human family. They must have shrunk from inflicting death on the very lowest of the animal creation, knowing that these had become subject to death only through their sin. They knew, indeed, that the whole irrational creation was made in a sense for them; they were lords over it--but not at first to the extent of being at liberty to take away the life of animals for their necessary support; the grant of flesh for that purpose, was not given till after the deluge; and that they should yet have thought it proper and becoming to shed the blood of animals merely to express a religious idea, nay, should have regarded that as so emphatically the way of honouring and serving God, that for a long period it might almost be said to be the sum and substance of their worship, is utterly incredible on any supposition apart from the immediate direction and explicit warrant of God. 3. But finally, not only do those theories respecting the human origination of sacrifice, run counter to the analogy of God's character and dealings, and leave unresolved a difficulty, concerning the earliest kind of sacrifices, which seems to give the lie to their pretensions, they are also confronted by a fact, with which they never can be fairly reconciled, the fact of Abel's accepted offering from the flock, in undisguised preference to that of Cain, from the produce of the field, (Gen. iv. 4, comp. with Heb. xi. 4.) The offerings of the two brothers differed, we are told, not only in the outward oblation, the one being a living creature, while the other was an inanimate production, but also in the principle which moved the brothers respectively to present them. That principle in Abel was faithconsequently not this, but something else in Cain,—and as it was faith which both rendered Abel's sacrifice in itself more excellent than Cain's, and drew down upon it the approving testimony of Heaven, the faith meant could obviously not be a mere general belief in the being of God, or his readiness to accept an offering at the hands of man; for faith, in that sense, must have been possessed by him who offered amiss, as well as by him who offered with acceptance. The faith of Abel must have been of a much more particular and definite nature, for it had respect, not to any general views of God's character, or sentiments of devotion toward him, but to a certain determinate mode of worship. It must, therefore, have had a special revelation or testimony of God regarding sacrifice to rest upon, pointing out that kind of sacrifice which God would accept, as contradistinguished from what he would not; and to learn what the kind of sacrifice prescribed actually was, we have only to look to the offering presented by Abel. For this we are plainly warranted and bound to regard as expressing the mind of God. So that the difference between Abel's sacrifice and that of Cain, in regard to the things offered, must be looked upon as essential, not accidentally arising from his occupation as a shepherd, but necessarily growing out of his faith as a true worshipper of God. Cain, in short, is presented to our view as without grace and faith-a child of nature, following only nature's teaching in the kind of service he yielded to God; his oblation is an undoubted

specimen of what man could do in his fallen state to originate proper ideas of God, and give fitting expression to these in outward acts of worship; but unhappily for our theorists, it stands condemned on the inspired record as a presumptuous act of will-worship, which God would not accept. Abel, on the other hand, appears as a child of grace, and because a child of grace, therefore a man of faith, implicitly following the direction of God's wordfirst, no doubt, as to the ground of his hope and confidence, and then, as to the more excellent way, in which he was to show forth the better principles he had imbibed.

Upon the whole, therefore, we can see no possibility of fairly avoiding the conclusion, that the institution of sacrifice must have been of divine origin; for though the fact is not explicitly recorded in Scripture, yet the notices there found regarding ancient sacrifice, are such as to present insuperable objections against any theory, which can be framed to account for its human origin. It is proper also to add, that this conclusion is strengthened, not only by the mention made of the skins, with which God clothed our first parents, which are most naturally viewed as skins of slain victims, but also by various other notices connected with primitive worship, which seem clearly to imply the existence of a revelation from God, directing men to all things necessary concerning the way of serving him. Thus the expression, rendered in our Bible, "in process of time," but literally "at the end of days," which is used to denote the occasion of the offerings of Cain and Abel being presented, is undoubtedly to be understood of some fixed and stated period, which, it appears, they agreed, for some obvious reason, in considering as the proper time for bringing their gifts. Its being said also of the exile of Cain, that he "went out from the presence of the Lord," is a distinct intimation that there was a place where God revealed himself as near to those who sought him-a sanctuary, to which the manifestations of his presence were confined; and that, we can scarcely doubt, was connected with the eastern approach to the garden of Eden, where visible symbols of his glory were stationed. Then the distinction of beasts into clean and unclean, which comes out in the account of the deluge, as one already existing, and familiarly known to Noah, must of necessity be regarded as a sacrificial arrangement, all animals being then interdicted for food, and an arrangement it is impossible to trace to any other source than the immediate interference of God. From these various and scattered notices of primeval times, we cannot conceive divine worship to have been then in that floating and unsettled condition, in which it must have been, if every thing had been left to the freedom or caprice of each man's private inclination. They seem to be the not uncertain traces of a revelation, which rendered plain and obvious to the men of that dispensation the way in which they ought to wait upon God so as to be accepted by him. And though in the altered circumstances of the world, now, we are apt to regard it as absolutely essential to a revelation, that there be a written word, in which it may be preserved pure

and entire from the corruptions of men, yet in that age of protracted life, when the days of a man were literally as the days of a tree, the necessity of a written word was in a manner superseded; and a revelation limited, from the very nature of the case, to a few leading points, which had to exchange hands only twice during the whole period from Adam to Noah, could be in no danger of suffering much by the process of transition, which it had to undergo.

But while we think the divine origin of sacrifice capable of clear deduction from what is written concerning it in the word of God, and regard it as a portion of the truth well worth contending for, it is not, as formerly intimated, absolutely indispensable to a correct view being formed of the worship, which prevailed in patriarchal times. For though the precise time and manner of its origin are not recorded, we yet know, that from within a few years subsequent to the fall, the sacrifice of burnt-offerings was the great act of worship; that sacrifices of this kind were not offered at a venture, on the bare authority of man's own will or reason, but in faith on some word, which plainly involved, if it did not formally impose, the obligation of presenting them; and that when so presented, they were visibly owned and accepted by God, and so must have been designed by him to be regarded as an authorized and settled ordinance in his church. We know nothing of primitive sacrifice in the church of God, and are not at liberty to think of it, otherwise than as now described as that religious solemnity, in which alone faith had its appropriate exercise, and God was acceptably worshipped. And the chief question regarding it in the present point of view is, what as so presented, on the one hand, and received on the other, did the act of sacrifice originally symbolize? What religious feelings did it necessarily express, or what principles of divine truth did it embody?

It would not be a legitimate mode of answering this question, to go to the law of Moses, and endeavour to ascertain from what is written there the radical idea or ground-principle of sacrifices by blood. For the revelation by Moses formed in many respects, and in none probably more than this, a great step in advance; and those, who lived under the dispensation he was honoured to introduce were certainly furnished with means for apprehending the exact import and ultimate design of sacrifice, which were not possessed by the earlier worshippers of God. In considering what sacrifice was to those who lived under the first dispensation of grace, we must view it in the light merely, which their own knowledge and circumstances were fitted to throw upon it-leaving the more full and accurate exhibition of its nature, as afterwards determined by the handwriting of Moses, to another part of our inquiry. (1.) Now, there can be no doubt, first of all, that when they found God approachable only through the sacrifice of a creature's life, they must have discerned in this an unequivocal testimony to the sinfulness of their condition. They well knew, that God was far from delighting in blood, and that death, either in man or beast, was no part of the constitution of things, as origi

nally settled by him. It entered only in consequence of man's transgression, and on his account, (he being the head and lord of creation upon earth,) was made to spread its desolation through the whole field of animal existence. The thought of this was fitted, in any circumstances, to suggest painful and humiliating reflections in the minds of those, who, from the very nature of their position, would be ever ready to look back from the effect to the cause; but when death was thus brought into the service of God, and every act . of worship carried in its bosom the life-blood of an innocent creature, what more striking memorial could they have had of their now sunk and fallen condition? With this perpetually before his eyes, on intelligent and believing worshipper could forget, that he stood upon the floor of a broken covenant, and had to deal with a God needing to be reconciled.

(2.) Then, secondly, their waiting upon God, with his own express sanction and encouragement, in a way, which so clearly bespoke their guilt and misery, was undoubted evidence of his gracious and merciful disposition toward sinners. In presenting such sacrifices, they came to him as sinners, expressing their faith, that for them there was "mercy with God that he might be feared, and plenteous redemption that he might be sought after." And having God's warrant for so coming, and the seal of his approval, when they did come, their faith was proved to be, not a false or presumptuous confidence, but a well-grounded and heavenly principle. Seeking and finding God thus, they eyed him as the repairer of the breach amid the very signs of its existence, and received from him, through an avenue of death, communications of life and blessing. That their relation to him had suffered a fearful and violent disturbance, this was the first thing, which must have forced itself on the convictions of those who found no way of access to God but through such sacrifices of blood; and with that must have been inseparably linked this other conviction, that so far from allowing the disturbance to grow into perpetual and hopeless alienation, it should certainly be rectified and restored for all who sought him in the appointed way.

(3.) But while this symbolical worship spake of a reconciled God, gracious to sinners, it spoke also of the way, through which reconciliation was to come; for the altar, on which it was presented, being ever stained with blood, a clear testimony was incessantly borne to the grand principle, that "without shedding of blood there is no remission" of sins. How far the earliest race of worshippers may have been able through this to descry the ultimate ground of a sinner's pardon, by connecting the blood of their sacrificed victims with that of the Lamb of God, cannot be pronounced on with certainty, and may have differed considerably according to the intelligence and faith of individual worshippers. But undoubtedly those who possessed any measure of these, understood that the devoting of an animal victim upon the altar, was the peculiar expression of faith, with which God was well pleased; and understanding that, it seems impossible for them to have avoided the

conviction, that the covenant of forgiveness and peace, which God was willing to make with his fallen offspring, was essentially connected with the life-blood of sacrifice. But the thought would inevitably occur, of what avail could the blood of such victims as they presented, be for the establishment of so important a covenant? What intelligible effect could it of itself have on the blotting out of transgression, or the providing of eternal life for the sinful and dying? Here manifestly they could find no satisfaction; and believing, as they had good reason to do on other grounds, that a redemption was to be brought in by God, which would be sufficient to undo all the misery and ruin of the fall-that this should of necessity be accomplished, not by each man for himself, but by some second head of humanity, and by him no otherwise than through some demonstration of righteousness worthy to form the ground of so great a recovery,-intelligent worshippers knowing and believing this, the farther conclusion must almost inevitably have forced itself upon them, that a suitable offering, embodying in itself an act of consummate righteousness, was to be included in the work of redemption; and that those offerings of irrational victims were but temporary expedients, necessary, meanwhile, as a fit expression of faith, and as means proper for keeping faith alive in the earth till the time should come for perfecting the work of God. Unquestionably, if they were not favoured with some more definite revelations, than are found extant now in the notices of primeval history, this anticipation of faith must have been enveloped in much darkness and mystery. But even from what is recorded, we can scarcely doubt that it was entertained, and that finding God gracious to them only through a medium of death, they must have concluded, that it would be peculiarly through death that the work of redemption was to be brought in.

(4.) For us, however, who can read the symbol by the clear light of the gospel, and from the high vantage-ground of a finished redemption can look back upon the temporary institutions which foreshadowed it, there is no darkness or uncertainty regarding the full and proper import of that great act of patriarchal worship. We see embodied in it the central truth of God's spiritual and everlasting kingdom-the truth of a dying Saviour as the only ground of peace and reconciliation between sinful men and their offended God. We see here, again, the ends of revelation most beautifully meeting together; and as amid the perfected glories of the Messiah's kingdom, all is represented as clustering around the Lamb. that was slain, and doing homage to him for his matchless victory over sin and death, so the earliest worship of the church exhibits "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world," as the one grand object of hope to the fallen, and the channel of restored communication between heaven and earth. At a later period, when the church was furnished with a fuller revelation and a more complicated worship, symbolical representations were given of other, and what might be called subordinate parts, of the work of redemption; but when that worship existed in its simplest form, and em