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skins of beasts; the slaying of which beasts is therefore implied. Wherefore were they slain? Surely, not for the sake of their skins merely; nor for purposes of food, for there is good reason to believe, that animal food was not permitted by God till after the Deluge. For what end, then, could they be slain, but for sacrifice? Secondly, the universal practice of sacrifice can be accounted for on no other principle. It was not the dictate of reason; man's judgment would never have suggested to him that the immolation of an innocent victim on the altar would be an acceptable act of worship. It was not the demand of nature; no one will say that it gratified any instinct or appetite impressed on the constitution of man. It had not its origin in the principle of self-interest, for there appeared no advantage to be gained by it; and, therefore, one way of accounting for it, alone remains, namely, that it was instituted by Divine command. Thirdly, Abel's offering was accepted, and God, who will not allow of any human innovation in his worship, would never have so powerfully marked his approval of that sacrifice, if he had not appointed it himself. Now, put together the announcement of a deliverer, who should crush the serpent, and the institution of animal sacrifice, and we have light thrown on the antediluvian religion. Ideas, conveyed by these facts, would, in all probability, be blended in the human mind; and a notion -a vague notion, perhaps, would arise, of salvation by sacrifice. And such an ordinance as that of the putting an animal to death in a solemn form of religious service, connected-as it seems to have been from the beginning-with some confession of sin, would be pregnant with most important instructions; instructions such as these: That sin is a great offence: That death is the proper punishment of sin: That God is full of mercy: And that he allows the substitution of another victim in the sinner's room. In sacrifice, then, was Abel's hope. By availing himself of God's provision of sacrifice, alone, could he get rid of the responsibility of guilt.

In this respect Abel's religion and ours must be the same. Christianity is a religion of sacrifice. It sets before us the one great sacrificeof which Abel's was typical. Christ's sacrifice is vicarious. "Christ suffered for us." "He bare our sins in His own body on the tree." Christ's sacrifice is propitiatory. Rom. iii. 25: "A propitiatory."" The word requires something to be added-either "mercy seat" or "sacrifice." Whichever is supplied, the effect of the apostle's instruction is the same. It is something which propitiates. Whether we look at the blood on the ark, or the victim on the altar, the same thing is taught. Whether we see Christ sacrificing Himself on the cross, or presenting the memorials of His sacrifice in heaven, the same truth is conveyed to our minds, that through Him the sins of men are expiated, the guilt of transgression is cancelled, and the righteousness of God is made manifest. Now, that sacrifice of Christ is the Divine provision

VOL. XLI.

made for our guilt. Responsibility, as illustrated in the history of Adam, is insupportable by us, under a consciousness of guilt, till we come to contemplate this subject of sacrifice indicated in the history of Abel. The institute of sacrifice, as appointed by God, Abel honoured; its merciful provision for expiating guilt he accepted; and we must walk in the steps of this righteous man. Christ, the one only all-sufficient sacrifice, must be embraced by us in the exercise of faith. No doubt there are many beneficial effects flowing from the sacrifice of Christ, of which men partake whether they believe or not. But the highest effect, that which consists in personal salvation, can only come (in the case of those who hear the gospel and are taught to understand it) through the instrumentality of faith in the only-begotten Son of God, who loved us and gave Himself for us. Our believing in Christ is what Abel's bringing of the firstlings of the flock was. Our not believing in Christ is like Cain's rejection of the better sacrifice. By the sacrifice of faith-the more excellent sacrifice-Abel obtained testimony that he was righteous. His righteousness came not out of his works, but out of his faith. He was justified, not through merit, but through mercy. We must understand Abel's righteousness to have been like Abraham's-imputed, not inherent; put to his account by virtue of a special economy of grace, not created by him under a stern dispensation of law; and we must further consider, that the righteousness which clothed and crowned him, and made him acceptable to God, came from the glorious Redeemer of men, whose sacrifice was prefigured by the slain lamb. In no other way can we be made righteous. In no other way can we get rid of the fearful responsibility of guilt. In no other way can we procure the effacing of the huge death-blot.

II.

The responsibilities of the future cannot be discharged without the sacrifice of ourselves.-The words rendered "more excellent sacrifice," mean literally, "more of sacrifice"-"a fuller one." It contained what Cain's did not contain. It recognised sin and guilt, and the need of mercy, and the possibility of expiation. While "more" and "fuller" than Cain's in this respect, could it be less than his in that other respect in which his had some excellence? To offer of the fruit of the earth was becoming; to do it devoutly was acceptable. Thus to express dependence and thankfulness for Divine bounties; thus to say, "Of thine own have I given thee." Thus to consecrate the precious things of the field to him who made them spring and grow, and crowned the year with his goodness, was right, and good, and beautiful. Possibly he who brought the "more" and the "fuller" sacrifice might bring the less as well. He who slew of the firstlings might also offer of the firstfruits. But be this as it might, certainly Abel's sacrifice, while in one point of view it meant more than Cain's; in the other

meant, and sincerely and truly meant, as much. It meant that the offerer felt himself a child of Providence-a recipient of costly favours; one who owed his all to God; who was in no proper moral sense his who looked on his possessions and on himself as Divine property, as now and evermore the Lord's; and while he humbly expressed his hope of mercy, through the institute of sacrifice, he also devoutly and thankfully expressed by sacrifice the sentiment of entire personal consecration to God; the desire to give up all he had and was into his heavenly Parent's hand.

The past responsibility of guilt removed by an atoning sacrifice, there remained still other responsibilities. Abel did not cease to be responsible when he had killed his lamb. The great duties of life were before him; the duties of morality and religion, and every day was to be one of service, each becoming purer, holier, brighter than the foregoing. And when we have got rid of the responsibility of past guilt, through faith in His blessed sacrifice, personal responsibility still cleaves to us. There are yearly, daily, hourly duties before us, till years, and days, and hours for us shall end. We do not much like the old-fashioned phraseology of duties towards "ourselves, and our neighbours, and God," because all duties are owing to God; but what is meant is right and just enough, that is, that duty covers all relations, temporal and spiritual-covers everything, both relative and personal. We come to the cross, and we look on the cruciñed One, and we lose our burden, not that we may get free from all bonds, but that we may feel all holy bonds the more. We get rid of what is burdensome in religion without losing anything that is binding. The yoke remains, but it is now easy. The burden, but it is now light. Gospel freedom is not licentiousness-not liberty to do

It is only emancipation from the devil's slavery, from lust's despotism, from fashion's restraints, from the world's charms; as for the rest it is power to do right, pleasure to do well.

How was Abel to meet the responsibilities of after life? Only by another kind of sacrifice which his offering truly represented. We miss much of precious truth, if we merely look at Abel approaching God as a sinner, and saying, "Have mercy on me, O Lord." When we are told that "he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts;" do we not see a further signification than that developed by ideas of substitution and atonement; see we not also the idea of self-sacrifice? Did not that penitent and believing one, as he sought remission of sin through the shedding of blood, also desire to devote himself, as a living sacrifice, acceptable in God's sight? We think he did. With the sinner we see the saint. Most assuredly there is no other method than that of self-sacrifice by which we can meet the responsibilities of the future. Trace every Christian duty to its root, and you will find it here. It is the surrender of ourselves, of our pleasure, and our inclination to God, so that we may have our hearts back

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again, baptized with Divine love, and stamped with the Divine likeness. We think of an angel's self-sacrifice as full of nought but pleasure, but in a sinner's self-sacrifice, or in an imperfectly renewed creature's self-sacrifice, will there not be more or less of pain? Are we unconscious of the pain? Is that unconsciousness the result of our having become so much like the angels; or is it not rather that we have not attained to the thorough making of a sacrifice at all?

Acceptance through the vicarious offering is a great motive to the presentation of the personal one. That God accepted Abel, and saved and blessed him in the exercise of his mercy, was a reason why he should go on serving Him in newness of life. That God has redeemed us through Christ, has put to our account the righteousness of His beloved and perfect Son, is a reason why we should devote to Him our residue of days in the loving sacrifice to His service of our whole selves.

Portraits of Christ.

Ir is a striking proof of the spirituality of our religion, that so little should have been left us by inspiration respecting the merely private story of our Saviour. While we have different accounts of His public life and of His death, His infancy and youth are passed over with a few words by two of the writers of the Gospel History, and altogether by Mark and John; and in none of them is there the slightest hint as to His personal appearance. "Christ, after the flesh," has left no trace behind him: it is to the works He did, the words He spoke, His glorious death and resurrection, and His ascension to His Father, we are introduced by each evangelist in succession.

That this silence should be so profound respecting the merely human details of the incarnation, is exactly what might have been expected in a religion which seeks to raise us above appearances to realities, and to lose the temporary in the eternal. It is an inherent tendency in our nature to sink from the height of the purely spiritual, as if it were too pure and rare an element for us to breathe, till, to prevent a total immersion in the things of time, and forgetfulness of unseen truths, every help is in turn laid

hold of by us to keep ourselves at some slight elevation, through whatever can affect the senses, and work on us through them. The truth itself passing from us, we try to make some image of it, and compromise with ourselves, by superstitious devotion to an outward object, for the blindness which has lost sight of what appeals only to the soul. As the church in any age has declined, its religious machinery, if we may so speak, has increased. If the faith which realizes the invisible were wanting to attract men upwards, an excitement was supplied to the senses to stimulate them into some semblance of spiritual vitality. If we do not naturally fly towards heavenly things, we must be raised to them; or if we cannot by any outward influences be thus lifted, we get gradually content with a notion, that somehow we have brought them down to our reach. The relics, and pictures, and images, which at first were only to fire the thoughts and wing them upwards, become themselves sacred, and attract the worship of the crowd.

The whole history of natural as well as revealed religion illustrates these characteristics of our nature. The gods of Egypt were originally only symbols or

hieroglyphics of the Supreme Deity, but | who had been taught by the personal

they came at length themselves to be thought divine, till animals and plants of all kinds were adored as true divinities, and the Roman satirist could mock the worshippers, by saying that they grew their gods in their gardens; and one of the early fathers could tell us how he went into a magnificent Egyptian temple, where, after much bowing and many solemnities on the part of the priest, he was led through rich curtains and veils to the holy place, and told he was in the presence of the god, whom he discovered in the person of an ape on the capital of one of the gorgeous pillars. In Greece and Rome the philosophers were always ready to say that they did not worship the statues of the gods, but the hidden presence of the divinity which dwelt in :hem after consecration; and even in Madagascar there is a ceremony called Prashta Paranu, which is supposed to fit an image for worship by bringing down the deity it represents to dwell in it. Yet, invariably, all this airy philosophizing is lost on the multitude, who take that to be a god which is spoken of as such, and worship the likeness as heartily as they could the reality. Antiquity is as full of miracles wrought by idols, and of their winking, sweating, and weeping on suitable occasions, as Popery used to be in England before the Reformation, and as it is still on the Continent. In the Greek church, the pictures intended at first only to teach the eye, have for ages been substituted for the faith they sought to embody, and are as much gods to the peasantry of Russia as images have been to others elsewhere. The panic that all but ruined the Russian campaign of 1812, when it was thought the French had captured the sacred picture of Smolensko, and the mad delight with which it was hailed, when carried before the army to quell the excitement, could not have been greater had the canvas been a visible appearance of God Himself.

Even in the time of the Apostles, the tendency to materialize the objects of faith seems to have shown itself in its germ, in the fondness with which those

followers of our Lord appear to have cherished whatever they had learned from their teachers of His unwritten earthly life, which was but the first step towards a worship of the merely human and non-essential. The spirit of St. Paul, who had apparently seen Christ only in His glory, was wholly opposed to setting a value on these traditions of His earthly life, and led him to announce that it was not Christ after the flesh, but the risen and glorified Saviour to whom his thoughts would be directed.

The first traces of likenesses of Christ are to be found among the Carpocratians, an obscure Egyptian sect of the second century, whose doctrines were so gross as to make it natural that they should seek such additions. Jesus was with them only the child of Joseph and Mary, although acknowledged as the Saviour of mankind--if, indeed, that could well be called salvation, which not only permitted, but inculcated licentiousness as the fulfilment of the laws of our nature. Tertullian tells us that Tiberius, who died only four years after the crucifixion, had already wished to put the statue of Christ among those of the deities of Rome, but was opposed by the Senate, but the story is so improbable, on many grounds, that it has no value. A truer instance of intended honour to Him, from a pagan, was that shown by the Emperor Alexander Severus, who set up His image in his private chapel, along with those of Abraham, Orpheus, and Apollonius, taking them all alike as his household gods. In the catacomb of Calixtus, on the Appian Way, at Rome, there is a well-known portrait in a large medallion, which is generally considered to represent our Lord. And in the Pontian catacombs on the Via Portuensis, there is another picture of a similar kind. Both agree with the description given in the letter of Lentulus. In this letter by Lentulus, who (though contrary to history) has been called the predecessor to Pontius Pilate in the government of Palestine, Christ is described as "a man of lofty stature, of serious and imposing countenance, in

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