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If the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?

AMONG several important questions, to which these words invite our attention, one of considerable interest and difficulty is the NEGATIVE character of the MOSAIC SACRIFICIAL ATONEMENTS, or the nature of their inferiority to the Christian atonement.

For the doctrine of the atonement by Jesus Christ, or the reconciliation of a fallen and a sinful world to their offended Maker by the sacrifice of the Saviour upon the cross, is almost universally admitted to be the great foundation of the Gospel. Upon the atonement effected by our Redeemer are founded equally all the present privileges of Christ's elect people, and all their hopes of future glory.

And those who reject this great doctrine are raised to an unhappy importance neither by their numbers nor their arguments, but by the magnitude of their error.

And it is as universally admitted among Christians, that the Mosaic sacrifices have an immediate connection with the Christian atonement. There is no dispute concerning the origin of these, as of the earlier sacrifices before the Law. It is agreed that the sacrifices under the Law were all of them either originally appointed by it, or adopted into it by the express command of the Almighty. Of some of them moreover the prospective and typical use is unequivocally admitted; and of the general system of the Mosaic sacrifices it is confessed, that they were designed to convey most important instruction, both to the Jew and to the Christian-to the Christian, strengthening the evidence of the great doctrine of the Gospel, and illustrating its meaning, and enforcing its importance; and preparing the Jew for his great office in the reception and propagation of Christianity, both by the positive and the negative teaching of the typical system, both by what his sacrifices did, and by what they could not effect.

And further, as to the positive instruction thus afforded to the Jew, there is little dispute among Christians. It is at least sufficiently agreed, that the Mosaic sacrifices tended in various ways to excite and to foster many of those religious impressions which are the most appropriate to beings fallen and redeemed: the sense of guilt, and the hope of pardon; the prospect of a mysterious road to reconciliation and favour through mediation, intercession, and vicarious suffering; the unworthiness and vileness of man, the holiness and justice, yet the mercy and placability, of his Maker.

But with respect to the negative instruction conveyed by

the same typical system, the agreement is not so complete. All allow indeed that there was some great inferiority in the Mosaic Sacrifices; the shadow must needs be inferior to the substance; the type below its antitype. And it is plain, that when St. Paul would instruct the Hebrews in the superior glory of the Gospel above the Law, he builds greatly upon some acknowledged inferiority in the legal sacrifices. But it is not so clear in what that inferiority consisted. In the following Discourse, therefore, I shall offer some considerations upon this question; endeavouring to inquire into the nature and extent of the MOSAIC ATONEMENTS, and to discover the principle of their INFERIORITY TO THE GREAT ATONEMENT OF THE GOSPEL; or at least the principle of their inferiority in some of the more remarkable cases, and especially in those to which the text more expressly refers.

I. And with this view it is better that we should even dismiss from our minds all consideration both of the various subordinate distinctions between the several Mosaic sacrifices, and of the many collateral uses to which they were applied. Almost every act of public worship under the Law either consisted in offerings and sacrifices, or was accompanied by them: but we are not at present concerned with them as employed in hallowing a vow, or in ratifying the covenant, or in the praise or adoration of the Creator, in celebrating the mercies of His general Providence, or acknowledging and commemorating His special mercies to His chosen and redeemed people—but only as intended to express a sense of uncleanness or guilt, self-abhorrence and repentance, the need of purification and par

don, the desire of atonement, that is to say, of reconciliation, acceptance, or forgiveness of sins, whether those of individuals, or of families, or of the whole congregation of Israel. Still less need we attend to the names of sacrifices derived from the ceremonial, or from the substance, of the offering (as meat and drink offerings, heave and wave offerings); nor to any other sacrifices but those in which blood was shed, and which are usually distinguished into four classes, burnt offerings, and peace offerings, sin and trespass offerings. And even with these we are concerned only so far as the blood of the victim was designed to make atonement for the life of him who offered it, according to the gracious but mysterious grant of the Almighty to the people of Israel," 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 "."

What then were the extent and the efficacy of this atonement?

1. Two answers are commonly returned to this question; both of them attributing, but upon different principles, an inferiority to the Mosaic atonement below the Christian.

For some contend, that, with the exception of a few slighter cases of moral offences particularly exempted from the general rule, the Mosaic atonements did not in fact extend to moral offences at all, but were limited to transgressions of the ritual or ceremonial Law. Others, on the contrary, conceive, that the forgiveness of all offences, moral as well as ceremonial, was obtained through the

a Lev. xvii. 11.

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