(_a_) The universe is the expression of the Mind of God;
(_b_) God is love,
There follow, by a natural and inevitable law, the two results which
accompany every act of sin.
(_a_) The destruction of the true self, the Christ, the Divine Life
within man.
(_b_) Separation from God, which is death. We separate these results in
thought; but it will now be sufficiently obvious that they are, in fact,
one.
Is this taking too serious a view of sin? I do not think that this can
be maintained in view of our whole preceding argument.
But are we taking too serious a view of little sins, of sins which spring
from ignorance, of the sins of children?
We have already seen that knowledge and freedom are both necessary to
constitute an act of sin. If ignorance is complete, then complete also
is the absence of sin. For sin lies not in any material act, but in
consciousness and will. The will alone can be sinful, as the will alone
can be good. And it is entirely consistent with our standpoint, to admit
the existence of an almost infinite number of degrees of sinfulness.
* * * * *
Now we reach this immensely important result. We having sinned, our
supreme need is forgiveness. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a Gospel for
this precise reason, that it meets, as it claimed from the beginning to
meet, this uttermost need of men. Its offer is, always and everywhere,
the forgiveness, the remission of sins.
But what are we to understand by forgiveness? The forgiveness which is
offered to us in the name of Jesus Christ is not, and our own moral sense
ought to assure us that it could not be, the being let off punishment.
"Thou shalt call His name Jesus, for He shall save His people from their
sins," not from any external pains or penalties of their sins. To be
saved from sin, is to have sin brought to an end, abolished within us. It
is the recovery of the true self, the restoration of that union with God
which is, here and now, eternal life. In other words, understanding the
Divine Wrath as we have seen reason to understand it, forgiveness must
mean to cease to be, or to cease to identify ourselves with, that in us
which is the object of the Divine Wrath. In short, forgiveness is, in
the great phrase of St. Paul, reconciliation with God.
How, then, is forgiveness or reconciliation to be obtained? The answer
which the apostle gives is this: "God was in Christ reconciling the world
to Himself." Let us try to see what this means.
* * * * *
There can only be one way of ceasing to be the object of the Divine
Wrath, and that is by identifying oneself with it; if we may use the
catch-phrase, by becoming its subject instead of its object. This means
that, so far as is in our power, we must enter into the Divine Mind in
regard to sin, and our own sins in particular. Up to the limit of our
power, we must make that Mind our own mind, we must hate sin, and our
sins, as God hates them.
There is one word in the New Testament which expresses all this, and that
is the word only partially and inadequately translated "repentance." The
word thus represented is [Greek text], and [Greek text] is exactly "a
change of mind." It really means the coming over to God's side, the
entire revolution of our mental attitude and outlook with regard to sin.
The word stands for self-identification with the Wrath of God, with the
Divine Mind in its outlook upon sin. That change of mind is itself
reconciliation, forgiveness, remission of sins. And that which alone
makes [Greek text] and, therefore, forgiveness, possible, is the Death of
Jesus Christ upon the Cross.
For that Death is the perfect revelation, in the only way in which it
could be interpreted to us, that is, in terms of our common human life,
of the Wrath of God, the Divine hostility to, and repudiation of sin. For
the Death of Christ was the complete repudiation of sin, by God Himself,
in our manhood. The Incarnate Son laid down His life in the perfect
fulfilment of the mission received from the Father. "He became obedient
unto death." He died, rather than, by the slightest concession to that
which was opposed to the Divine Will, be unfaithful or disobedient to
that mission. "He died to sin once for all." His Death was His final,
complete repudiation of sin. And thus it was the absolutely perfect
revelation of the Divine Mind in regard to sin.
This is the truth which underlies all the utterly misleading language
about Christ's Death as a penalty, or about Christ Himself as the Ideal
Penitent. Both penalty and penitence imply personal guilt and the
personal consciousness of guilt. Both conceptions destroy the
significance of the Cross. Only the Sinless One could die to sin, could
perfectly repudiate sin, could perfectly disclose the Mind of God in
relation to sin.
The Death of Christ was indeed, as we have seen, the result of His
perfect obedience in a world of sin, of disobedience. The historical
conditions under which He fulfilled His Mission, necessitated that His
repudiation of sin should take the form which it did actually take. We
may be sure, too, that He felt, as only the Sinless Son of God could
feel, the injury, the affront, the malignity, the degradation of sin. It
is the sense of this which has given rise to the modern idea of Christ as
the Penitent for the world's sin. But if we are to understand the word
in this sense, then we are entirely changing its meaning and connotation.
And we cannot do this, in regard to words like penitent and penitence,
without producing confusion of thought. It is time, surely, that this
misleading and mischievous fallacy of the penitence of Christ should be
finally abandoned by writers on the Atonement.
But, so far, we have only seen that the Death of Christ to sin, His
repudiation of sin to the point of death, is the complete revelation of
the Divine Wrath, the Divine Mind in regard to sin. If we could only
make all this our own, then we should have actually attained to the
changed mind, the [Greek text], which is reconciliation with God.
Now, it is a most significant fact that, in the New Testament, repentance
is ever closely coupled with faith. Faith, in its highest, its most
Christian application, is not faith _in_ Christ, in the sense of
believing that the revelation made by Christ is true, but in the strange
and pregnant phrase of St. Paul and St. John, faith _into_ Christ. And
by this is meant entire self-abandonment, the utter giving up of
ourselves to Christ. To have faith into Christ is the perfect expression
of discipleship. It is the supreme act of self-surrender by which a man
takes Christ henceforth to be the Lord and Master of his life. It
implies, no doubt, the existence of certain intellectual convictions; but
the faith which rests there is, as St. James tells us, the faith of the
demons "who also tremble." In the full sense, faith is an act of the
whole personal being. And as the will is our personality in action, we
may say that faith into Christ is, above all, an affair of the will.
But thus to surrender oneself to Christ, to make Him, and not self, the
centre and governing principle of our life is, in other words, to make
His Will our will, His Mind our mind. St. Paul is exactly describing the
full fruition and final issue of faith when he says of himself, "I live,
yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me."
Faith _is_ self-identification with the Mind of Christ. And that Mind is
the Mind of Him Who died to sin, Who by dying repudiated sin, and
revealed His implacable hatred of and hostility to it, which is the
hatred and hostility of God, in our manhood, to the moral evil which
destroys it.
Thus the man, who, by the supreme act of faith into Christ, has made
Christ's Mind his own mind, has thereby gained the changed mind, the
[Greek text], in regard to sin, which is the ceasing to be the object of
God's wrath, because it is the being identified with it. He is,
henceforth, reconciled to God. The state of alienation and death is
over. In Christ he, too, has died to sin. The false self, in him, has
been put to death. With Christ he has been crucified. With Christ he
lives henceforth to God, in that union and fellowship with Him, which is
the life eternal, the life which is life indeed. His true self, the
Christ in him, is alive for evermore in the power of the Resurrection.
That is the final issue, the glorious consummation, of faith. But so far
as faith is in us at all, so far as daily with more complete surrender we
give ourselves to Christ, and take Him for our Lord and Master, the
process, of which the fulfilment, the perfect end, is reconciliation,
union, resurrection, eternal life, has begun in us. And He Who has,
visibly and manifestly, "begun in us" that "good work," will assuredly
"accomplish it until the day of Jesus Christ."
But something more yet remains to be said. Every theory of the Atonement
in the end must come to grief, which is based upon the assumption that
Christ is separate from the race which He came to redeem, or the Church,
which is the part of humanity in actual process of redemption. Professor
Inge, in his work on _Mysticism and Personal Idealism_, has justly
denounced the miserable theory which regards human personalities as so
many impervious atoms, as self-contained and isolated units. This
popular view is theologically disastrous when the Atonement is
interpreted in the light, or rather the darkness of it.
As the Son of man He is the Head of the human race, "the last Adam" in
the language of St. Paul. No mere sovereignty over mankind is denoted by
that title. He is that living, personal Thought of God which each man,
as man, embodies and, with more or less distortion, represents. He Who
became Incarnate is, as He ever was, the Light which lighteneth every man
coming into the world.
It was because of this, His vital and organic connexion with the race,
and with every member of it, that He could become Incarnate, and that His
sufferings and triumph could have more than a pictorial, or
representative, or vicarious efficacy. His work of redemption was
rendered possible by His relation, as the Word, to the whole universe,
and to mankind.
It was because of this, that He could become "the Head of the Body, the
Church." Former ages interpreted the Atonement in the terms of Roman
law. It is the mission of our age to learn to interpret it in terms of
biology. We are only just beginning, by the aid of modern thought, to
discover the true, profound meaning of the biological language of the New
Testament. "As the body is one, and has many members, so also is the
Christ." Not, let us mark, the Head only, but the Body. The Church is
"the fulness of Him Who at all points, in all men, is being fulfilled."
The words tell us of an organic growth. "I am the vine, ye are the
branches." Can any terms express organic connexion more clearly than
these?
It is our Head, to Whom we are bound by vital ties, in the mysterious
unity of a common life, Who has repudiated sin by dying to it. By
personal surrender to Christ we make His Mind our own; but we are enabled
to do so, because, in so doing, we are attaining to our own true mind, we
are entering into the possession of our own true selves, we are "winning
our souls," realising the Christ-nature within us. By faith and
sacraments, that which is potentially ours becomes our own in actual
fact.
In simpler language, and in more familiar but not less true words, we who
are members of Christ's Body, in all our weak attempts after repentance
and faith, are not left to our own unaided resources, but are at every
point aided and enabled to advance to final, complete reconciliation and
union by the Spirit of the Christ working in us.
He is no merely external reconciler. He reconciles us from within,
working along with our own wills, to create that changed mind which is
His own Mind revealed upon the Cross for no other reason than that it
might become our mind, the most real and fundamental thing in us, that
"new man, which is being renewed after the image of Him Who created him."
VI
REDEMPTION
"Ye shall therefore be perfect, as your Father in Heaven is
perfect."--MATT. V. 48.
"Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver from the body of this
death? Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord."--ROM. VII.
24, 25.
We have studied the meaning of reconciliation through the Cross. We have
said that to be reconciled to God means to cease to be the object of the
Wrath of God, that is, His hostility to sin. We can only cease to be the
objects of this Divine Wrath by identifying ourselves with it, by making
God's Mind in regard to sin, and our sins, our own mind. The Cross gives
us power to do this. For it reveals to us in the terms of humanity, that
is, in the only way in which it could be made intelligible to us, the
Divine Mind in its relation to sin. By faith, which is personal
surrender to Christ, His mind thus revealed becomes our mind. Thus we
attain to "repentance," in the New Testament sense of the changed mind
and outlook upon sin. And the motive power to faith and repentance is
supplied by our union with Christ.
But all this is not yet enough. We have not exhausted the glory, the
full meaning of the Cross. If this were indeed all, the work of our
salvation would be incomplete. For I may indeed have, in Christ, died to
sin; in Him I may have repudiated it; but the task of life still lies
before me to be fulfilled, and that task is nothing short of this: the
complete putting off of sin, the complete putting on of holiness, the
final achievement of that union with God which is life eternal.
For this I was made. "Ye shall therefore be perfect, as your Father in
heaven is perfect." Our Lord is not, in these words, enunciating a rule
of perfection for a few saintly souls. He is laying down the law, the
standard of all human lives. To fall short of this, is to fall short of
what it means to be a man.
The proof that this is so, is to be found in our own consciousness,
bearing its witness to these words of Jesus Christ. The one most
constant feature in human life is its restlessness, the feeling of
dissatisfaction which broods over its best achievements, the attainment
of all its desires. That very restlessness and dissatisfaction is the
witness to the dignity of our nature, the grandeur of our destiny. We
were made for God, for the attainment of eternal life through union with
Him. No being who was merely finite, could be conscious of its finitude.
Spite of yourselves ye witness this,
Who blindly self or sense adore.
Else, wherefore, leaving your true bliss,
Still restless, ask ye more?
"Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart knoweth no rest, till it
find rest in Thee."
Then look at the other picture. Side by side with the glory of our
calling, place the shame and the misery of what we are. My desires, my
passions are ever at war with the true self, and too often overcome it.
"I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and
bringing me into captivity to the law of sin and death which is in my
members." And so there goes up the bitter cry, "Wretched man that I am!
who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"
Now the Cross of Jesus Christ is the Divine answer to this great and
exceeding bitter cry of our suffering, struggling, sinful humanity. For
the Cross is not merely an altar, but a battlefield, by far the greatest
battlefield in all human history. That was the crisis of the conflict
between good and evil which gives endless interest to the most
insignificant human life, which is the source of the pathos and the
tragedy, the degradation and the glory, of the long history of our race.
It is the human struggle which we watch upon the Cross: the human victory
there won which we acclaim with endless joy and exultation. Man faced
the fiercest assault of the foe, and man conquered.
O loving wisdom of our God!
When all was sin and shame,
A second Adam to the fight
And to the rescue came.
O wisest love! that flesh and blood,
Which did in Adam fail,
Should strive afresh against the foe,
Should strive, and should prevail.
Man conquered man's foe, and in the only way in which that foe could be
conquered, the way of obedience. "He became obedient unto death." The
Death was in a real sense the victory, for its only meaning and value
consisted in its being the crown and culmination of His life-long
obedience. The Resurrection itself, in one aspect of it, was but the
symbol, the "sign," of that victory which was already achieved upon the
Cross.
But what has this to do with us? It cannot be too often repeated, that
it has nothing to do with us, if Christ be merely "Another," separate
from us as we are, or imagine ourselves to be, separate from each other.
That which He took of the Virgin Mary, and took in the only way in which
it could have been taken, by the Virgin Birth, was not a separate human
individuality, but human nature; that nature which we all share. It was
in that nature that He faced and overcame our enemy.
Here we pause to note a difficulty based on a misunderstanding. If
Christ were a Divine Person, working in and through human nature, if that
humanity which He assumed were itself impersonal, then how could He have
had a human will? And, after all, is an impersonal human nature really
human? That is the difficulty, and the very fact that we feel it as a
difficulty, is a proof that we have not yet grasped that conception of
the Divine Nature which underlies the belief in the Incarnation. God and
man are not beings of a different order. The humanity of every man is
the indwelling in him of the Word Who became flesh. Each one of us is a
shadow, a reflection of the Incarnation. In Jesus Christ God came; and,
it would be equally true to say, in Him first, man came. All human
nature, I believe it would be true to say all organic nature, pointed
forward to the Incarnation as its fulfilment, as the justification for
its existence.
Thus, when it is said that the human nature of Christ was impersonal,
what is meant is, impersonal in the modern and restricted sense of
personality. The phrase is useful, when explained, to guard against the
idea, which is contrary to the very principle of the Atonement, that the
Son of man was just one more human soul added to the myriads of human
souls who have appeared on this planet. He Who became Incarnate is the
true self of every man, the very Light of true personality in all men. As
a matter of fact, He was more truly humanly Personal than any of the sons
of men, and all the more truly humanly Personal, because He was Divinely
Personal, the Word in the image of Whom man was made.
The immense significance of these truths in regard to our redemption is
this, that a separate individuality cannot be imparted to us, but a
common nature can. And that nature which the Eternal Word assumed of the
Virgin Mary, and in which He conquered sin and death, is communicated to
us by His Spirit, above all, in the sacraments of Baptism and the Holy
Communion. Here is the heart of the Atonement.
That victory over sin and death is mine, and yet not mine. That is the
splendid paradox which lies at the very root of Christianity. It is
mine, because I share in that Human Nature, which by its perfect
obedience, the obedience unto death, "triumphed gloriously" upon the
Cross. It is not mine until, by a deliberate act of my will, in self-
surrender to Christ, I have made it my own. By grace and by faith, not
by one of these without the other, we become one with Him Who died and
rose again. It is faith, the hand of the soul stretched out to receive,
which accepts and welcomes grace, the Hand of God stretched out to give.
These great thoughts we will pursue in our next address. But meanwhile,
we have at least seen that the Cross is both victory and attainment:
victory over the sin by which I have been so long held in bondage;
attainment of all I can be, all I long to be, all I was made by God to
be. "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord."
VII
REDEMPTION (CONTINUED)
"He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, hath life
eternal."--JOHN VI. 54.
We were made for holiness, union with God, eternal life. These are but
different expressions for one and the same thing. For holiness is the
realisation of our manhood, of that Divine Image which is the true self,
expressing itself and acting, as it does in us, through the highest of
animal forms. That perfect self-realisation is not merely dependent
upon, but is union with God, at its beginning, throughout its course, and
in its final consummation. And the life of self-realisation or holiness,
which is the life of union with God, is eternal. Eternal life is not, as
in the popular idea of it, an endless and wearisome prolongation of mere
existence. Primarily, the idea is of the quality, not the duration of
life. In the teaching of the New Testament, eternal life is a present
possession of Christians. "These things I write to you, who believe on
the Name of the Son of God, that ye may know that ye have eternal life."
Being as it is a moral and spiritual reality, it is outside time and
space. It is unaffected by "changes and chances." It is for ever beyond
the reach of the temporal processes of decay, corruption, death. Here it
manifests itself in service, that service of our fellows which is the
service of God. Hereafter, it will be manifested in higher and more
exalted forms of service. "Have thou authority over ten, over five,
cities."
Now all this, the consummation and glorious fruit of our humanity,
holiness, union with God, life eternal, we see already realised in Jesus
Christ, the Son of man. We see it realised, as we have learnt, not in a
separate, solitary, individual, isolated life, but in that common nature
which "for us men and for our salvation" He assumed of the Virgin Mary.
All that is in Him was in Him first, in order that it might be in us. And
this is the important point: it can only be in us by virtue of our union
with Him. That union He describes under the vivid and forcible metaphor
of eating His flesh, and drinking His blood. "He that eateth My flesh,
and drinketh My blood, hath life eternal." His flesh and blood--a common
Jewish phrase for human nature--is precisely that common nature which He
assumed, in which He died to sin, which He raised from the dead and
exalted to the Right Hand of God, and which He imparts to us, by His
Spirit given to dwell in us for evermore.
The doctrine of the Atonement is incomplete, it is irrational, until it
is completed by the doctrine of the Spirit, the Giver of Life. As He is
the source of life in all living organisms, so He is in Christians the
source of the Christ-life. He comes to dwell in us, not simply as the
Spirit, but as the Spirit of Christ--the Spirit Who first created, and
then "descended" to abide in the Perfect Manhood. That gift of the
Spirit of Christ as the indwelling source of the life of Christ, and the
means of the Presence of Christ in us, is the characteristic gift of the
New Dispensation. It is His work to make us ever more and more partakers
of Christ, to be perpetually feeding us with His flesh and blood.
And, as we are about to speak of the Holy Communion, it is well to insist
first on this, that the work of the Spirit in there feeding us with the
flesh and blood of the Son of man is a continuous process. It is of the
very essence of what is meant by being a Christian. "If any man have not
the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His." The sixth chapter of St.
John's Gospel is not a mere prediction of the Eucharist. It is the
revelation of that principle of which the Eucharist is an illustration.
Our Communions are the supreme moments, the crises, in a process which is
for ever going on, the feeding of us, by the Spirit, with the flesh and
blood, the holy and victorious manhood, of the Redeemer.
What relation, then, can this spiritual process have to the material
substances, to the bread and wine which are used in the Eucharist? This
question at once opens out into the larger one, as to the relation
between matter and spirit. Now, that question could not be dealt with at
all satisfactorily without undertaking a vastly larger task than we are
prepared for at the present moment. We should have to ask, What is,
after all, meant by "matter," and what by "spirit"?
But something may be achieved on a much humbler scale. It will suffice
for our present purpose to concentrate our attention on a remarkable fact
which seems to underlie all our experience. And we will approach the
statement of this fact by first recalling the familiar definition of a
sacrament, which fastens upon the union of the outward and visible with
the inward and invisible as being the essence of what is meant by a
sacrament. Now, the fact we have in view is this: _every_ outward object
in the world is, in this respect, a sacrament. What we seem to see is
everywhere spirit working through what we call "material" objects. That
sacramental principle of the universe is the very principle which
underlies our Lord's parables of Nature. Speaking more accurately, we
see in "matter" (1) the means of the self-revelation of spirit; (2) the
instrument by which spirit acts.
The human organism may serve as a type of this. Here is a spiritual
being, the Ego, in its will, its thoughts, its affections, invisible, and
it makes its presence manifest, and it acts, through the material
manifestation and instrument of itself, the body. To believers in God,
nature itself, in its deepest reality, is the revelation of the Divine
Presence, and the instrument of the Divine action. A beautiful sunset is
a veritable and genuine sacrament. In the light of this profound truth,
of matter as the manifestation and instrument of spirit, we are enabled
to see how futile was the ancient dispute concerning the number of the
Sacraments. In view of the fuller and larger knowledge which has come to
us, this, like so many other objects of theological strife, ought before
this to have been consigned to the limbo of forgotten controversies.
But in all this we have been, in fact, interpreting the whole universe in
the light of the Incarnation. For that is the supreme sacrament of all,
the very type and complete embodiment of the sacramental principle. There
we see the Divine manifesting Itself through, and using as the instrument
of its action, a Human, a "material" Body.
The Eucharist thus for the first time becomes intelligible. It is only
one particular illustration, although a most momentous one, of the
universal sacramental principle, of which all things else in the world
are also illustrations. There we have the Spirit manifesting itself and
acting, as always and everywhere, wherever "matter" is found; but in a
particular way, and for a particular purpose.
The bread and the wine are the material substances which He uses at the
critical moments in His perpetual action of feeding us with the flesh and
blood of the Son of man. And these elements were obviously chosen,
"ordained by Christ Himself," for their most significant symbolism. There
is no truer philosophy of the Eucharist than that which is contained in
the familiar words of the Church Catechism, which speak of "the
strengthening and refreshing of our souls by the Body and Blood of
Christ, as our bodies are by the bread and wine." That wonderful, and in
itself essentially sacramental process, by which the organism lives by
the incorporation and assimilation into its own substance of other
substances which we call foods, is the exact analogue of the way in which
our true, spiritual manhood lives by the incorporation and assimilation
of the manhood of Christ, that manhood which is holy, which exists in the
Divine Union, which has perfectly realised eternal life in the complete
dying to sin, and the complete putting on of holiness.
The Eucharist is, in the broadest sense, the final act in the drama of
our salvation. It is the means by which, by His own appointment, all
that Christ achieved _for_ us upon the Cross, the repudiation of, or
dying to sin, the realisation of perfect obedience, obedience unto death,
comes to be _in_ us, is made all our own.
But it is most important that we should ever remember that this truth has
two sides.
(i) It is Christ Who saves us; that is, Who is the actually putting away
of sin, attainment of holiness, union with God, eternal life, by what He
does in us. "Christ _for_ us" finds its perfect fulfilment and end in
"Christ _in_ us."
(ii) Yet, Christ does not save us apart from ourselves. Else the
Eucharist would be degraded to the level of some heathen, magical charm.
We must will and intend the putting off of sin, and the putting on of
holiness. We must recognise, and this is a truth of experience, our
complete inability to attain this without Him. That will, and that
recognition, are the repentance and faith which constitute the necessary
contribution on our part to the work of Christ for our salvation.
Our Communions are the most important moments in our lives. Each marks a
distinct and definite stage in the fulfilment of the purpose of God for
us, the fulfilment in us of all that is meant by the Death and
Resurrection of the Lord. We ought to come, therefore, not only after
due preparation, with repentance and faith, but also with hope and joy;
not to perform a duty, but to receive the best gift which God Himself can
bestow upon us--that gift which is the perfect conquest of sin, the
complete realisation of holiness, union with God, eternal life; the
fulfilment of every aspiration, the accomplishment of every dream, the
achievement of every glory, the crown, the consummation, the attainment
of our manhood in union with Jesus Christ the Son of man.
VIII
THE SACRIFICE
"For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of a heifer
sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: how
much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit
offered Himself to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve
the living God?"--HEB. IX. 13, 14.
No Christian doctrine is more commonly misunderstood than that of the
sacrifice of Christ. This misunderstanding arises from ignorance as to
the meaning of sacrifices in the ancient world.
Sacrifice is one of the earliest and most widely spread of all human
institutions. Behind the laws regulating sacrifice in the Old Testament
there lies the long history of Shemitic ritual and religion. These
sacrificial rites were not then introduced for the first time. They
formed part of the inheritance of the Israelites from their far-off
ancestors; an inheritance shared by them with the Ammonites and Edomites,
and other kindred and neighbouring nations. They differed from these not
in matter or form, but in the loftier moral and spiritual tone which
formed the peculiar and distinguishing mark of the Hebrew religion, and
in which we to-day can clearly trace the actions in the minds of men of
the Spirit of God.
It follows that it is hopeless to attempt to understand the sacrificial
teaching of the Old Testament without some grasp of the meaning of
sacrifice in the ancient world. Failure to attain this has led to the
idea that the sacrifice of Christ must mean the appeasing of an offended
Deity by blood and death. But this view of sacrifice is not merely a
heathen, but a late and debased heathen conception. "Shall I give my
first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of the
soul?" was the cry of the King of Moab, and it marks the lowest depth
into which the pagan idea of sacrifice had sunk. It is a genuine
instance of deterioration in ethnic religion. The primitive view was far
loftier and more spiritual than this.
Recent researches, dependent on the comparative method, into the earliest
forms of religion have brought to light two principles which underlay the
conception of sacrifice, and which to a great extent can be discerned
more clearly in the most ancient period than in later times. Now these
two principles which, taken together, constitute the primitive theory of
sacrifice, which make up the fundamental idea of it, however little
prehistoric man may have been capable of giving distinct and logical
expression to them, were these: