THE

FREETHINKING

CHRISTIANS'

QUARTERLY REGISTER.

ON RELIGIOUS WORSHIP.-ESSAY II.

"What is man?

Where must he find his Maker? with what rites

Adore him? Will he hear, accept, and bless?

Or does he sit regardless of his works?

THE

'Tis Revelation satisfies all doubts.”—Cowper's Task, Book II.

HE object of the present Essay is to take a review of the modes of religious worship, as commanded or authorized by Deity, and which are alluded to as such in the scriptures; contrasting these with the various corruptions and unauthorized species of worship, which, whether from ignorance, interest, or false views of expediency, have been adopted by mankind, under the name of Christian.

As best fitted for such a review I shall adopt the mode of plain narration; reserving, for future Essays, all argument upon any points of difference which may arise. A statement made by any individual, whose intentions are fair and honest, must necessarily square with his own views and opinions. If the reader, however, should think any assertion hereinafter contained untenable, I can only request him, in fairness, to suspend his judgment till he shall have seen, in the after remarks, how far such assertions are, or are not, supported by sound argument, or borne out by sufficient authority.

To proceed then to the subject. When the Deity placed our first parent in the garden he had prepared for him, the earliest lesson which we have recorded, was a command

which he disobeyed. In the infancy of his intellect it would have been vain to look for that implicit confidence in the will of his great Maker, which ages of experience have not produced on the minds of his distant offspring. The lesson taught, therefore, was not by means of any abstract, theoretical principle which he could not have understood, but by a direction which, bearing reference to his daily food, was brought down to the level of his capacity, and appealed to his feelings and his wants.

It is evident indeed that every appeal to the understanding must, in the first instance, be made through the medium of the senses: a principle which will be found to elucidate nearly all the modes, recorded in the scriptures, of early religious worship.

Of the sons of Adam the elder was a tiller of the ground, and the next born a keeper of sheep. Their worship was natural, and adapted, at once, to their capacities and circumstances. Cain brought of the fruit of the ground; Abel brought of the firstlings of the flock; and each made his offering to the Lord.

In an age immediately succeeding we are told that men first began to call upon the name, or to call themselves by the name of the Lord; the altar is erected, and we have frequent instances recorded of sacrifice and burnt offering. Thus of Noah we read that he built an altar to the Lord, and offered burnt offerings on the altar, and that the Lord accepted his sacrifice, and blessed Noah and his sons. (Gen. viii. 20.)

On the subject of SACRIFICE various opinions have been entertained. There were evidently, indeed, sacrifices of different descriptions; some, as we have seen, were offerings presented to the Deity, in acknowledgment of his greatness and power, it being peculiarly the custom of eastern countries to express respect and obedience to superiors, by offerings and presents; in some cases the thing devoted-that is, made sacred, or sacrificed-was consumed by fire; emblematical, it may be, of the intention of the party to purify himself from sin, and lead, thenceforward, a life of virtue. Sacrifices, in after ages, were instituted at stated times, for the purpose of celebrating important events; and, in many cases, the thing offered or devoted, was eaten with rejoicing and thanksgiving-the sacrifice thus becoming, in fact, a feast. This has been, somewhat quaintly perhaps, but correctly, described by Dr. Sykes, as "a kind of eating and drinking with God, as it

"were at his table, in consequence of being in a state of friend"ship with him, by repentance and confession of sin.*

One general remark may be made, that it was never the death or the sufferings of the thing offered that constituted the essence of the sacrifice; in many cases, indeed, the object devoted was inanimate, and therefore incapable of pain or death. The piety or religious efficacy of sacrifice rested in the mind of the individual who made the offering, not in any innate virtue possessed by the first fruits of the earth, or by the blood of bulls, or goats, or rams.

Covenants, or as it were conditional agreements, are afterwards described as being made by Deity with Abraham and his descendants, throughout what are called-THE PATRIARCHAL AGES. Their simple and primitive views of the Deity, and of religious worship, are such as might have been expected from the people of an early, an ignorant, and an unenlightened period. Their compacts with Jehovah are made in the same form as agreements amongst each other; their reverence is manifested by the same tokens as marked their respect for the great men of the earth. "If God will be with me, and keep me in this way which I go, “and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that "I may come again to my father's house in peace, then shall "the Lord be my God."+ Such was the language of Jacob; and "he set up the stone" on which his head had rested, as a pillar which should be God's house, or a visible token of the undertaking he had given.

This was then considered as a religious compact, or covenant; but what Jacob, in this instance, did before God, was, as we find on another occasion, equally the token of a covenant between him and his fellow creature. His fatherin-law, Laban, says "Come thou, let us make a covenant, I "and thou, and let it be for a witness between me and thee; and Jacob took a stone, and set it up for a pillar; and Jacob "said unto his brethren, gather stones; and they took stones, "and made an heap, and they did eat there upon the heap; and Laban said, this heap is a witness between me and thee this day."+

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* In some of the passages of the Old Testament, a doubt evidently remained in the minds of the translators of our received version, whether a feast or a sacrifice were intended. Compare the text with the marginal readings-Gen. xxxi. 54; 1 Sam. ix. 12. See also Exod. xviii. 12.

+ Gen. xxviii. 20.

Gen. xxxi. 44.

On another occasion (Gen. xxxv. 9) we are told that God appeared unto Jacob again, and blessed him; and said "The land which I gave unto Abraham and Isaac will I give "unto thee; and to thy children after thee will I give the "land." Then also Jacob "set up a pillar in the place where God talked with him—even a pillar of stone; and he poured "a drink offering thereon, and he poured oil thereon; and "Jacob called the place where God spake unto him Beth-el, "the house of God." (See also Jos. iv. 9.)

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This spirit of external observance, not confined to religious matters, appears to have been extended to all the occurrences of political, and even of domestic life. It remains, more or less, even to this day, the prevailing characteristic of all the oriental nations, except where it has been superseded by the introduction of European habits; and it was, besides, the natural offspring of that early age of society.

The MOSAIC INSTITUTIONS Were naturally-wiselyinevitably indeed-accommodated to this spirit. They suited, in their external forms, the age in which they were given, or they never could have gained the objects for which they were intended. Still, however, those favoured individuals who received direct communications from the Deity, and all who entered into the true spirit of his worship, appear, from the very earliest age, to have enter

tained but a mean idea of the intrinsic value of forms and ceremonies-of sacrifice and outward ordinances. These were indeed, probably, at the time, given with an avowed view to the ignorance, the prejudices, and even the superstition of the people; or, to use the words of Jesus on a similar subject, "because of the hardness of their hearts." One of their prophets (Ezek. xx. 11, &c.) in describing the dispensations of the Deity toward the children of Israel, represents him as first "giving them statutes, and shewing "them his judgments; which, if a man do, he should even live "in them:" and then, with a view to their own peculiar and national circumstances, as afterwards "giving them his "sabbaths, to be a sign between him and them, that they might know that he was the Lord that blessed them;" whilst at once the subordinate nature, and the after institution of the forms of their religious worship, are equally asserted by the prophet Jeremiah; (Ch. vii. 21-23) who expressly affirms that burnt offerings and sacrifices were not, at first, commanded their fathers, when they left the land of Egypt; the earlier direction of the Deity simply being,

that they should obey his voice, and walk in the way "that he had commanded them." Principles, or statutes, like these last, were, however, too pure for the practice; and too abstract and mental for the comprehension of an early, yet corrupted, stage of society. The nations around them were plunged in ignorance, superstition, and idolatry: the children of Abraham had themselves been degraded by slavery, and contaminated by the example of their Egyptian masters. Habituated to the errors of polytheism, it was only by a visible and constant interposi-, tion of the power of Jehovah, that they were called originally to the worship of the true God; accustomed to behold the imposing, enticing, and even sensual observances of an idolatrous worship, it was only by a substitution of forms and ceremonies, purified from grossness, and adapted, in some degree, to the attributes and character of Jehovah, that their ignorant and wavering minds, constantly prone, to excess and idolatry, were retained in an obedience to his commandments, and an attention to his will.

To these ends all the institutions of Moses were directed; every public form had its object-every peculiar ceremony its design. The sabbath, or day of rest, (in a great measure a political institution) was intended constantly to remind them that the God whom they worshipped, was, at once, the creator of heaven and earth and the founder of their nation, by their deliverance from the slavery of the Egyptians. Their offerings and sacrifices, morning and evening, and on every great occasion, bespoke the presence of that supreme, benevolent being, from whom they derived. every blessing. At the feast of the passover, when their children, in time to come, said “what is this?" the answer they were instructed to give, was " It is the Lord's passover; for by the strength of his hand brought he us out of Egypt, "from the house of bondage." "Hear, O Israel!" is the expressive language of Moses, "the Lord our God is one Lord. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart; and thou shalt teach them diligently "unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt "bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as "frontlets between thine eyes; and thou shalt write them upon "the posts of thine house, and on thy gates." (Deut. vi. 4.)

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* See Lev, xvi. 29; xxiii. 10-43, and many other places. + Ex. xiii. 14.