have already seen, that the authority with which our Lord spoke and acted, originated in that power and intelligence with which the Almighty formed the universe.

The Apostle farther intimates, that the Son of God made a sacrifice of himself to purify us from our sins. This is a fact which the Apostle more directly asserts in the following passage: "But Christ, a high-priest of the future good things, being come, entered once for all into the most holy place, through the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made by hands, nor by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood having found a lasting purification. For if the blood of bulls, and of goats, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctify to the cleansing of the flesh; how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the everlasting spirit offered himself spotless to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works, that you may serve the living God? Heb, ix. 11-15.

Here it is said, that the death of Christ was a sacrifice for sin, that his blood was shed to wash away the impurities of men. Are we then to understand that his death was strictly a sacrifice, and that the object of it was to appease God, and to purchase salvation for mankind. I shall employ a few observations, to shew that this unscriptural and antichristian doctrine has no foundation in this epistle, though apparently more favourable to it than any other part of the New Testament.

1. Wherever the Apostles mention the death of Christ as the means of expiating guilt, it appears evident from the context that they had

the Gnostics in view. The known sentiments of the deceivers, then, furnish the only true method of ascertaining the purport of the sacred wri ters. But the false teachers affirmed that Christ did not come to deliver men from their sins, and that, as not having flesh and blood, he did not in reality die. The apostolic teachers, therefore, in noticing his death, must be understood to inculcate that he really died, not that he died to atone for sin; that as having flesh and blood, he had the real nature, and not the mere appearance of man; and that his object in submitting to death was to induce men to forsake their former evil ways, and thus save them from moral death.

2. The impostors farther maintained that the law had no connexion with the Gospel. The writer to the Hebrews sets aside this opinion, by shewing, that the ordinances of the law were symbolical of Christ, and intended as preparatory to his religion. Hence he draws a parallel between Moses as the servant, and Jesus, as the Son of God, chap. iii. 1-7; between Melchisedec (chap. vii. 1.) who, as priest of the Most High God, had no human parents, and Christ, who, as the Logos of God, had no other father than God, and no mother but wisdom; between the high priest, who shed the blood of animals, to purify the people, and Christ, who shed his own blood to purify the world by placing before them the most efficacious motives to repentance and amendment. By this representation, the author intended further to wean the Jewish believers from the rites of Moses, and from the services of the temple which were soon to be destroyed. These were only shadows; Christ

was the great reality. To Christ, therefore, as to the rising sun, their attention was directed and they were to leave their ritual law, like the shadows of the morn, to pass without regret.

3. The terms sacrifice, purification, atonement, the phrases to cleanse sins, to shed his blood for the remission of sins, used to express the death of Christ or the effects of that death, are hence to be understood, not in a literal but in a figurative sense. They are all copied from the Jewish ritual, and solely in consequence of a comparison with it. They are to be interpreted, therefore, with the same latitude, as when Christ is said to be a lamb, John i, 36, to be a high priest; when his flesh is said to be a veil, Heb. x. 20, or when the heavens, into which he has entered, are called the most holy place, or the true tabernacle.

4. The death of Christ is represented in this epistle as producing effect not on God but on us; it is not said that he died to reconcile God to men, to disarm his justice, and to open for them the gates of mercy, but to wash our consciences from dead works, and to bring us to the knowledge and worship of the only true God. Jesus suffered on the cross to establish a new covenant between God and man, in which the sole condition on the part of man is to study and obey the divine law, and on the part of God to forgive and forget the iniquities that are forsaken."This is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel," saith the Lord: "I will put my laws into their mind, and I will write them on their hearts; and I will be to them a

God, and they shall be to me a people. I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities I will remember no more." Heb. viii. 10. Heathen writers speak of appeasing their Gods by sacrifices or ceremonial ablutions*. But this is a language unknown in the Jewish and Christian scriptures: in these heavenly records, the very word which denotes the forgiveness of sins on the part of God, means the dismission of it on the part of man. On this principle Christ, our compassionate and faithful high priest, hath atoned for the sins of the people, by furnishing them with motives no longer to continue in their sins,

5. The Apostle Paul asserts, that the Son of God, by means of himself, purified or washed away the sins of men. Philo has asserted the same thing; and his language is a happy comment on the language of our Apostle. "God," says he, "the author of divine virtue, was willing, in compassion on our race, to send his Image, that he might wash away the impurities which fill this life with guilt and misery, and thus secure to us a better inheritance."

Philo has no where mentioned the death of Christ; and this is a circumstance which clearly

* Eov inασxeola. Iliad i. 386. The language of the New Testament is, ἱλασκεσθαι τας αμαρτίας, το propitiate our sins-to purify-to forsake them. Thus, also, αφεσις των αμαρτιων, the forgiveness of sins-the dismission of sins; and this Paul calls anλTEWOLS, Col. i. 14, purification, redemption.

proves that, in his estimation, our Saviour washes away the impurities of men in no other' way than by teaching them to become holy and virtuous. He had received the Gospel as it came simple and unadulterated from the mouth of Christ, and he could not have been mistaken as to the nature and end of his death. The converts in Egypt and Palestine, whom he has so fully described, illustrate the justice of his opinion. They were purified from the disorders of vice, and qualified by faith in Jesus for a divine inheritance, and yet the only article of their creed was that they worshipped and obeyed the only true God through Jesus Christ.

6. In two places of the New Testament (1 Cor. vi. 7. 2 Pet. ii. 1. 1 Tim. ii. 6) it is said, that the believers in Jesus were bought with a price. This language supposes that they had been before captives-had been in bondage-in bondage to sin and death. They were then bought in the sense in which they had been slaves; and they had been slaves only by a figure of speech. The language, therefore, which holds forth good men as purchased by the death of Christ, is also figurative. Besides, to whom was this price paid, if paid at all? Certainly to the being who held them in subjectionto sin, to death, or the principle of evil. Jesus then paid the price of sin in behalf of the elect, not to the justice of God, but to the devil*.

* And this was really the first notion on the subject of the atonement. 66 If," says Origen (Opera, vol. ii. p. 486), "we are bought with a price, as Paul affirms, we must have