annual expiation appointed, the people would have been ready to imagine that every offering which they had presented to God had actually taken away the sin for which it had been offered. To guard against this fatal error, a day was appointed annually for a more especial remembrance of their sins, and for a deeper humiliation of their souls before God on account of them. Thus they were taught that neither their repentances nor their sacrifices had really availed to put away their sins : for, if they had, there had been no occasion for a repetition of them. Moreover, the same ordinances being still appointed annually, and annually observed, they were made to feel, that not even these more solemn rites had been able to prevail for the expiation of sin ; so that, in fact, the guilt contracted throughout their whole lives still abode upon their souls ; no offerings, which they had ever presented, having been able to remove it. In the view of this, they were particularly required to "afflict their souls ^" And, in truth, this ordinance was well calculated to produce in them the deepest humiliation: for, having occasion every year to review their lives through the past year ; and to add, as it were, the sum of their recent iniquities to the incalculable score that was against them in consequence of former transgressions ; and being at the same time necessitated to see that nothing which they either had done, or could do, could cancel the smallest portion of their debt ; they would, of necessity, be led to cry for mercy with the deepest contrition, and to acknowledge their need of that Saviour whom they were instructed to expect.]
2. To shew, then, the insufficiency of the legal sacrifices —
[Nothing could carry stronger conviction with it than this particular ordinance : for, if former sacrifices had prevailed, why should they be repeated ? What occasion was there for the annual offerings, if the occasional ones had answered their full end ? or why should the same sins be atoned for in a future year, which have been expiated in the present year, if the present expiation has been satisfactory and complete ? Here, then, was the axe laid to the root of all self-righteous conceits. It was to no purpose that these ordinances were of Divine appointment ; or that they were observed according to the strict letter of the law : they were never intended to serve as real expiations of sin ; nor was the observance of them ever intended to form a justifying righteousness before God : they were intended only to shadow forth a Saviour, to whom all must look, and through whom all must be justified; and the very repetition of them was, in fact, not only a remembrance of
a Lev. xvi. 29, 31.