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By Patrick Fairbairn
Published by Smith & English, 1854
p. 248-264.
VOLUME II.
CHAPTER FOURTH.
The symbols, to which, our attention has hitherto been directed, were simply ordinances of teaching. They spake in language not to be mistaken of the righteous character of God, of the evil of sin, of the moral and physical ruin it had brought upon the world, of a purpose of grace and a prospect of recovery--but they did no more. There were no rites of service associated with them; nor of themselves did they call men to embody in any outward action the knowledge and principles they were the means of imparting. But religion must have its active services as well as its teaching ordinances. The one furnish light and direction, only that the other may be intelligently performed. And a symbolical religion, if it could ever be said to exist, could certainly not have perpetuated itself, or kept alive the knowledge of divine truth in the world, without the regular employment of one or more symbolical institutions, fitted for the suitable expression. of religious ideas and feelings. Now, the only thing of this description which makes its appearance in the earlier periods of the world's history, and which continued to hold, through all the after stages of symbolical worship, the paramount place, is the rite of sacrifice.
We are not told, however, of the actual institution of this rite in immediate connection with the fall; and the silence of inspired history regarding it till Cain and Abel had reached the season of manhood, and the mention of it then simply as a matter of fact in the narrative of their lives, has given rise to much disputation concerning the origin of sacrifice--whether it was of divine appointment, or of human invention? And if the latter, to what circumstances in man's condition, or to what views and feelings naturally arising in his mind, might it owe its existence? In the investigation of these questions, a line of inquiry has not unfrequently been pursued by theologians, more befitting the position of philosophical reasoners, than of Christian divines. The solution has been sought for chiefly in the general attributes of human nature, and the practices of a remote and semi-barbarous heathenism, as if Scripture were entirely silent upon the subject till we come far down the stream of time. Discarding such a mode of conducting the investigation, and looking to the notices of Scripture for our only certain light upon the subject, we hope, without material difficulty, to find our way to conclusions on the leading points connected with it, which may be generally acquiesced in as legitimately drawn and firmly established.
1. In regard, first of all, to the divine authority arid acceptable nature of worship by sacrifice--which is often mixed up with the consideration of its origin--Scripture leaves very little room for controversy. The only debateable ground, as concerns this aspect of the matter, respects that very limited period of time, which stretches from the fall of Adam to the offerings of Cain and Abel. From this latter period, verging too on the very commencement of the world's history, we are expressly informed that sacrifice of one kind had a recognised place in the worship of God, and met with his acceptance. Not only did Abel appear before God with a sacrificial offering, but by a visible token of approval--conveyed in all probability through some action of the cherubim or the flaming sword, near which, as the seat of the manifested presence of God, the service would naturally be performed--the seal was given of the divine acceptance and blessing. Thenceforth, at least, sacrifice presented after the manner of Abel's might be regarded as of divine authority. It bore distinctly impressed upon it the warrant and approbation of heaven; and whatever uncertainty might hang around it during the brief space which intervened between the fall and the time of Abel's accepted offering, it was from that time determined to be a mode of worship, with which God was well pleased. We might rather say the mode of worship; for sacrifice, accompanied, it is probable, with some words of prayer, is the only stated act of worship, by which believers in the earlier ages appear to have given more formal expression to their faith and hope in God. When it is said of the times of Enos, the grandson of Adam in the pious line of Seth, that "then men began to call upon the name of the Lord," there can be little doubt that they did so after the example of Abel, by the presentation of sacrifice--only, as profiting by the fatal result of his personal dispute with Cain, in a more public and regularly concerted manner. It appears to have been then agreed among the worshippers of Jehovah, what offerings to present, and how to do so; as, in later times, it is frequently reported of Abraham and his family, in connection with their having built an altar, that they then "called upon the name of the Lord" (Gen. xii. 8 ; xiii. 4 ; xxvi. 25). That sacrifice held the same place in the instituted worship of God after the deluge, which it had done before, we learn, first of all, from the case of Noah--the connecting link between the old and new worlds--who no sooner left the ark than he built an altar to the Lord, and offered burnt-offerings of every clean beast and fowl, from which the Lord is said to have smelled a sweet savour. In the delineation given of the earlier patriarchal times in the Book of Job, we find him, not only spoken of as exhibiting his piety in the stated presentation of burnt-offerings, but also as expressly required by God to make sacrifice for the atonement of his friends, who had sinned with their lips in speaking what was not right. And as we have undoubted testimonies respecting the acceptable character of the worship performed by Abraham and his chosen seed, so we learn, that in this worship sacrificial offerings played the principal part, and were even sometimes directly enjoined by God (Gen. xv. 9, 10, 17; xxii. 2, 13 ; xxxv. 1, &c.)
The very latest of these notices in sacred history carry us up to a period far beyond that to which the authentic annals of any heathen kingdom reach, while the earliest refer to what occurred only a few years subsequent to the fall. From the time of Abel, then, downwards through the whole course of antediluvian and patriarchal history, it appears that the regular and formal worship of God mainly consisted in the offering of sacrifice, and that this was not rendered by a sort of religious venture on the part of the worshippers, but with the known sanction and virtual, if not explicit, appointment of God. As regards the right of men to draw near to God with such offerings, and their hope of acceptance at his hands, no shadow of doubt can fairly be said to rest upon any portion of the field of inquiry, except what may relate to the worship of the parents themselves of the human family.
2. It is well to keep in view the clear and satisfactory deliverance we obtain on this branch of the subject. And if we could ascertain definitely what were the views and feelings expressed by the worshippers in the kind of sacrifice which was accepted by God, the question of its precise origin would be of little moment; since, so recently after the institution of the rite, we have unequivocal evidence of its being divinely owned and approved, as actually offered. But it is here that the main difficulty presents itself, as it is only indirectly we can gather the precise objects for which the primitive race of worshippers came before God with sacrificial offerings. The question of their origin still is of moment for ascertaining this, and, at the same time, for determining the virtue possessed by the offerings in the sight of God. If they arose simply in the devout feelings of the worshipper, they might have been accepted by God as a natural and proper form for the expression of these feelings; but they could not have borne any typical respect to the higher sacrifice of Christ, as, in the things of redemption, type and antitype must be alike of God. And on this point we now proceed to remark negatively, that the facts already noticed concerning the first appearance and early history of sacrifice, present insuperable objections to all the theories which have sought on simply natural grounds to account for its human origin.
The theory, for example, which has received the suffrage of many learned men, both in this country and on the continent, [1] and which attempts to explain the rise of sacrifice by a reference to the feelings of men when they were in a kind of bestial roughness, capable of entertaining only the most gross and carnal ideas of God, and consequently disposed to deal with him much as they would have done with a fellow-creature, whose favour they desired to win by means of gifts,--this theory is utterly at variance with the earlier notices of sacrificial worship. It is founded upon a sense of the value of property, and of the effect wont to be produced by gifts of property between man and man, which could not have been acquired at a period when society as yet consisted only of a few individuals, and these the members of a single family. And whether the gift were viewed in the light of a fine, a bribe, or a feast (for each in different hands has had its share in giving a particular shape to the theory), no sacrifice offered with such a view could have met with the divine favour and acceptance. The feeling that prompted it must in that case have been degrading to God, indeed essentially idolatrous ; and the whole history of patriarchal worship, in which God always appears to look so benignly on the offerings of believing worshippers, reclaims against the idea.
Of late, however, it has been more commonly sought to account for the origin of sacrifice, by viewing it as a symbolical act, such as might not unnaturally have suggested itself to men, in any period of society, from the feelings or practices with which their personal experience, or the common intercourse of life, made them familiar. But very different modes of explaining the symbol have been resorted to by those who concur in the same general view of its origination. Omitting the minor shades of difference which have arisen from an undue regard being had to distinctively Mosaic elements, Sykes, in his Essay on Sacrifice, raised his explanation on the ground, that "eating and drinking together were the known ordinary symbols of friendship, and were the usual rites of engaging in covenants and leagues." And in this way some plausible things may doubtless be said of sacrifice, as it appeared often in the later ages of heathenism, and also on some special occasions among the covenant people. But nothing that can seem even a probable account is thereby given of the offerings presented by believers in the first ages of the world. For it is against all reason to suppose that such a symbol of friendship should then have been in current use,--not to mention that the offerings of that period seem to have been precisely of the class in which no part was eaten by the worshippers--holocausts. Warburton laid the ground more deeply, and with greater show of probability, when he endeavoured to trace the origin of sacrifice to the ancient mode of converse by action, to aid the defects and imperfections of early language,--this being, in his opinion, sufficient to account for men being led to adopt such a mode of worship, whether the sacrifice might be eucharistical, propitiatory, or expiatory. Gratitude for good bestowed, he conceives, would lead the worshipper to present, by an expressive action, the first-fruits of agriculture or pasturage--the eucharistical offering. The desire of the divine favour or protection in the business of life would, in like manner, dispose him to dedicate a portion of what was to be sown or propagated--the propitiatory. And for sacrifices of an expiatory kind, the sense of sin would prompt him to take some chosen animal, precious to the repenting criminal who deprecated, or supposed to be obnoxious to the Deity who was to be appeased, and slay it at the altar, in an action which, in all languages when translated into words, speaks to this purpose: "I confess my transgressions at thy footstool, O my God; and with the deepest contrition implore thy pardon, confessing that I deserve the death which I inflict on this animal." [2] If for the infliction of death, which Warburton here represents as the chief feature in the action of expiatory sacrifice, we substitute the pouring out of the blood, or simply the giving away of the life to God, there is no material difference between his view of the origin of such sacrifices, and that recently propounded by Bahr. This ingenious and learned writer rejects the idea of sacrifice having come from any supernatural teaching or special appointment of God, as this would imply that man needed extraneous help to direct him, whether he was to sacrifice, or how he was to do it. He maintains, that "as the idea of God, and its necessary expression, was not something that came upon humanity from without, nothing taught it, but something immediate, an original fact; so also is sacrifice the form of that expression. From the point of view at which we are wont to contemplate things, separating the divine from the natural, the spiritual from the corporeal, this form must indeed always present a strange appearance. But if we throw ourselves back on that mode of contemplation, which views the divine and spiritual as inseparable from the natural arid corporeal, we shall find nothing so far out of the way in man's feeling himself constrained to represent the internal act of the giving up of his whole life and being to the Godhead--and in that all religion lives and moves--through the external giving away of an animal, perhaps, which he loved as himself, or on which he himself lived, and which stood in the closest connection with his own existence." [3] Something of a like nature (though exhibited in a form decidedly more objectionable) has also received the sanction of Tholuck, who, in the Dissertation on Sacrifices, appended to his Commentary on Hebrews, affirms, that "an offering was originally a gift to the Deity --a gift by which man strives to make up the deficiency of the always imperfect surrender of himself to God." And in regard especially to burnt-offerings, he says: "Both objects, that of thanksgiving and of propitiation, were connected with them; on the one hand, gratitude required man to surrender what was external as well as internal, to God; and, on the other hand, the surrender of an outward good was considered as a substitution, a propitiation for that which was still deficient in the internal surrender." [4] A salvation, it would seem, by works so far, and only where these failed, a calling in of extraneous and supplementary resources!
These different modes of explanation are obviously one in principle,
and are but varying aspects of the same fundamental view. In each form
it lies open to three serious objections, which together appear to us
quite conclusive against it. 1.
First, the analogy of God's method of dealing with his church in the
matter of divine worship, at other periods in her history, is opposed
to the simply human theory in any of its forms. Certainly at no other
era did God leave his people altogether to their own inventions for the
discovery of an acceptable mode of approaching him, and of giving
expression to their religious feelings. Some indications he has always
given of what in this respect might be accordant with his mind, and
suitable to the position in which his worshippers stand towards him.
The extent to which this directing influence was carried, formed one of
the leading characteristics of the dispensation brought in by Moses;
the whole field of religious worship was laid under divine
prescription, and the inventions of men solemnly interdicted. But even
in the dispensation of the Gospel, which is distinguished for the
spirituality of its nature, and its comparative freedom from legal
enactments and independence of outward forms, the leading ordinances of
divine worship are indicated with sufficient plainness, and what has no
foundation in the revealed word is expressly denounced as
"will-worship." And if the church of the New Testament, with all her
advantages of a completed revelation, a son-like freedom, and an
unction from the Holy One, that is said to "teach her all things," was
not without some direction and control in regard to the proper
celebration of God's service, is it conceivable that all should have
been left utterly loose and indeterminate, when men were still in the
very infancy of a fallen condition, and their views of spiritual truth
and duty only in the forming? Where, in that case, would have been
God's jealousy for the purity of his church? And where, we may also
ask, his compassion toward men? He had disclosed to them purposes of
grace, and awakened in their bosoms the hope of a recovery from the
ruin they had incurred; but to set them adrift without even pointing to
any ordinance fitted to meet their sense of sin, and re-assure their
hearts before God, would have been to leave the exhibition of mercy
strangely defective and incomplete. For, while they knew they had to do
with a God of grace and forgiveness, they should still have been in
painful uncertainty how to worship and serve him, so as to get personal
experience of his blessing, and how, especially when conscience of sin
troubled them anew, they might get the uneasiness allayed. Never surely
was the tenderness of God more needed to point the way to what was
acceptable and right, than in such a day of small tilings to the
children of hope. And if it had not been shewn, the withholding of it
could scarcely seem otherwise than an exception to the general analogy
of God's dealings with men. 2.
But, secondly, the simply human theory of the origin of sacrifice is
met by an unresolved, and, we are persuaded, on that supposition an
unresolvable difficulty in respect to the nature of ancient sacrifice.
For, as the earliest, and indeed the only recorded mode of sacrifice in
primitive times, among acceptable worshippers of God, consisted in the
offering of slain victims, it seems impossible that this particular
form of sacrifice should have been fallen upon at first, without some
special direction from above. Let the symbolical action be viewed in
either of the shades of meaning formerly described--as expressive of
the offerer's deserved death,, or of the surrender of his life to God,
or as a propitiatory substitution to compensate for the conscious
defect of such surrender--either way, how could he have imagined, that
the devoting to death of a living creature of God should have been the
appropriate mode of expressing the idea? Death is so familiar to-us, as
regards the inferior creation, and so much associated with the means of
our support and comfort, that it might seem a light thing to put an
animal to death for any purpose connected with the wants or even the
convenience of men. But the first members of the human family were in
different circumstances. They must have shrunk--unless divinely
authorised-- from inflicting death on any, and especially on the higher
forms of the animal creation; since death, in so far as they had
themselves to do with it, was the peculiar expression of God's
displeasure on account of sin. All, indeed, belonging to that creation
were to be subject to them. Their appointment from the very first was
to subdue the earth, and render everything in it subservient to their
legitimate use. But this use did not originally include a right to
deprive animals of their life for the sake of food; the grant of flesh
for that end was only given at the deluge. And that they should yet
have thought it proper and becoming to shed the blood of animals merely
to express a religious idea, nay, should have regarded that as so
emphatically the appropriate way of worshipping God, that for ages it
seems to have formed the more peculiar medium of approach to him, can
never be rationally accounted for without something on the part of God
directing them to such a course. 3.
Finally, the theories now under consideration are still farther
objectionable, in that they are confronted by a specific fact, which
was evidently recorded for the express purpose of throwing light on the
original worship of fallen man, and with which their advocates have
never been able to reconcile them--the fact of Abel's accepted offering
from the flock, as contrasted with the rejection of Cain's from the
produce of the field (Gen. iv.; Heb. xi. 4). The offerings of the two
brothers differed, we are told in the epistle to the Hebrews, and the
account in Genesis implies as much, not only in regard to the outward
oblation--the one being a creature with life, the other without it--but
also in the principle which moved the two brothers respectively to
present them. That principle in Abel was faith; not this, therefore,
but something else in Cain. And as it was faith which both rendered
Abel's sacrifice in itself more excellent than Cain's, and drew down
upon it the seal of Heaven's approval, the kind of faith meant must
obviously have been something more than a general belief merely in the
being of God, or his readiness to accept an offering of service from
the hands of men. Faith in that sense must have been possessed by him
who offered amiss, as well as by him who offered with acceptance. It
must have been a more special exercise of faith which procured the
acceptance of Abel--faith having respect not simply to the obligation
of approaching God with some kind of offering, but to the duty of doing
so with a sacrifice like that actually rendered, of the flock or the
herd. But whence could such faith have come, if there had riot been a
testimony or manifestation of God for it to rest upon, which the one
brother believingly apprehended, and the other scornfully slighted? We
see no way of evading this conclusion, without misinterpreting and
doing violence to the plain import of the account of Scripture on the
subject. Taking this in its obvious and natural meaning, Cain is
presented to our view as a child of nature, not of grace--as one
obeying the impulse and direction only of reason, and rejecting the
more explicit light of faith as to the land of service he presented to
his Maker. His oblation is an undoubted specimen of what man could do
in his fallen state to originate proper ideas of God, and give fitting
expression to these in outward acts of worship. But unhappily for the
advocates of nature's sufficiency in the matter, it stands condemned in
the inspired record as a presumptuous and disallowed act of
will-worship. Abel, on the other hand, appears as one who through grace
had become a child of faith, and by faith first spiritually discerning
the mind of God, then reverently following the course it dictated, by
presenting that more excellent sacrifice (*** ***) of the firstlings of
the flock, with which God was well pleased.
On every account, therefore, the conclusion seems inevitable, that the institution of sacrifice must have been essentially of divine origin; for though we cannot appeal to any record of its direct appointment by God, yet there are notices concerning sacrificial worship which cannot be satisfactorily explained on the supposition in any form, of its merely human origin. There is a recorded fact, however, which touches the very borders of the subject, and which, we may readily perceive, furnished a divine foundation on which a sacrificial worship, such as is mentioned in Scripture, might be built. It is the fact noticed at the close of God's interview with our parents after the fall--"And unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skin, and clothed them." The painful sense of nakedness that oppressed them after their transgression, was the natural offspring of a consciousness of sin--an instinctive fear lest the unveiled body should give indication of the evil thoughts and dispositions which now lodged within. Hence, to get relief to this uneasy feeling, they made coverings for themselves of such things as seemed best adapted to the purpose, out of that vegetable world which had been freely granted for their use. They girded themselves about with fig-leaves. But they soon found that this covering proved of little avail to hide their shame, where most of all they needed to have it hidden; it left them miserably exposed to the piercing glance of their offended God. If a real and valid covering should be obtained, sufficient to relieve them of all uneasiness, God himself must provide it. And so he actually did. As soon as the promise of mercy had been disclosed to the offenders, and the constitution of mingled goodness and severity brought in, he made coats to clothe them with, and these coats of skins. But clothing so obtained argued the sacrifice of life in the animal that furnished them; and thus, through the death of an inferior yet innocent living creature, was the needed relief brought to their disquieted and fearful bosoms. The outward and corporeal here manifestly had respect to the inward and spiritual. The covering of their nakedness was a gracious token from the hand of God, that the sin which had alienated them from him, and made them conscious of uneasiness, was henceforth to be in his sight as if it were not; so that in covering their flesh, he at the same time covered their consciences. If viewed apart from this higher symbolical aim, the outward act will naturally appear small and unworthy of God; but so to view it were to dissever it from the very reason of its performance. It was done purposely to denote the covering of guilt from the presence of God -- an act which God alone could have done. But he did it, as we have seen, by a medium of death, by a sacrifice of life in those creatures which men were not yet permitted to kill for purposes of food, and in connection with a constitution of grace, which laid open the prospect of recovered life and blessing to the fallen. Surely it is not attributing to the venerable heads of the human family, persons who had so recently walked with God in paradise, an incredible power of spiritual discernment; or supposing them to stretch unduly the spiritual import of this particular action of God, if we should conceive them turning the divine act into a ground of obligation and privilege for themselves, and saying, Here is heaven's own finger pointing out the way for obtaining relief to our guilty consciences; the covering of our shame is to be found by means of the skins of irrational creatures, slain in our behalf; their life for our lives, their clothing of innocence for our shame; and we cannot err, we shall but shew our faith in the mercy and forgiveness we have experienced, if, as often as the sense of shame and guilt returns upon our consciences, we follow the footsteps of the Lord, and, by a renewed sacrifice of life, clothe ourselves anew with his own appointed badge of acquittal and acceptance.
We are not to be understood as positively affirming that our first parents, and their believing posterity reasoned thus, or that they actually had no more of instruction to guide them. We merely say, that they may quite naturally have so reasoned, and that we have no authority from the inspired record to suppose that any further instruction was communicated. Indeed, nothing more seems strictly necessary for the first beginnings of a sacrificial worship, And it was still but the age for beginnings; in what was taught and done, we should expect to find only the simplest forms of truth and duty. The Gospel, in its clearer announcements, even the law with its specific enactments, would then have been out of place. All that was absolutely required, and all that might be fairly expected, was some natural and expressive act of God toward men, laying, when thoughtfully considered, the foundation of a religious service toward him. The claims of the Sabbatical institution, and of the marriage-union, had a precisely similar foundation -- the one in God's personal resting on the seventh day, hallowing and blessing it, the other in his formation of the first wife out of the first husband. It was simply the divine procedure in these cases which formed the ground of man's obligations--because that procedure was essentially a revelation of the mind and will of Godhead for the guidance of the rational beings who, being made in God's image, were to find their glory and their wellbeing in appropriating his acts, and copying after his example. So here, God's fundamental act in removing and covering out of sight the shame of conscious guilt in the first offenders, would both naturally and rightfully be viewed, as a revelation of God, teaching them, how, in henceforth dealing with him, they were to proceed in effecting the removal of guilt, and appearing, notwithstanding it, in the presence of God. They found, in this divine act, the key to a justified condition, and an acceptable intercourse with heaven. Had they not done so, it would have been incapable of rational explanation, how a believing Abel should so soon have appeared in possession of it. Yet, it could not have been rendered so palpable, as to obtrude itself on the carnal and unbelieving--otherwise, it would scarcely be less capable of explanation, how a self-willed Cain should so soon have ventured to disregard it. The ground of dissension between the two brothers must have been of a somewhat narrower and more debateable character, than if an explicit and formal direction had been given. And in the divine act referred to--viewed in its proper light, and taken in connection with the whole circumstances of the time--there was precisely what might have tended to originate both results; enough of light to instruct the humble heart of faith, mainly intent on having pardon of sin and peace with God, and yet not too much to leave proud and unsanctified nature without an excuse for following a course more agreeable to its own inclinations. [5]
3. We thus hold sacrifice--sacrifice in the higher sense, not as expressive of dependence and thankfulness merely, but as connected with sin and forgiveness, expiatory sacrifice--to have been, as to its foundation, of divine origin. It had its rise in an act of God, done for the express purpose of relieving guilty consciences of their sense of shame and confusion; and from the earliest periods of recorded worship it stands forth to our view as the religious solemnity, in which faith had its most peculiar exercise, and for which God bestowed the tokens of his acceptance and blessing. For the discussion of some collateral points belonging to the subject, and the disposal of a few objections, we refer to the Appendix. [6] And we now proceed here briefly to inquire what sacrifice as thus originating, and thus presented, symbolically expressed? What feelings on the part of the worshipper, what truths on the part of God, did it embody?
Partly, indeed, the inquiry has been answered already. It was impossible to conduct the discussion thus far without indicating the leading ideas involved in primitive sacrifice. It must be remembered, however, that we are still dealing with sacrifice in its simplest and most elementary form--radically, no doubt, the same as it was under the more complex and detailed arrangements of the Mosaic ritual, but in comparison of that wanting much in fulness and variety. As employed by the first race of believing worshippers, a few leading points are all that it can properly be regarded as embracing.
(1.) Both from the manner of its origin, and its own essential nature, as involving in every act of worship the sacrifice of a creature's life, it bore impressive testimony to the sinfulness of the offerer's condition. Those, who presented it, could not but know, that God was far from delighting in blood, and that death, either in man or beast, was not a thing in which he could be supposed to take pleasure. The explicit connection of death, also, with the first transgression, as the proper penalty of sin, was peculiarly fitted to suggest painful and humiliating thoughts in the minds of those who stood so near to the awful moment of the fall. And when death, under God's own directing agency, was brought so prominently into the divine service, and every act of worship, of the more solemn kind, carried in its bosom the life-blood of an innocent creature, what more striking memorial could they have had of the evil wrought in their condition by sin? With such an element of blood perpetually mingling in their services, they could not forget that they stood upon the floor of a broken covenant, and were themselves ever incurring anew the just desert of sin.
(2.) Then, looking more particularly to the sanction and encouragement of God, given to such a mode of worshipping him, it bespoke their believing conviction of his reconcileable and gracious disposition toward them, notwithstanding their sinfulness. They gave here distinct and formal expression to their faith, that as they needed mercy, so they recognised God as ready to dispense it to those who humbly sought him through this channel of communion. Such a faith, indeed, had been presumption, the groundless conceit of nature's arrogancy or ignorance, if it had not had a divine foundation to rest upon, and tokens of divine acceptance in the acts of service it rendered. But these, as we have seen, it plainly had. So that a sacrificial worship thus performed bore evidence as well to the just expectations of mercy and forgiveness on the part of those who presented it, as to their uneasy sense of guilt and shame, prompting them to do so.
(3.) But, looking again to the original ground and authority of this sacrificial worship,--the act of God in graciously covering the shame and guilt of sin,--and to the seal of acceptance afterwards set so peculiarly and emphatically on it, the great truth was expressed by it, on the part of God, that the taking away of life stood essentially connected with the taking away of sin---or, as expressed in later Scripture, that "without shedding of blood there is no remission of sins." In accordance with the general character of the primeval constitution of things, this truth comes out, not as a formal enunciation of principle, or an authoritative enactment of Heaven, but as an embodied fact; a fact, in the first instance, of God's hand, significantly indicating his mind and will, and then believingly contemplated, acted upon, substantially re-enacted by his sincere worshippers, with his clearly marked approval. The form may be regarded as peculiar, but not so the truth enshrined in it. This is common to all times, and, after holding a primary place in every phase of a preparatory religion, it rose at last to a position of transcendent importance in the work and kingdom of Christ. How far Adam and his immediate descendants might be able to descry, under their imperfect forms of worship, and the accompanying intimations of recovery, the ultimate ground in this respect of faith and hope for sinful men, can be to us only matter of vague conjecture, or doubtful speculation. Their views would, perhaps, considerably differ, according as their faith was more or less clear in its discernment, and lively in its perceptions of the truth couched under the symbolical acts and revelations of God. But unless more specific information was given them than is found in the sacred record (and it is mere conjecture to suppose there was more), the anticipations formed even by the most enlightened of those primitive believers, regarding the way and manner in which the blood of sacrifice was ultimately to enter into the plan of God, must have been comparatively vague and indefinite.
(4.) For us, however, who can read the symbol before us by the clear light of the Gospel, and from the high vantage-ground of a finished redemption can look back upon the temporary institutions that foreshadowed it, there is neither darkness nor uncertainty respecting the prophetic import of the primeval rite of sacrifice. We perceive there in the germ the fundamental truth of that scheme of grace which was to provide for the complete and final restoration of a seed of blessing---the truth of a suffering Mediator, giving his life a ransom for many. Here again we behold the ends of revelation mutually embracing and contributing to throw light on each other, And as amid the perfected glories of Messiah's kingdom all appears clustering around the Lamb that was slain, and doing homage to him for his matchless humiliation and triumphant victory, so the earliest worship of a believing church points to his coming sacrifice, as the one ground of hope and security to the fallen. At a subsequent period, when the church was furnished with a fuller revelation and a more complicated worship, symbolical representations were given of many other and subordinate parts of the work of redemption. But when that worship existed in its simplest form, and embodied only the first elements of the truth, it was meet that what was ultimately to form the groundwork of the whole, should have been alone distinctly represented. And we shall not profit, as we should, by the contemplation of that one rite, which stands so prominently out in the original worship of the believing portion of mankind, if it does not tend to deepen upon our minds the peerless worth and importance of a crucified Redeemer, as the wisdom and power of God unto salvation.
1. Spencer de Leg. Heb, L. iii. c. 9. So also substantially, Priestly, H. Taylor, Hichaelis, Rosenmiiller, &c.
2. Warburton's Div. Legation, B. vii. c. 2. Davison substantially adopts this view7 with no other difference than that he conceives it unnecessary to make any account of the defects and imperfections of early language in explaining the origin of sacrifice; but, regarding " representation by action as gratifying to men who have every gift of eloquence," and " as singularly suited to great purposes of solemnity and impression," he thinks "not simple adoration, not the naked and unadorned oblations of the tongue, but adoration invested in some striking and significative form, and conveyed by the instrumentality of material tokens, would be most in accordance with the strong energies of feeling, and the insulated condition of the primitive race/' (Inquiry into the Origin and Intent of Sacrifice, p. 19, 20.)
3. Bahr's Symbolik, B. ii. p. 272.
4. Biblical Cabinet, vol. xxxix. p. 252
5. Substantially tlie correct view was presented of this subject in a work of Dr Croly7 though, like several other things in the same volume, attended with the twofold disadvantage, of not being properly grounded, and of being encumbered with some untenable positions, " God alone is described as in actr and his only act is that of clothing the two criminals. The whole passage is biit one of many, in which a rigid adherence to the text is the way of safety. The literal meaning at once exalts the rite, and illustrates its purposes. . . . Adam in Paradise has no protection from the divine wrath, but he needs none; he is pure. In his hour of crime, he finds the fatal difference between good and evil, feels that he requires protection from the eye of justice, and makes an in-effectual effort to supply that protection by his own means. But the expedient, which cannot be supplied by man, is finally supplied by the divine interposition. God clothes him, and his nakedness is the source of anguish and terror no more. The contrast of the materials of his imperfect and perfect clothing is equally impressive. Adam, in his first consciousness of having provoked the divine displeasure, covers himself with the frail produce of the ground, the branch and leaf; but from the period of forgiveness, he is clothed with the substantial product of the flock, the skin of the slain animal. If circumstances apparently so trivial, as the clothing of our original parents, are stated, what .other reason can be assigned, than that they were not trivial, that they formed a marked feature of the divine dispensation, and that they were important to be recorded for the spiritual guidance of man?"--(Divine Providence, p. 194-196.)
6. Appendix D.