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13. It is worthy of note, if I may be permitted the digression, that Buddhism aligns itself with the prophets, sages, and poets on this question.

Buddha said, "If a man live a hundred years and engage the whole of his time and attention in religious offering to the gods, sacrificing elephants and horses and other life, all this is not equal to one act of pure love in saving life!" Buddha denounced animal sacrifices as in themselves wrong: to him all life was sacred,

III. THE PRIESTLY COUNTER-REFORMATION.

14. No ecclesiasticism, however firmly grounded in popular prejudice, can withstand such protests as those that we have noticed, without undergoing a counterreformation. Let us, therefore, look at the legal and sacrificial ideas of atonement as they appear in the postexilian writers. We will dismiss Ezekiel, Zechariah, Haggai, Joel, and some others, with the hint that they, doubtless, had much to do in bringing this counterreformation about.

15. When we turn to the offerings of the Levitical law, we are surprised to find how large a number of them are no longer sacrifices, but fines and dues for maintaining the priests, and the elaborate system of praiseworthy charities managed by the Jewish Church.1 In passages like Lev. v. II, sacrifices are reduced to the lowest possible limit. The daily meal and drink offerings of which Joel so often speaks, required a surprisingly small quantity of flour and wine. In fact, many Jews before the time of Christ had, doubtless, come 1 Wellhausen's History, p. 73.

to look upon the sacrifices as small indeed in value as compared with the study of the law.1

When we turn to these offerings themselves, and note the character of the sins for which they avail, we are surprised to find that they are for sins of ignorance, or for omissions and misdemeanors in regard to which there may have been a real perplexity of conscience, the conscience not yet having pronounced judgment at the time when some decision was forced upon the offender.

Let us look at these in detail. The sin-offering in Lev. iv. 2 is clear enough. He is guilty who shall sin by mistake in any of the things which Jahveh hath commanded, and a sin-offering is due from him. The variations from the first test case, cited in other parts of the chapter, and in v. 15, 17, are equally clear.

The law of the guilt-offering in Lev. v. is not quite so easily understood. Verse I seems to be badly put. Yet scholars find in it some such meaning as this: A witness appearing, say for a man that he knows to be innocent, forgets the best part of his testimony in the flurry of being called before the court, and the innocent man is condemned. Such a witness is guilty. He has been careless or thoughtless, or he has caught a panic when he should have been made morally strong by his sense of right.2

Verses 2, 3, are purely ceremonial. A man without knowing it is made unclean by some means, and subsequently does what the law forbids an unclean person to do. Possibly the offence consisted in walking over 1 Weber's Altsynagogale Theologie, S. 38 ff. 2 See Toy, Judaism and Christianity, p. 226.

the grave of some dead man.

The offender is guilty,

and the act costs a lamb or a kid.

Verse 4 has to do with rash promises and oaths. The language here clearly implies that the offender's intentions were good, but he was rash or thoughtless, as was Herod, for example, when he made the promise that cost the life of John Baptist.

Lev. vi. 1-7 seems at first sight to be even more perplexing than v. I. That is, it looks as though the writer intended to say that a man could cheat his neighbor out of five thousand shekels, and make it all right with Jahveh, by sending up to the temple five shekels of the spoils wherewith to buy a ram for a guilt-offering. The passage runs as follows: "If any one sin, and commit a trespass against Jahveh, and deal falsely with his neighbor in a matter of deposit, or of bargain, or of robbery, or have oppressed his neighbor, or have found that which was lost, and deal falsely therein, and swear to a lie : in any of all these that a man doeth, sinning therein; then it shall be, if he hath sinned, and is guilty, that he shall restore that which he took, and bring his guilt-offering unto Jahveh." Now, the whole of this passage has its secret in the repetition of the "if" idea. If it is perfectly evident that the man has sinned, why the reiteration of the "if"? The fact is, it was not evident at the time. The language, especially its literary dependence upon Ex. xxii. 7-13, clearly shows this. It was a case of real perplexity of conscience. Let us enlarge upon one detail of the passage by way of illustration. In the great bulk of our trade to-day we have one known quantity in almost every exchange of goods. In ancient times

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when trade was, between neighbors, largely barter, there were two unknown quantities. Suppose a man exchanges two cows for a horse, often he could not tell the relative value of the two cows and the horse until he had owned them all for a certain length of time. Then, when experience brings it to his notice, he becomes aware of the fact that he knew all the time that he was cheating his neighbor.

16. Now, in modern ethics, sins of ignorance, unless the ignorance is "criminally acquired," are not sins. In modern ethics, too, the existence of real perplexities of conscience is admitted. And it is also claimed that one may decide amiss in such a case, without being guilty of sin. The future alone could decide whether the act were good or bad. Moderns say that the ignorant offender must take the consequences of his blunders. So said the Levitical law. It is said of these ignorant, conscience-perplexed offenders, one after another, "He is guilty, and shall bear his iniquity." That does not mean that the ram shall bear it, or that he bears it in the loss of his ram. But he bears his iniquity in taking the punishment prescribed by the laws of nature and of civil society.

In exact agreement with Leviticus is the book of Hebrews. According to Heb. ix. 7 (R. V.), the High Priest offers sacrifices "for the ignorances of the people." But the author of Hebrews goes farther, and declares, as does Paul, that sins of this kind are formal rather than real, and that the sacrificial means of atonement is of the same nature. "Gifts and sacrifices cannot, as touching the conscience, make the worshipper perfect, being only carnal ordinances, imposed until a

time of reformation. . . . For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins." 1

In no case, then, will a sacrifice enable a man to escape the consequences of moral transgression. But why must another take them, we ask, if the offender must bear them himself? Where is the substitution? In what does the ransom consist? Obviously the venerable Bishop Burnett was altogether wrong when he wrote, "The notion of an expiatory sacrifice which was there when the New Testament was writ, well understood all the world over, both by Jews and Gentiles, was this that the sin of one person was transferred on a man or a beast, who upon that was devoted or offered to God, and suffered in the room of the offending person.' "2 And Professor Schultz is right in saying, "The sin-offering and guilt-offering of the Torah are admissible only in cases where there has been no wicked intention." 3

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17. Some scholars have tried to show that the ideas that underlay the ceremonies of the "day of atonewere of a somewhat different nature, and do imply a belief in substitutionary atonement. In the first place, it should be said that the part played by the scapegoat in the "day of atonement" is essentially foreign to the religion of the Old Testament, and the idea cannot with certainty be said to appear in the New Testament at all. The account of the sacrifice is given

'Heb. ix. 7-10, x. 1-4, and Cone's Gospel and Its Earliest Interpretations, p. 240 fol.

2 Quoted by Professor Everett, Gospel of Paul, p. 4.

8 Schultz's Old Testament Theology, vol. ii. p. 307. See also Piepenbring's Theology of the Old Testament, pp. 309–316.

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