The Pulpit Commentary — Leviticus — Section 13

TBA.T man or steel, as he was called, Origen, the greatest of the great Fathers or Alexandria, bad, to judge from his Eclogues and his Homilies on Leviticus, a very poor opinion of the literal interpretation of the ritualistic sections of the Book of the Law. The circumstantial and realistic observances of the Jew, based upon an unquestioning acceptance of the Levitical injunctions, were considered by Origen both inappropriate and useless. Nay, the literal interpretation of this diversified rubric made, he thought, cavillers and infidels ; for it led some, to use his own words, to "despise the Law as a vile thing unworthy of the Creator," e.nd others to "impiously condemn the Creator himseH who could ordain such vile commands." Hence his so-called spiritual sense- a gross misnomer, unless the spiritual is synonymous with the imaginative-was Origen's great panacea for all the apparent inanities of the sacred records, the infallible harmonizer of all its seeming contradictions. And his talented lead has, alas I been followed by only too many eminent successors. Ii was but an application of the same method of forcibly squaring Law with Gospel, when in the next age such moulders of opinion as Augustine and Ambrose descended-the former to expound in his treatise,' De Isaak et Anima,' the simple fact of Rebekah's filling her pitcher at the well, as "the soul descending to the fountain of wisdom to draw the discipline of pure knowledge," and the latter to find a reference in circumcision to the resurrection of Christ, qma desideria carnalia auferl. Even when the reign of Augustine in Biblical hermeneutics gave way before the influence of that delicate exegete, Isidore of Hispala, whose work, ' De Allegoriis,' became a type of scriptural exposition in the Middle Ages, it was virtually the same allegorizing principle which was advocated and exemplified. Nor was the case different at the Reformation. When, at that epoch, the close study of Scripture became a vital necessity for the consolidation of belief, the writings of Melancthon and Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, abundantly testify to the predominant fondness for "spiritualizing;" whilst the subsequent history of the Lutheran and Reformed Churches further witnesses to the potency of these revered leaders, until spiritualizing blossomed into such amusing, if not appalling, extravagances as are to be found in Coccejus and his school. To Lund, for example, Aaron's rod that budded was a type of tho rod out of the stem of Jesse; its supernatural greenness was a type of Christ's supernatural con- ception; the mystery of its sprouting a type of the mystery of the birth of thp Son of the Virgin; the night of its blossoming was a type of the night in which the miraculous birth of Christ occurred ; there were three things on the rod, after the miracle, which were not there before-leaves, flowers, and fruits, whereby the threefold work of the Redeemer is prefigured; and, not to linger further upon this illustration, in the preser- vation of the rod within the holy of holies we have foreshadowed, he ~upposcd, the LEVITICUS. C ii THE LEDTICAL SACRlFICES LITERALLY CONSIDERED.