of the wicked, and the eternal happiness of the redeemed, we cannot trace their origin to any known or accessible source in the belief of those times and countries. Neither can we account for their reception. There was nothing in the doctrines themselves to allure or conciliate; and the minds, both of Jews and Gentiles, were altogether unprepared and unlikely to embrace a religion which had nothing in common with their former opinions, and directly opposed some of their strongest prejudices.

CHAPTER IV.

CONNEXION OF CHRISTIANITY WITH THE JEWISH HISTORY AND SCRIPTURES.

THE inquiry of the preceding chapter came to this result that the Christian religion sets out upon a view of the state of mankind which was original, and proclaims a method of recovery from that state, which was also original: the expectation of such an event, to be so accomplished, having never entered into the minds of Jews or Gentiles.

But is it not a possible case, that the followers of Jesus, being disappointed by his death, and required to account for it, or to give up their purpose, and confess themselves deluded; should have struck out the idea of atonement, and affirmed that he died a sacrifice? Then having hit upon this explanation, they supported it as they could out of the institutions of their law, and the facts related in their history.

I am the more bound to consider this hypothesis, because it has been recently brought forward by one of our most ingenious rationalists, as sufficiently

accounting for the language of St. Paul and the other Apostles, when they represent the death of Christ as the propitiation for our sins. Mr. Jowett writes: "It must be remembered that the Apostles were Jews; they were so before their conversion; they remained so afterwards in their thoughts and language. They could not lay aside their first nature, or divest themselves at once of Jewish modes of expression. Sacrifice and atonement were leading ideas of the Jewish dispensation: 'without shedding of blood there was no remission.'. In thinking of the death of Christ and of the fulfilment of which He spoke, it was natural for them to think of Him as a sacrifice, and atonement for sin. To Him bore all the prophets witness, as well as the types of the law and the history of the Jewish people. All their life long they had been sacrificing, and 'living in the commandments of the law blameless.' What a striking view must it have been in their minds, that their rites and ceremonies were not in vain, but only done in ignorance of their true design and import; that there was more in them than the Chief Priests or Pharisees could conceive. There was meaning in the sacrifices which they could not comprehend, as they truly felt that there was in the death of Christ more than they could understand, and they interpreted the one by the other. And whenever the thought was suggested to men's minds, at every opening of the Old Testament a new light fell

upon every page: the history of Abraham, the settlement in the promised land, the least details in the Temple and the Tabernacle, were written for their instruction."1

This hypothesis, as will be at once perceived, proceeds upon the assumption which it is the object of the present treatise to refute; namely, that the Apostles had no divine commission, but acted on purposes of their own. If they were really what they professed to be, "servants of the most high God, showing the way of salvation," they could not have made a false idea, an unauthorized representation, the main basis of their religion. If Jesus had been merely the victim of the enmity of his countrymen, indignant because he "made himself the Son of God," they could not, except by a deliberate project of imposture, have maintained that he gave his life a ransom for man's sin. So that if this view is to be received, the whole fabric of Christian faith falls to the ground. It is the invention of the Apostles, and not the revelation of God.

Now it is not to be denied, but on the contrary is a most important fact, that there are points in the law, and circumstances in the history, of the Jews, to which the death of Jesus appears to bear a more or less direct relation.

1. In a very early part of their history, the father of the nation, Abraham, is represented as receiving 1 Jowett on Epistles, Vol. ii. p. 475.

a command from God, to offer his only son, Isaac, as a victim to be sacrificed on the altar by his own hand. Abraham obeyed the extraordinary command; and to the full extent of purpose and intention the sacrifice was consummated; being only restrained at the very crisis of accomplishment, by divine interposition.1 Do we see here the germ of the doctrine that "God so loved the world, as to send his only begotten Son" to make "a propitiation for their sins?"

2. Again, in the journey through the wilderness, we find it related that when the camp of the Israelites was infested with venomous serpents, sent as a judicial chastisement for their disobedience, Moses erected, by divine command, a serpent of brass: numbers of the people had perished; but as many as looked up to this brazen figure, were healed of their wounds. To this the crucifixion of Jesus is explicitly compared: "as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up."2

3. The departure of the Israelites from Egypt was attended with this remarkable circumstance. That they might avoid the fate with which the Egyptians were threatened, the Israelites were ordered, in every family, to kill a lamb, and sprinkle the doors

1 Gen. xxii.; being the chapter selected for the Church Service on Good Friday.

2 Numbers xxi. 8. John iii. 14.