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apostate race the hope of a reconciliation with God through the promised instrumentality of a certain woman-born Deliverer: no person, I think, who reads the entire volume of Holy Scripture with even ordinary attention, can reasonably hesitate to admit.

The existence, therefore, of such a connection will obviously prepare us to expect, in some leading particulars at least, a marked affinity.

I. Now the most cursory reader of the Bible can scarcely have failed to observe, simply as a naked matter of fact, that every of the three Dispensations is characterized by the very extraordinary rite of animal sacrifice: animal sacrifice, I mean, as contradistinguished from vegetable oblation. Each, with whatever object, recognises the sacrificial devotement, by a violent death, of that which possesses animal life.

Under the Evangelical Dispensation, the man Jesus Christ, mysteriously uniting the humanity to the divinity, is himself the sacrifice: under the Levitical Dispensation, and under the Patriarchal Dispensation, the sacrifice consists of various bestial victims.

Here then, in a point altogether arbitrary, we have, so far as the bare outward fact is concerned, an affinity strongly marked and readily

discerned. Whether the affinity extends beyond the bare outward fact to the moral inward purpose, has not, in the present stage of our inquiry, been as yet determined. The outward fact is indisputable: the inward purpose, in the three several cases of the three connected Dispensations, abstractedly may, or may not, be identical; for identity of outward fact does not of necessity involve an identity of inward purpose.

II. According to the general analogy of all God's works, the three connected Dispensations are clearly progressive.

Hence, if we desire a key to the whole system, we must obviously seek it in that concluding Dispensation which consummates and perfects its two allied predecessors.

Now, under this consummating Dispensation, the outward fact is the sacrifice of an animated human victim and the object, which we wish to ascertain, is the inward purpose or intention of that sacrifice.

On such a point, we are by no means left in a state of vague uncertainty and bootless conjecture. We are assured, in language too plain to be misapprehended save by a predetermined manufacturer of systems, that the inward purpose of the sacrifice of Christ was strictly piacular or

expiatory. He died on the altar of the cross, in order that he might atone for our sins, and in order that he might thus effect our reconciliation with his justly-offended Father: he became strictly what the Hebrews denominate a sin-offering of atonements *.

Such, if there be any certainty in language, was the inward purpose of the outward fact of our Saviour Christ's sacrificial devotement †.

III. We have now obtained what we may not unreasonably presume to be the key of the whole system. Presumption, however, is not assurance. Hence, although piacularity be the inward purpose of animal sacrifice under the Christian Dispensation, we have no right forthwith to determine positively, that it must therefore be the inward purpose of animal sacrifice under each of the two preceding Dispensations: still less are we warranted in asserting a studied and intentional connection, between the various animal sacrifices under Patriarchism and the Law on the one hand, and the one animal sacrifice under the Gospel on the other hand. Before judgment is pronounced, evidence must be examined.

* Exod. xxx. 10.

† Rom. v. 6-11. Ephes. v. 2.

1. Let us begin with examining the evidence attendant upon the Levitical Dispensation.

(1.) Here the question is, Whether, from any sufficient authority, we can learn something fixed and definite, as to the inward purpose of animal sacrifice under the Law of Moses.

Now, on this point, the language, both of the Levitical Dispensation itself, and of its successor the Christian Dispensation, is full and explicit.

The language of the Levitical Dispensation itself pronounces, that the blood of the animal victim is shed upon the altar, in order to make an atonement for the souls of the offending Israelites*.

And, analogously, the language of the Christian Dispensation pronounces, that the high-priest of Israel went alone once every year into the second tabernacle with blood, which he offered for himself and for the errors of the people †.

From such testimonies it is evident, that the inward purpose of animal sacrifice, under the Levitical Dispensation, was piacular. Whence we learn, that its inward purpose, both under the Levitical Dispensation and under the Christian Dispensation, is strictly identical. In each case, the victim is devoted piacularly: that is to say,

*Levit. xvii. 11.

† Heb. ix. 7.

in each case, the victim is devoted under the precise aspect of making an atonement,

(2.) The outward fact and the inward purpose of animal sacrifice, both under the Christian Dispensation and under the Levitical Dispensation, being thus strictly identical; we are naturally led to make yet another inquiry.

Here then the question is, Whether this identity of outward fact and of inward purpose, so far as the case of animal sacrifice under the Christian Dispensation and the Levitical Dispensation is concerned, be a mere identity: or whether it involves also the additional idea of a studied and intentional connection.

The present question is fully answered in the Scriptures of the New Covenant. From them we learn, that there is not only an identity of outward fact and of inward purpose: but likewise that there is a studied and intentional connection, between the various piacular animal sacrifices under the Law, and the one piacular animal sacrifice under the Gospel. The piacular sacrifices under the Law, we are assured, had in themselves no moral efficacy of making an atonement: they were potent, simply as prophetic types, or images, or pictures, or shadowy representations of that one piacular sacrifice under the Gospel, which really possessed a

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