answer to such a question. Nay, does not their very piety, in its force, its joyousness, its elevation, assure us that they must have had an answer to it, such as calmed their consciences, cheered their hearts, and led them with the loving confidence of those who had their sins forgiven them, to rejoice in the Lord as the God of their salvation? The soul that is under the burden of unforgiven guilt cannot run as they ran in the paths of God's commandments. The heart that is shrouded over with the darkness of despair cannot shine as theirs shone with the light of God's countenance.

It could hardly miss the observation of any thoughtful Jew who was inclined to pursue the inquiry, that the whole theocratic system under which he lived was symbolical of something else, viz., of God's moral government over men. Moses, it is true, nowhere formally states this; but to a people familiar with sym-. bolical representations it would hardly fail to occur. Indeed, on no other hypothesis could the Jew reconcile the views given in his own Scriptures of Jehovah, as the God of the whole earth, with the specialty of His relation to Israel; if the latter representation was not a miniature symbol of the former, it was a gross contradiction of it. But if the Jew had the general con

* Psalm li. 17; Is. i. 11-14.

+ See De Wette Bibl. Dogmatik, s. 94.