was his inalienable conviction that the visible world is merely pheno- menal, the temporary form or manifestation of the invisible, arche- typal world which alone is real and eternal. In the Epistle these two worlds are continually related by contrast. The unseen world [πράγματα οὐ βλεπόμενα xi. 1] is the eternal counterpart of this present order of things [αὕτη ἡ κτίσις ix. 11]; the reality, of which earthly things are but the shadow [σκία viii. 5]. The visible heaven and earth are one day to pass away, “as things that have been made” [ὡς πεποιημένων xii. 27], but this only in order that the eternal things which cannot be removed may remain alone existent.
On this broad philosophical basis, itself unshakable as the eternal things, the writer builds hisargument. Here he finds the key to the essential distinction between Mosaism and Christianity, as well as the proof of the superiority and finality of the latter. The Mosaic dispensation belongs to the seen and temporal, the Christian to the unseen and eternal. In the one there isa tabernacle “made with hands”; a sanctuary of this world, equipped and furnished with material objects; the sacrifices are of bulls and goats; the rest ap- pointed cannot be eternal, because it is in a visible earthly land; their holy city is one which can be profaned by Roman armies; above all, their priesthood is dependent on the flesh. How manifest that all these things belong to the earthly temporal order. The whole dis- pensation is involved with things visible, tangible, material, evanescent.
But Mosaism was not wholly useless. It was a shadow of the good things to come: and to these real, eternal things Christ in- troduces men. Christ Himself, being Son of God, belongs to the eternal order. In Him we have throughout to do not with external ceremonies and temporal arrangements, but with what is spiritual ; in Him we come into touch not with imperfect revelations of God made through symbol and human medium, but with the very image of God. He mediates between God and man in virtue of His con- nection with both. He leads men into the true relation to God by — Himself perfectly fulfilling the human life of obedience to God’s will. His priesthood or power to carry His human brethren with Him into the heavenly life, springs out of His personal worth! wrought by discipline to a perfected condition. He is priest in virtue not of what is of the flesh, not by inherited office, but by virtue of His sympathy with men and His personal stainlessness. He enters the presence of God not in an earthly tabernacle nor with the blood of bulls and goats bué with His own blood, bringing men and God together by the pure and perfect surrender of Himself to God. This sacrifice though made on earth was yet made in the eternal order,