THE GREAT SACRIFICE. CHAPTER I. THE CONTRAST. "For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh : how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?" HEBREWS ix. 13, 14. WE have seen in the first chapter of Leviticus, which we have this morning read, the letter of the Gospel. In the verses that we have now read, we have what may be called the spirit of the Gospel. The one is the outward and material hieroglyph, the other is the inward and the spiritual meaning. The one, or the letter, the worship on this mount, with all its forms, its ceremonies, its sacrifices; the other is neither on this mount, nor on that, but the requirement that they who are in Christ worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The one was the washing with water, the purifying of the outward man; the other is the washing of the spirit, the renewing of the inward heart. Leviticus, in the letter, could make a Jew outwardly; the New Testament can B : : make a Jew inwardly, whose praise is not of man, but of God: but in both, as I have stated, we have the same Gospel. Moses and Matthew equally sketched from a grand original; they equally described the Lord of glory, the Sacrifice for sin, the Saviour of the guilty, only in different shades and colours in the case of Moses with more splendid colours, in more gorgeous hues; in the case of Paul, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, more fully, and simply, and transparently, but still the same Saviour. Moses and Matthew spoke the same truths; the one with stammering lips, the other clearly the one upon the lower; the other upon the loftier, and the clearer key-note. They lived in the same light; but Moses saw Christ by moonlight,-a veil of dark cloud all round him and over him: the other saw Christ in the sunlight,-the clouds that are about him only softening, not concealing the splendour of his glory. But both looked to the same Saviour,-trusted in the same cross; the one in the world's infancy, the other when light and immortality have been clearly brought to light. The fact is, there never has been, from the moment that Christ was preached in Paradise till now, but one Protestant and evangelical religion. It has been from the beginning. Adam, Abel, and Enoch, were Christians before the flood; Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, were Christians, amid their shining tents in the desert; Moses, and David, and Hezekiah, were Christians, amid the projected shadows of Sinai and of Horeb; Matthew, and Mark, and Luke, and John, and Peter and Paul, were Christians, who had seen Christ -the same Christ-face to face; Augustine, and Chrysostom, and Vigilantius, were Christians in the patristic era, in the early dawn; and Cecil and |