THE OFFERINGS.

CHAPTER I.

THE OFFERINGS IN GENERAL.

HOW general has been the thought that it is only

in the revelation of God's written Word that we can know anything of redemption, expiation, and vicarious sacrifice! God's two Books-Revelation and Nature-have been divorced, and more than divorced, set in direct antagonism to each other from age to age. It is quite true, indeed, that had the Bible never spoken, we never could have interpreted the language of Nature. Her hieroglyphics would have remained unread for ever. But, Revelation having uttered its voice, its echoes have been heard in every department of Nature. The bowels of the earth, the depths of the sea, the universe on every side, has responded to the cry, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." The laws of nations, the usages of society, the commonest incidents of every-day life, the dust beneath our feet, the lichen on the crumbling rock,

the air we breathe, each in its turn not only illustrates the great doctrine of sacrifice taught in every page of God's written Word, but is governed by the same great law. Each one has graven upon it in letters of light, which all may read, "Without shedding of blood is no remission of sin." It is true, indeed, that for ages we have been asleep. Men are now waking up. The light of a new morning is shining upon Nature in every department, and men are beginning to read characters written there which the long dark night of ignorance, prejudice, and sin has concealed from view. To all but the man whose eyes are absolutely shut, Nature is telling her tale, and every line is the counterpart of divine Revelation. We can only rightly estimate the fearful character of sin when we think of its. power to blind men to the great fact to which I have just called attention.

I have spoken of Nature's teachings, however, as "hieroglyphics;" and, indeed, they are. The whole of the visible world is a hieroglyph or picture-writing, to which the Gospel of Christ is, as it were, the Rosetta Stone, making—when once mastered—all the rest plain. Nature, yea also Providence, is thick with dark. anomalies; day unto day these utter speech, and night unto night declare knowledge—a language of sin and parable, where the voice is not heard. One there is, only One, who can interpret it, and "show us plainly of the Father." God's bow lies upon the cloud of everything around, yet light does not break through it till we see Him, in whom the brightness of God's glory shines. Human life is beset with

contradictions, at the solution of which we are but guessers until Christ solves the riddle that was too hard for us, bringing forth meat out of the eater, and out of the strong One sweetness;" for "in Jesus Christ all contradictions are reconciled."

The offerings of Leviticus are the interpreters of the great law of expiation and sacrifice written on everything around us. They show us, in varied aspects, the great truth which underlies everything in nature and in grace-redemption. Jesus-that is the highest, the noblest study for man. Jesus dying, Jesus rising from the dead, Jesus ever living on high for man-this is the tale all Nature has to tell in ten thousand different forms, and which Revelation has to interpret. It is a noble study! It will occupy eternity. It has depths the longest line has never sounded. It has heights the loftiest flight has never reached. Jesus! the new-born soul utters it, and feels that it has, in its farthest reachings, barely touched the surface of the infinite grace and mercy and love and wisdom and knowledge which lie beneath; and as it stands upon that surface uttering that wondrous and blessed name, Angels and Archangels, and all the host of heaven, seem to echo in his ears-Jesus!

How beautifully this great truth is endorsed in the words of another! He says:- "The atonement of Christ was not an abrupt, isolated occurrence, having no relations with the previous history of mankind. It is not reasonable to suppose that an event so mysterious, so astonishing, involving such momentous consequences, past, present, and future, was

ushered upon the stage without any previous warning -without any anticipatory likeness in persons and things which, in some measure, should prepare the minds of men for its understanding, and their hearts for its reception."

"Survey the face of Nature as it is now arranged, and you find everywhere prospective contrivancesacted prophecies-in their own order wonderful and convincing. Everything lower in order, or earlier in time, prophecies the coming of something higher and better than itself to follow in due course and to announce in its turn something higher still. The mineral world sends forth its herald voice in its crystallizations to proclaim the coming glory of the vegetable kingdom; the world of plants in its structure and functions is full of presignificances of the animal world; there is hardly anything in the one which is not paralleled in the other and earlier system. The blossom is foretold at every stage of growth in the plant by signs that become more and more significant as the period of flowering draws nigh. And the advent of man himself is predicted, not only by the progressive arrangements of the earth's surface through vast cycles of time, but also by a corresponding uniform ascent and approach to the physical structure and form of man in the creatures that appeared in the successive epochs. In the first zoophyte that dropped its anchor in the most ancient sea, man was created by anticipation in the thought of God; and parts of the economy of all the lower animals that preceded man, which exist but as symbols in them, acquire use and significance in him.