main as a makeshift for bringing God in contact with man; and not to have been grounded on the perfect fitness of man, as the image of God, of man's organs, his affections, his life, to be the utterers and exponents of all the life, yea, of all the heart of God. It is oftentimes considered the chief purpose of Christ's Incarnation, that it made his death possible, that it provided him a body in which to do that which merely as God he could not do, namely to suffer and to die; while some of the profoundest teachers of the past, so far from contemplating the Incarnation in this light, have rather affirmed that the Son of God would equally have taken man's nature, though of course under very different conditions, even if he had not fallen-that it lay in the everlasting purposes of God, quite irrespective of the fall, that the stem and stalk of humanity should at length bear its perfect flower in Him, who should thus at once be its root and its crown. But the Incarnation being thus slighted, it follows of necessity, that man as man is thought meanly of, though indeed it is only man as fallen man, as separated by a wilful act of his own from God, to whom this shame and dishonour belong. In his first perfection, in the truth of his nature, he is the glory of God, the image of the Son, as the Son is the image of the Father, declaring the Son as the Son declared the Father :— surely a thought, which if we duly lay to heart, will make us strive that our lives may be holy, that our lives may be noble, worthy of Him who made us after his image, and when we had marred that and defaced it, renewed us after the same in his Son.

LECTURE IV.

THE PERFECT SACRIFICE,

MICAH VI. 6, 7.

Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high God? shall I come before him with burntofferings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

THERE are few facts more mysterious than the prevalence of the rite of sacrifice through the world. Nations which it is impossible could have learned it of one another, nations the most diverse in culture, the highest in the scale, and well nigh the lowest, differing in every thing besides, have yet agreed in this one thing, namely, in the offering of things which have life to God,-or when the idea of the one God has been lost,-to the "gods many" of heathenism-the essential of that offering in every case being that the life of the victim was rendered up. And they have all agreed in considering that this act of theirs had a value, that it did place upon a new and better footing the relations in which they stood to the heavenly powers; that by these sacrifices they might more or less re-constitute the relations

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between themselves and God, which by any cause had been disturbed, bringing themselves nigher to Him, and rendering Him more favourable to them.

Now there are few or none in our day who would count that they had explained the prevalence of these convictions, in the conspiracy of the more artful few to hold the simpler many in bondage. These convictions were too wide spread, too universal; moreover, men were too fearfully earnest in carrying them out, to allow us to accept any such explanation as this. Sacraments they might be, and often were, of the devil, and not of God, but yet dreadful sacraments still—bonds and bands by which men knit themselves to one another, and knit themselves also to a spiritual world,-if not to heaven, yet to hell. Those who explain them into artful contrivances, may so give witness for their own shallow insight into the past history of the world, for the absence of any deeper needs at work in their own hearts; since if there had been such, they would have suggested a profounder explanation;-but the time is past when they will find any number of persons to accept their explanation as sufficient.

As little can their theory be historically justified, who trace up the existence of sacrifice to the rude notions about God which belonged to an early age; for then we should see a people, as it attained worthier views about Him, gradually outliving and renouncing the practice of this rite. But, contrary to this, we find in the most cultivated nations the theory of sacrifice only the more elaborately worked out, the sacrifices themselves only multiplied the

more. Here and there there might be found in some obscure corner of the earth, a savage tribe or horde, which had sunk below the idea and practice of sacrifice; though one in which, in one form or another, it did not survive, it would be difficult to point out; but nowhere a people that had risen above it. Here and there a philosopher may have set himself against the popular belief, but nowhere has he been able to change it; he has ever stood single and alone, and has as little carried with him the more thoughtful and deeper spirits of his time as the common multitude. He may have eloquently declaimed on the absurdity of supposing the gods would be pleased with the death-struggles of animals, with the blood of bulls and of goats; but there was ever something in men, though they might not be able to explain it to themselves, which told them that sacrifice had a significance and a meaning, which a few plausible words could not get rid of or destroy.

Such, brethren, I think you will admit are the facts, for I speak to those capable of judging. Whether we turn to those pages of Greek and Roman literature, brought by our studies in this place especially before us, or whether we take a wider range within our ken, everywhere alike we encounter a consciousness upon man's part, that the relations between him and the powers in whose hands he is, have been interrupted and disturbed. The fact might be sometimes overlooked and forgotten by him in times of prosperity, but we see it evermore mightily emerging from the deep of his

heart, when the judgments of offended heaven were evidently abroad. Everywhere, too, we encounter the effort by certain specific and definite acts of expiation and atonement to restore those disturbed relations again. "Without blood is no remission of sin," was a truth as deeply graven on the heart and conscience of heathen as of Jew.

For vast and complex as is the Jewish system of offering, yet it is not a greater body of sacrifice than we meet almost everywhere else, when we turn to the ritual of heathenism. That Levitical system is of course in every way more complete: it is an organic whole; excluding all individual caprice, all too into which the true idea of sacrifice, when escaping from God's control, would inevitably degenerate. Moreover it was no will-worship, being the appointed way in which God was to be sought, and not that in which men out of their own hearts imagined that they would seek Him. But with all this, it does not, I think, run into greater detail, nor take more entire possession of the whole life of man, nor demand a more continual recognition of a distance and separation from God which has need to be removed, than did the heathen systems of sacrifice with which it was surrounded, when we take them in their sum total, when we count up all their infinite forms and varieties. For doubtless it was meant that they too, by this their multitude and repetition, should give testimony against themselves, should witness as plainly as did the Jewish in the same way, for their own weakness and unprofitableness; since of them, too, we may say, that had they