retrospective adaptation of the once prospective eacri6ce. We cannot wonder, therl'- fore-though we know not the exact customs of the apostles themselves--tbat we should early read of the Christian aacrifice, the Christian priest, the Christian altar. The" elements" of the feast were a continuation of the" meat offering," the minchah, part of ever, former sacrifice ; the presbyter, elder, or president, who served at tho table, though not a priest of the Aaronic line, yet might well be called, in a certain though modified sense, a priest; and the table at which be served, though no longer- the seat of the sacred fire, or sprinkled with blood, was to the Christian what the alta1' had been to the Jew-that from which be fed on the picture of Christ. And I cannot doubt, on a candid examination of the expression, though I once held to the contrary, that there is a reference to the table of the Lord's Supper in Heb. xiii. 10, "We (Christians) have an altar, whereof they have no right to eat which serve the taber- nacle." True it is that Christ's divinity is the actual altar of the universe, which upheld, sustained, and sanctified the humanity of Jesus in his sacrifice of himself; yet, as the Jewish altar was that which held the picture of the Sacrifice to come, and from which the Jew ate the emblematic feast, so the holy table from which we Christians feed in memor, of Christ's death, is, in a parallel though modified sense, an altar. To refuse to the Christian Church, then, the ver, names of sacrifice, priest, and altar would seem almost to be to deny the propriety and solemnity of the words under the earlier dispensation, and to interfere materially with our understanding the real signifi- cance of our Saviour's institution as an adaptation of the divinely appointed sacrificial system to the Christian dispensation. Yet as different views may, no doubt, lawfully be taken as to the intention of our blessed Saviour's silence at the moment of the institution of the Lord's Supper, we should surely allow that latitude of thought to others who, like ourselves, love the Lord Jesus in sincerity. What is the error that has grown up about the words "sacrifice," "priest,n and "altar"? It is idolatry ; that is, making the picture more than a picture. When the- Jew believed that the blood of bulls and of goats wuld take away sin, he perverted the truth and the ordinance of God ; and when the Christian holds that there is in the Lord's Supper a propitiator, sacrifice for the quick and the dead for the remission of sins, he equally abuses the truth of God and the beauty of the ordinance. It is the confounding of the inward spiritual grace in the sacraments with the rite itself that has been at the root of the chief of the religious errors of mankind. The inward spiritual grace is the apprehension and appropriation by the intelligence and the affections of that which the 011.tward observance typifies, and therefore to the faithful the actual reception of its benefit; and the observance itself, when rightly understood, becomes an instrument in arousing that apprehension, as well as a pledge and means, by virtue of its institution, of our receiving that grace. But to make a sacrament an opw operatum, to convert the image into that which it represents, is idolatry. It is this astounding, though truly human, error that plunged the ancient world into heathenism, the Jewish world into Pharisaism, and the Christian world into what is now commonly called Poper,. The fall of the intelligence when the floods of superstition are let in upon the soul, is great indeed ; so that a man can even hold the blasphemous doctrine that the blessed Redeemer can become incarnate in the sacramental elements of bread and wine in the hands of the priest, and that it is necessary for salvation that the body, soul, and div;inity of Jesus Christ should be digested in the human stomach. This is a fall sorer than any fall on record of the Jews; however much we may pity their unbelief, we have no evidence that any Jew ever taught that ever, Passover iamb ond every victim brought to the altar was God incarnate; and yet, iI it be true- xiv AN ESSAY ON SACRIFICE.
of the Christian element of sacrifice, it must have been true of the Jewish, We cannot wonder at the reformers of the English Church expunging the word "altar" from the Prayer-book, when we know how the idea of the Christian altar was perverted to serve the purposes of the grossest idolatry. But ln meeting the doctrinal errors that have entwined themselves, like Laocoon's snakes, a.round the Christian altar, it ls surely not necessary for us to blind ourselves to the fa.et that our Saviour did perpetuate for the Church the principle a.nd method of the ancient sa.orificia.l feast; and that, there- fore, in some sense at least, we have, as the Church seems from very early times to have expressed herself, a. sa.cri6ce, a priest, and an altar; always remembering that, in reference to sacrifice, that sense, as defined by St. Chrysostom and others in the early Church, who speak of the Eucharist as a sacrifice, ls that it is a "commemoration of a sacrifice" (vide St. Chrysostom on Heb. L 9), The point.a to be kept, then, constantly and prominently before the Church are : first, that we must not misinterpret the character of the Jewish sacrifice itself; second, that we must ma.in.ta.in, as a truth for a.11 time, that an image of a thing cannot be the thing itself; and third, that as the Jewish sacrifice was not truly in itself propitiatory, but only the figure and pledge of propitiation and spiritual life, so there is no pro- pitiation, but only a fi.,crure and pledge of the propitiatory and life-giving office of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. And then we need not fear to use the Old Testament terms, a.s in one instance appears to me to have been done in the Epistle to the Hebrews, for designedly parallel Christian ordinances. And the conclusion of the whole matter seems to be, that the Church still has, In a rea.sona.ble though modified sense, not an offering for sin, but still a sacrifice, which the Church of England calls a ".sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving." THE LEVITICAL SACRIFICES LITERALLY CONSIDERED. BY TBll
REV. PROFESSOR ALFRED CAVE, B.A.