gregation, and make atonement for them: for there is wrath gone out from the Lord; the plague is begun." (Num. xvi, 46.) Here was no beast or blood, but the fire from the altar manifestly stood for the sacrifice which it usually consumed. In these three cases it is God's wrath excited by sin which is appeased by propitiation. The atonement (Greek, eğiλaoμós, and the Hebrew, 3) certainly intervenes between God's wrath and sin. In the sacrifices of the day of atonement the same thought is clearly revealed. After Aaron had offered his bullock of the sin-offering, he was to take two kids of the goats for a sin-offering for the people, and, bringing the two goats to the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, to cast lots upon them-one lot for the Lord and the other lot for the scape-goat. The one which fell to the Lord was slain, its blood sprinkled upon the altar, as the blood of the bullock had been sprinkled for Aaron, after wnich he was to bring the live goat : and lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and sending him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness. (Lev. xvi, 20, 21.) This act of confession was a transfer of the people's sin, its guilt and corruption, to the animal, and its escape denoted their deliverance. The punished sin was symbolized in the slain goat, the pardoned sinner in the escaped goat. The profound significance of the passover dwindles, in the hands of the deniers of substitutional atonement, into a mere means on the part of God to mark the residences of the Israelitish people as distinguished from the houses of the Egyptians; whereas the blood of the paschal lamb upon the door-post not only showed where an Israelite lived, but declared that every Israelite was saved by the blood of the lamb, as a means of warding off death as a substitutionary sacrifice for the first-born of Israel, who, but for it, must have perished by the avenging angel with the first-born of Egypt. St. Paul must have known what it meant to the mind of a Jew, or he would not have said, "Christ, our Passover, is slain for us." And Jesus himself, in instituting his own supper at the close of the passover, explicitly avows and embodies the great fact of his dying to save; to save not only by the inward communication of his spirit of obedient self-surrender,

but also and principally as a ground of pardon: "For this is my blood of the New Testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins." The apɛou cannot mean cleansing, except by implication; but literally and by the widest usage signifies letting go, freeing, removing barriers as opening sluices, remission, forgiveness. The Saviour's evident reference was to the old covenant, which was sealed by blood, and which based forgiveness only upon condition of shedding of blood. (Exod. xxiv, 8.)

Why should his supper commemorate his death rather than his birth, or any event of his life, except that it was the pregnant point of his career, as indicated in all the sacrificial types which preceded him? "For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar, to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul." Lev. xvii, 11. These Old Testament sacrifices, we read in the New Testament, were shadows of the good things to come, the substance was Christ. They derived their power not from the entertainment which they gave to an ignorant, crude people-not from any adequate sense of sin which they were supposed to convey-but from their designed reference to the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world. It is not necessary to suppose that the Jew embraced in his knowledge their fullest spiritual significance; yet assuredly he did embrace enough to keep alive his faith in the deepest purpose of God in the creation of the world. The older Rationalists and Mr. Jowett tell us, that since the apostles, as Jews, were full of the Old Testament doctrine of expiation by sacrifice, it was the most natural thing for them to see the same doctrine in the life and death of Jesus. It is left for our modern vindicators of the character of God to find out that Jehovah never meant to teach what these apostles had learned from the sacred books. Abraham and the other patriarchs, Moses and the kings and the prophets, saw the day of Christ and were glad, but they did not understand what they saw, much less why they should be glad; they could not put this and that together, as through the smoke of their own sacrifices they looked down through the ages and caught the flashes which ascended to heaven from Calvary's altar; they could see no connection between the two; their sacrifices were only a dumb

show, given to them as a toy is given to a child to occupy it until it can comprehend and manage real things. Dr. Bushnell sees an argument for the absence of significance and power in the Old Testament sacrifices in their growing disuse as the moral sense of the Jews expanded. They outgrew such crudities! Did not the prophets charge this growing neglect rather to a growing wickedness than an expanding conscience? They, to the last recorded utterances of Malachi, reproach the people for robbing God of his dues in withholding the tithes and offerings. It was to their shame that they either brought nothing or brought only the blemished, such as were an abomination unto God. And whenever God speaks lightly of sacrifices, it is where those sacrifices are associated with corruption and are vainly presented without repentance and reformation. It is impossible to find that at any time God meant that the mere blood of the beast could take away sin, only as it was a sign, or the expression, of the deeper sacrifice of a broken and contrite spirit, and a symbol of that greater Sacrifice which was to appear once in the fullness of time as a satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. The age so boastingly called the advanced period of Israel was an age of apostasy-the purer age, on the contrary, was when the people brought of the best of their flocks, etc., to sacrifice regularly to the Lord. The flame of piety died with the flame of the altar, and only revived again at Pentecost, after that the sacrifice of the Lamb of God had found acceptance in heaven and obtained eternal redemption for men. The ancient sacrifices were valueless only as they diverted the mind from Christ and the holiness which it is the end of all religion to create, but so long as they kept the mind steadily on Christ as the Lamb of God taking away the sin of the world they were of priceless value. It is only when brought into comparison as a ground and means of holiness with the blood of Jesus that their value vanishes. And when, too, God's great purpose is ripe to effect by the real sacrifice that which was hitherto only foreshadowed and anticipated-by the one great sacrifice of his Son-then they altogether vanish away. "For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins. Wherefore, when He cometh into the world, he saith, Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared me: in burnt

offerings and sacrifices for sin thou hast had no pleasure. Above, when he said, Sacrifice and offering and burnt-offerings and offering for sin thou wouldest not, neither hadst pleasure therein; which are offered by the law; then said he, Lo, I come to do thy will, O God. He taketh away the first, that he may establish the second." Heb. x, 4-6, 8, 9. The Lamb "slain from the foundation of the world" had now appeared, offered himself, and, all past as well as the present and future merging in him, the apostle could say, "Whom God hath set forth (preordained) to be a propitiation (a propitiatory sacrifice) through faith in his blood, to declare (demonstrate) his righteousness (justice) for the remission (forgiveness) of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God, (because of his seeming impunity in overlooking transgression in the past ;) to declare (demonstrate) at this (present) time his righteousness: (justice :) that he might be (is) just and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus." This sacrifice was that to which the ancient Jew looked by anticipation; it is that to which we now look by retrospection. It has already been shown how Christ derived from the passover the lesson, and henceforth embodied in his own Supper as a fact the truth, of his atoning death; it remains to quote but one among many instances in which he assumed for himself and his sacrifice the whole burden of meaning involved in the Old Testament ritual. "Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many." Matt. xx, 28. Here the evangelist puts into the mouth of Christ the very word, (λúτpov,) lutron, by which the "Seventy" translate Exod. xxi, 30, λúτpa, a ransom, and the equivalent forfeited life; also (Lev. xxv, 24, 51,) the purchase price to be paid for a possession according to a just valuation. Take this in connection with the great event which Christ pointed out as approaching, (verse 18,) his betrayal and death, and it does seem indisputable that he designedly inculcated that his death was to be of the nature of a substitutionary satisfaction. He was to redeem the many by buying them out from the curse of the law. Otherwise how can we interpret language? (See Stier's "Words of the Lord Jesus," vol. iii, p. 81.) It is not claimed that the whole significance of Christ's life and work is to be found in the Old Testament ritual, but it is claimed that one vital connection FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXIII.—39

of the Old and New Testaments is the blood of expiation. Here they meet if nowhere else. Without sheding of blood is no pardon for the guilty. In the great truth of satisfaction by substitution as the only adequate explanation of the vicarious atonement the believer must rest. Nothing short of this as fundamental can meet the reason of the case, the wants of conscience, and the testimony of Holy Scripture. Tried by experience the experience of myriads who overcame by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony-it alone stands the immutable rock on which Christ has founded his Church, and against which the gates of hell shall never prevail. If we may determine what is the most wholesome food for the body by ascertaining by what substances the body is nourished at its best state, so may we fairly infer what is truest, soundest doctrine for the Church, if we can find out what has been the belief of the Church in its purest and most victorious periods. No more decided and favorable answer is needed than that which comes from the lips of the more thoughtful and devout of the doubters of the doctrine of the vicarious expiatory sacrifice of Christ. Systems, like men, must be tested by their fruits. The sign never to be cut off is the ever-recurring miracle of the Cross. It makes a "holy people." "The blood of Jesus Christ... cleanseth us from all sin." "But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption."

ART. V.-CHURCH PROPERTY QUESTIONS IN THE SOUTH.

It is generally known that since the close of the war a number of questions, both legal and moral, have arisen in the South, bringing into controversy the legal claims and rightful ownership of certain Church property. Houses of worship, parsonages, and in some instances improved camp-grounds, are held and used by the members of one Church which are claimed as rightfully belonging to another Church. In some places the members of the Methodist Episcopal Church are in the possession and use of property which is claimed as exclusively be.