intimating whether the worshipper, when he came to bring his offering, obeyed a command, or acted upon the suggestions of a customary, or a spontaneous piety." P. 9.

This negative argument has been powerfully urged by Bishop Warburton, and eloquently enforced by Mr. Benson *; nor has it gained any additional force in the hands of Mr. Davison; for, when he proceeds to argue, that "this silence of scripture history, neutral in the narration, is far from neutral in its import," he may be thought either to contradict himself, or to argue sophistically. But the argument, however propounded, cannot avail with the advocates of the opposite system, who deny the premises. In their view of the question there is " an implied evidence in the history of the facts;" since the divine acceptance of Abel's offering is, in their estimation, evidence that the worship itself must have been commanded. The same inference, they believe, is deducible from the very expressions in the Scripture narrative, from the distinction of clean and unclean beasts, which, they think, could only be made for sacrificial purposes, (Gen. vii. 2.) and from the appointment of the Sabbath as virtually including the appointment of sacrifice; for they cannot conceive that the Almighty would set apart the seventh day for religious services, without informing man of the nature of the services he was bound to perform.

It cannot, however, be denied that in the history there is no express mention of the divine institution of sacrifices; and upon this circumstance we may reason as an acknowledged fact:-it may, nevertheless, be fairly doubted whether a negative argument of this kind can amount to more than a presumption, which, in the present case, is much diminished by another fact, that in the book of Genesis, and the other historical parts of the sacred volume, there are omissions of equally important matter. Excepting Jacob's supplication at Bethel, (Gen. xxviii. 18-22.) scarcely a single allusion to prayer is to be found in the whole Pentateuch. Circumcision, being the sign of God's covenant with Abraham, was beyond all question punctually observed by the Israelites; yet, from their settlement in Canaan, no particular instance is recorded of it till the circumcision of Christ, a period comprehending about 1500 years. The observance of the sabbath is never spoken of in the history of the patriarchal ages; and no express mention is made of it in the books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, the first and second of Samuel, or the first book of Kings. Hence, it is argued, that it

Div. Legat. of Moses, lib. ix. cap. 2.; Hulscan Lectures for 1822, Lect. 18.

can be nothing wonderful if the first institution of sacrifice, on the supposition of a divine command, is not recorded in the summary history of the primitive times.

Having concluded that the historical evidence of Scripture is adverse to the belief that primitive sacrifice was consecrated by a divine institution, our author proceeds to consider the objections which have been made to its Human Origin; the first of which is the natural incongruity of sacrificial worship-its unsuitableness to the dictates of reason. The mode in which he meets this objection displays all the characteristics of a sagacious and discriminating mind. The stress of it, he observes, applies not to Eucharistic, but to Piacular sacrifice. The former, being an oblation of thanksgiving, is the natural and spontaneous offering of a heart impelled by gratitude to its Creator. The exception, then, taken to the natural reasonableness of sacrifice, bears only upon the sacrifice strictly so called, that of a living creature, slain, and offered as an holocaust upon the altar, and presented as an offering for sin. "In this kind of sacrifice," says he, "two conditions are to be distinguished: the guilt of the worshipper, and the atonement for, or expiation of, his sin." (p. 21.) In reference to the second condition, the expiatory or atoning power of sacrifice, the following candid acknowledgments are made.

"Instead of attempting to deduce the doctrine of expiation and atonement by animal sacrifice from the light of nature, or the principles of reason, I confess myself unable to comprehend, with the most ignorant, how it can ever be grounded on any such principles, or justified by them. There exists no discernible connection between the one and the other. On the contrary, Nature has nothing to say for such an expiatory power, and Reason every thing to say against it. For that the life of a brute creature should ransom the life of a man; that its blood should have any virtue to wash away his sin, or purify his conscience, or redeem his penalty; or that the involuntary sufferings of a being, itself unconscious and irrational, should have a moral efficacy to his benefit, or pardon; or be able to restore him with God; these are things, repugnant to the sense of reason, incapable of being brought into the scale of the first ideas of nature, and contradictory to all ine religion, natural and revealed. For as to the remission of sin, it is plainly altogether within the prerogative of God; an act of his mere mercy; and since it is so, every thing relating to the conveyance and the sanction, the possession and the security of it, can spring only from his appointment. Reason teaches repentance as a preliminary condi tion to the hope of pardon; but reason can do no more. External rites merely human, whether rites of sacrifice, or any other, may exhibit the repentance, but they cannot rise above the efficacy of that

genu

inward act which they exhibit. They cannot supply the shortness, or cure the infirmity, or satisfy the doubt, of its pretensions. The human instruments are here infinitely unequal to the end proposed. They may speak the suppliant suing for pardon; they can never speak the suppliant absolved. And though mere natural reason, when best informed, may not always have thought justly, or argued soberly on the subject of repentance, we may confidently assert that one of its last resources would have been, that of adopting the blood of a victim as the positive remedy for the guilt of moral transgression.

"If, therefore, the primitive age had its expiatory sacrifices, sacrifices framed according to this standard, it would be difficult to account for them as rational rites; still more difficult to think that under the palpable incapacity of their human origin they could have been accepted by God. No expiatory sacrifice must have been of God's own appointment, to reconcile it either to God, or to man himself, till he was fallen under a deplorable superstition." P. 27.

These conclusions, as just as forcibly expressed, render it essential to our author's system to evince, that in the primitive religion no expiatory or atoning virtue is ascribed to sacrifice. This he endeavours to accomplish by an appeal to the Scripture history; observing, that in the offerings of Abel, in the sacrifice of Noah, and in the oblations of the patriarchs, the sacrificial worship is given with the utmost simplicity of description. The altar is raised, the oblation is brought, and the victim is sacrificed; but with what notions, with what specific intent, is not defined. (p. 30.) This, he conceives, becomes more apparent by contrasting it with the different scene which meets our view on turning to the Mosaic law: "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 an atonement for the soul." (Levit. xvii. 11.) This doctrine of the atoning power of blood, he thinks, is a new doctrine, and one of which we find no positive information, nor any probable yestige in the primeval religion. (p. 32.) It is from disregarding this distinction, he asserts, and from viewing primitive sacrifice through the law of Moses, that many writers, as Bishops Taylor and Warburton and Dr. Spencer, have been led into erroneous notions of the nature and character of sacrifice in its first usage, p. 33.

Whether the author be fully borne out in his strictures on these eminent writers; whether he have substantiated his idea that no expiatory virtue was annexed to primitive sacrifice; whether, if the permission to eat animal food was subsequent to the deluge, man could have any right over the life of the creature, and, by consequence, any right to offer an animal sacrifice;

whether the declaration, that "unto Adam, and to his wife, did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them," (Gen. iii, 21.) do not imply, that as it cannot be supposed God would permit the taking away of the lives of animals merely for clothing, the grant of animal food not being given till the flood, the skins could be no other than those of animals slain in sacrifice-we shall not attempt to determine. We cannot, however, pass over this part of Mr. Davison's work without expressing a doubt, whether, supposing it fully proved that there is no natural incongruity with reason in sacrificial worship, a single step is made towards proving it to have originated in human invention. If the rite of sacrifice be contrary to the dictates of natural reason, it probably had some other source; but if it be consonant with reason, it may nevertheless have been instituted by a divine command. It would be absurd to reject the claim of a divine origin merely on the ground of consentaneousness with the natural dictates of human reason. Though Archbishop Magee and many others contend for the unreasonableness of sacrifice, as Mr. Davison does with respect to piacular sacrifice, there are others of a different opinion, who deem it irreverent to suppose that the Deity would adopt a rite on account of its being contrary to human reason; and yet contend, with equal zeal, for its divine origin. After all, the natural reasonableness or unreasonableness of sacrifice is a subject upon which the human mind is scarcely competent to form a judgment, without a knowledge of the whole scheme of Providence in the redemption of the world,-which we neither have nor can have*.

It is a matter of still higher moment to investigate the grounds which have been alleged for the divine institution of sacrifice; and accordingly Mr. Davison, who is too sagacious to omit any point essential to the inquiry, enters in the next place upon this discussion. Justly concluding that no topic of importance can have escaped the penetration of Archbishop Magee, he resolves to break a lance with this most able champion of the divine origin of the Rite, the main grounds of whose argument, as he observes, are laid, 1. In certain notions respecting the nature and object of Abel's faith; 2. In a corrected version of the text relating to Cain, Gen. iv. 7; 3. In the testimony of the divine acceptance granted to the sacrifices of Abel and others; 4. In a comparison of the sacrifice of Abel with that of Christ; (Heb. xii. 24.) And lastly, in some general reflections which represent the pri

See the profound remarks of Bishop Butler, Analogy of Nat. and Rev. Relig. p. 2. cap. v. For the opinions of Pagans see Grotius de Satisfactione Christi; Faber's Origin of Pagan Idolatry, lib, 2, cap, viii.; Magee's Disc, on Atonement, Noș, 5, 23, et al,

mitive and the Mosaic worship as united in a common system P. 44.

Reserving the first of these topics till he comes to the doctrinal evidence of Scripture, and esteeming it a sufficient answer to the third, to reply," that unless expiatory sacrifice, and the capacity of divine acceptance, are to be taken for convertible terms in the argument; unless every other sacrifice is to be excluded from the primitive worship, and from the divine favour, there is an end of our reliance on that topic," (p. 45.) he proceeds to review the text relating to Cain. "If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, SIN LIETH AT THE DOOR:" where the clause in capitals is rendered by Archbishop Magee, "a sin-offering lieth at the door," that is, to make an atonement with, if thy deeds are evil. This explanation, first proposed by Lightfoot, has been espoused by Kennicott, Pilkington, Parkhurst, Faber, Boothroyd, &c. The chief grounds upon which it rests are, 1st. The grammatical structure-for the word, though feminine, is here connected with the masculine verb y, which is perfectly consistent with the supposition that denotes a sin-offering; and 2dly, The peculiar force of the verb 27, which strictly implies couching or lying down as a beast.

This criticism it is imperative upon Mr. Davison to invalidate, or his cause is lost; and it is but justice to him to say, that, whether successfully or not, he has displayed much ingenuity. To the first reason, the peculiarity of the grammatical construction, he replies, that the Hebrew idiom is far from tenacious of its forms in this respect, and that the freedom of this language renders it unsafe to trust to such a principle of criticism; that the evidence of parallel instances of construction, by which it is supported, is incorrect; and that the new interpretation is neither satisfactory nor consistent. Such is the substance of his reply, for we cannot enter into the details; and it is obvious that it does by no means subvert the proposed version of Gen. iv. 7. In all languages there are anomalies, but it is one of the most indisputable of philological canons, that we are never to have recourse to them without necessity; and granting the truth of the author's observation as to the Hebrew idiom, it still remains to be inquired whether the grammatical structure of the text in question demands, or at least sanctions, the new rendering. The instances adduced as parallel, may not be so without affecting the criticism in dispute:-as to the unsuitableness of it, plausible things may be said on both sides, and it is at best a dangerous principle to apply our own ideas of fitness and unfitness to the operations of criticism and philology. Leaving the deci