not sacrifice; else would I give it thee: thou delightest not in burnt-offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise',' which is generally adduced as a proof that the law furnished no atonement for moral sin, scarcely can it be considered as an argument sufficient for the purpose, when taken in conjunction with what immediately follows: "Do good in thy pleasure unto Zion: build thou the walls of Jerusalem. Then shalt thou be pleased with the sacrifice of righteousness, with burnt-offering and whole burnt-offering: then shall they offer bullocks upon thine altar"." These two passages, the connexion of which avowedly involves a difficulty, appear to shew nothing more than that God, though he had appointed sacrifices, was more pleased with the purity of the offerer than with the exact performance of the prescribed ordinance. Again, the other supposition, that the expia

Psalm li. 16, 17.

u Psalm li. 18, 19.

tion or atonement of the primeval religion was perfect in itself, is evidently gratuitous in the part of those who assume it. The plan of universal atonement had already been laid immediately after the fall of man; if therefore there was expiatory sacrifice in the primeval religion, it would be inconsistent with the stability of God's purpose to suppose that it could otherwise be expiatory, than that of the Mosaic law was, viz. otherwise than prospectively by virtue of the great and final expiation of Christ. Thus the two suppositions, the absolute disability of the Mosaic law to atone for moral sin, and that of a perfect atonement in the primeval religion, the former of which assumes less than we are warranted to allow, the latter more than is necessary, do not prove any retrogradation of the divine economy, since, as it is reasonable to suppose and as the explanation given of sin-offering requires, the atonement in both is placed upon an equal footing.

Having shewn, from the etymological expla

nation of the word rendered sin-offering, that it necessarily signifies expiatory or atoning sacrifice, and, according to the most legitimate rules of interpretation, that it ought to be understood in the same signification in the controverted passage of the book of Genesis, and consequently that the notion of expiation or atonement was known in the primeval religion; I proceed to enquire, whether there be not something in the efficient principle of sin-offering or atoning sacrifice itself, as we find it explained in the books of Moses, which may lead us to the same conclusion. But I shall first make some observations on the hypothesis of the natural origin of sacrifice.

It is allowed by the writer before alluded to, that eucharistic oblations are so perfectly reconcileable with the suggestions of a natural piety, that the reasonableness of them may easily be maintained. But with regard to animal sacrifice, he confesses that it presents the only difficulty in the rational scheme of sacrifice, although he thinks that even this is by no

means inexplicable, or in any degree paradoxical, if considered upon natural principles. He reasons thus: God having denounced death as the punishment due to man's original transgression, and thereby given him to understand that death was the wages of all other sin, it was natural that man should make confession of his guilt and of the punishment he deserved by presenting a victim to be slain, as the appropriate but interposed symbol of his contrition and self-condemnation, by a kind of natural representation of his own forfeited life. Against this argument it may be observed, that, as Abel, when he offered the first recorded sacrifice, (which however, as we may infer from the manner in which it is mentioned, was probably not the first offered,) had not yet seen any example of sin having been punished by actual death, for his parents, against whom that punishment had been denounced, were living at a period long after that sacrifice, it is scarcely probable that he should by his own natural reason have known either the nature of

death, still less would it have suggested itself to him that the death of an irrational animal might be substituted for his own, or merely as a symbol of his own contrition and self-condemnation. The interposition too or substitution of the victim, if it meant any thing, must have represented that the punishment was transferred from himself to the victim; if then this substitution of a victim, to which the punishment due to the offerer was considered in any sense as transferred, was the natural discovery of human reason, it is scarcely probable that God would have made this very circumstance, viz. the vicarious nature of animal sacrifice, the subject of an express revelation in the opening of the Mosaic law: "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 which maketh an atonement for the soul." Besides, although no doubt the divine declaration which gave to

Leviticus xvii. 11.

R