ing sinfulness. Sin reached its culmination of daring wickedness when it put to death the Prince of life, and divine love reached its complete manifestation when the Prince of life suffered himself to be taken and by wicked hands crucified and slain. Too much emphasis cannot be put upon the death of Christ, for without it his work would have been incomplete, like a bridge that reached only part way across a chasm. He, the infinite head of a finite race, and the sinless head of a fallen race, must experience, in his own person, the utmost that sin could do, and must share to the full all the grief and pain that a being of infinite holiness and love could feel in consequence of the wickedness of those whom he loved as brethren. But all this exhibition of human sinfulness, and of patient endurance on the part of Christ, was only the culmination and visible exhibition of what had been going on since the first trangression. All through the ages preceding the incarnation, the sinful race had been trampling on his righteous law and abusing his goodness, while he had as constantly been bearing their iniquities and striving to win them to repentance. For a little time now the veil is drawn aside, and, in his life among men and his death on the cross, men and angels are permitted to see the exhibition of human wickedness and divine long-suffering in closest contact and sharpest contrast.

The human race was constituted a unity, in which the innocent suffer with the guilty, in order that the divine Logos, himself the head of the race, might bear the sins of men, and win them, by this manifestation of his love, from sin to holiness. By his long-suffering grief over the sins of his own brethren, by his subjection to the malice of sinful beings, by his patient endurance of this malice, by his resistance of the temptations of Satan and his victory over him, and at last by receiving in himself the utmost that sin could do when it procured his death on the cross, he redeemed the race he had created in his own image. Not

alone on Calvary, but before his incarnation and birth in Bethlehem, in the temptation in the wilderness, in patient endurance of the contradiction of sinners, in every deed of kindness and patient submission to wrong, he was bearing our sins and working out our redemption. The doctrine of an angry God demanding a victim on whom to pour out his wrath, and finding it in his own son, substituted for the guilty, and laying on him the stripes due to sinners, finds no warrant in Scripture. Sin is exceeding sinful, and Christ's mission is to destroy it, and deliver men from its power. For this purpose he makes common cause with men. He shares their nature, not by uniting it with his own, but by creating them with his own, and thus making them his kinsmen; and in the fulness of time, limiting himself to human conditions in a human body, he endures, in his own person, the malice of Satan and of sinful men, and all that it is possible for them to inflict on him. He appeals to the best there is in man,-not to his fears alone, but to his love. It is from sin that he seeks to deliver men, and this he can do only by bringing them to love him.

The sufferings of Christ, then, were vicarious, not on Calvary alone, but before his incarnation and during his life on earth; and the agony in Gethsemane and on Calvary was but the consummation and culmination of the suffering involved in the relation which he constituted between himself and the human race when he made man in his own image. Thus he who knew no sin was made sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.

ARTICLE III.

THE EVIDENCE OF THE PSALTER TO A LEVITICAL SYSTEM.

BY THE REV. HENRY HAYMAN, D. D., ALDINGHAM, ULVERSTON, ENGLAND,

THE Book of Psalms ought, according to widespread recent theories, to mark a great advance on the ante-Babylonian prophets in the evidence of Levitical ordinances, their value and obligatory character-not of course as set forth in formal detail, but as extolled in religious sentiment. Of those prophets Prof. Robertson Smith, whom I have already taken as a representative advocate of those theories, remarks,1 that, whereas" in the Levitical system access to God . . . was only attained through the mediation of Aaronic priests at the central sanctuary," and whereas "the ordinary Israelite meets there with God only on special occasions, and during the greater part of his life must . . . stand afar off," the "reformers of Israel [i. e. the prophets aforesaid, pp. 266, 267] strove against the constant lapses of Israel into syncretism, or the worship of foreign gods; but they did not do so on the ground of the Levitical theory of Israel's absolute separation from the nations, or of a unique holiness radiating from the one sanctuary, and descending in widening circles through priests and Levites to the ordinary Israelite. The history itself does not accept the Levitical standard.

Nowhere does the condemnation of the popular religion rest on the original consecration of the tabernacle, the brazen altar, and the Aaronic priesthood as the exclusive channels of veritable intercourse between Jehovah and Israel."

1 Old Testament in the Jewish Church, p. 242.

But the prophets, it was further urged by the professor, give no testimony to a written code of law, and depreciate or even denounce all such elements of ceremonial as form the prominent feature of the Levitical law, and further rebuke contemporary Israel and Judah, not for abandoning those Levitical elements, but for neglecting moral duties and spiritual dispositions, these latter alone being that which Jehovah regards.

I have endeavored in an earlier essay1 to show that the above-quoted statements do not square with the facts, or do so to a far less extent than is supposed by the learned professor. But I am now going to assume, for argument's sake, that the facts are at any rate defective in the evidence which they give both to a written law and to a Levitical system and theory. In order to test the trustworthiness of this assumption, I proceed now to compare the similar evidence given by the Psalter, which we are expressly told by the same learned authority was "the service-book of the second Temple," i. e. of the Temple as restored after the return from Babylon. If this be so, we ought, on his view, to find that recognition of those elements in the Psalter which, according to him, are absent in the prophets. But if no such great advance in that recognition can be traced in the Psalter, the argument founded on the supposed silence of the prophets may be dismissed as untenable. It will be more convenient to postpone to the end the consideration of evidence in the Psalter to a written code of law; and to take, first, the question of exaltation of moral duties, etc., either absolutely, or as compared with ritual generally, and Levitical sacrifices and ceremonies in particular; and this question will be found to run into and involve those further ones of Israel's absolute separation, of a unique holiness radiating, etc., and descending, etc., as above-said, and of any original

1 See Bibliotheca Sacra for January and April, 1892, in which two numbers the essay above referred to appeared.

(by which I suppose auto-Mosaic is meant) consecration of tabernacle, brazen altar, and Aaronic privilege.

1. As regards the requirement of moral, etc., dispositions, as preferred to outward rite, etc., I adduce Ps. iv. 5, "Offer the sacrifices of righteousness;" xv. I seq., "Jehovah, who shall sojourn in thy tabernacle ? Who shall dwell in thy holy hill? He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh truth in his heart" -and so on throughout; repeated with details slightly retrenched in xxiv. 3 seq., which latter derives significance from the tradition of this psalm having been used at the dedication of the Temple. Again, in the first prolonged meditation on "the law of Jehovah" (xix. 7 seq.), its moral qualities are exclusively selected as the means and condition of human perfection. That "law is perfect, restoring the soul, . . sure, making wise the simple, . . . right, rejoicing the heart, . . pure, enlightening the eyes. His judgments are true and righteous altogether." Of course the language is largely general and partly figurative; but it would strain that language and trouble the even tenor of the passage to find anywhere in it any suspicion of ceremonial allusion. The sense of divine supervision and control is singularly prominent in verses 12 and 13; as is the presentment of outward words and inward thoughts for divine acceptance. In short we have here the real consecration-prayer of a spiritual sacrifice. Consider next the challenge given in xxxiv. 12 to seekers for human happiness, "who desire life and (many) days, that they may see good," and the means to that end as propounded here, and quoted by St. Peter (1 Pet. iii. 1012): "Keep thy tongue . . . thy lips. thy lips. . . ; depart from evil and do good, seek peace and pursue it." The "meek" are singled out for God's favor, our Lord borrowing one of his beatitudes (Matt. v. 5) from the Psalter here (xxii. 26; xxv. 9; xxxiv. 2). I can similarly find room for one only of the scores of correspondent negative passages: God has no