(Lincoln’s Inn, 4th Sunday in Lent, March 26, 1854.)
‘And it shall be when thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying, What is this? that thou shalt say unto him, By strength of hand the Lord brought us out from Egypt, from the house of bondage: and it came to pass, when Pharaoh would hardly let us go, that the Lord slew all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both the firstborn of man, and the firstborn of beast: therefore I sacrifice to the Lord all that openeth the matrix, being males; but all the firstborn of my children I redeem. And it shall be for a token upon thine hand, and for frontlets between thine eyes: for by strength of hand the Lord brought us forth out of Egypt.’—Exodus xiii. 14-17.
The book of Exodus, as I intimated last Sunday, introduces that new epoch in the scriptural history of sacrifices, when they begin to be regulated by fixed laws, to be part of a national economy. I say the book of Exodus, for I am anxious that you should distinguish between that and the following book, which is expressly devoted to the subject of sacrifices, and of the tribe which offered them. If we hurried on to the lessons which are contained in Leviticus, we should miss a link in the chain of instruction which is quite indispensable. Before we study the institutions of a nation, we ought to know what the nation itself is, upon what foundation its order stands. The second book in the Bible contains the answer to that question, as far as the Jewish nation is concerned. I do not know where we can find the principle of it more accurately, or livingly, set forth than in the verses I have just read to you. Moses supposes a son to be asking a father, in some distant time, about the Passover, which he and his family are keeping. The answer is simple and historical, adapted to the comprehension of a child. But the most learned Israelite would have made it far less satisfactory, would have well-nigh destroyed the meaning of it, if he had tried to give it a more profound and abstract character.
You must consider what the most ignorant of the Israelites who had dwelt in Egypt had seen,—what their descendants in Canaan were likely to see,—before you can appreciate the force, either of the question or of the answer. An organised hierarchy, as I said last Sunday, most probably existed in Egypt in the time of Abraham. The Scripture notices it in the time of Joseph. It must have grown stronger, and have introduced more complicated forms of worship before the time of Moses. The wisdom of the Egyptians may have concerned itself with things in heaven above or in the earth beneath, with the motions of the stars and the processes of agriculture, with nature and art; but we may be sure that notions respecting the objects of worship and the means of propitiating them, were worked into every part of it, and that this was the part of it which would present the most glaring and obvious effects to the looker-on. Sacrifices of various kinds, sacrifices to various divinities, sacrifices to procure the removal of particular local evils or of recurring general evils, sacrifices to avert the wrath of the gods for transgressions that had been undoubtedly committed, sacrifices for transgressions that were suspected to have been committed, sacrifices regular and habitual, sacrifices new and unwonted for strange emergencies, all these would have been seen or heard of by the slaves in Goshen as well as by the native subjects of the Pharaohs. Much might be hidden from both; much might be done to impress both with the feeling that the priest or the magician had a lore which he could not communicate: but the material part of the worship would be patent; the very object would be to force that upon the attention of the most vulgar.
Therefore any Israelitish child in the Wilderness who pointed to the paschal lamb and asked, ‘What is this?’ may have been supposed to mean, ‘Is this like one of the sacrifices which you have told me the Egyptians offered? Is this feast like one of the feasts they make at their sacrifices? If it is not so, what is the difference?’ And any child who said to his father in the land of Canaan, ‘What is this?’ would mean in like manner, ‘Is this such a sacrifice as the Canaanites or the Phoenicians are offering to their Baal and Astoreth? If not, tell us what the difference is. Why are we not like them? Why do you bid us keep aloof from their worship and their offerings?’ Consider what would have been the natural and expected reply to such a question, supposing the principle upon which the Israelites offered sacrifices had been the same with that on which the Egyptians or the Phoenicians offered them. The child would have heard of some great advantage which this sacrifice was to buy,—of some threatened peril which it was to keep off. It would have been told that the Lord God of the Hebrews was mightier and more terrible than the gods of On or of Ekron; and, therefore, that, if it was thought necessary to offer them sacrifices with which they would be pleased, it must be far more prudent and necessary to offer them to Him. The consequences of neglecting them would have been pointed out from past experience. ‘What might not He who ruled the winds and the waves be contriving against them? How likely was it, that He who had favoured their fathers might desert them, and choose some more devout suppliants if they neglected Him!’
Perhaps more refined arguments than these might have been adapted to people with devout spiritual tastes and instincts; but would not you have thought these, or such as these, exceedingly suitable to the condition of the uninformed man or boy who is supposed to be taking part in the dialogue? Would not they be just such as religious teachers, in all countries and ages, have thought were desirable to impress people, not capable of understanding high truths, or being influenced by nobler motives, with a salutary fear of omitting duties which it was needful that they should perform? There can be no doubt that the legislator desired fathers to give their children a deep sense of the sacredness of the national service in which they were engaged, of the exceeding evil that might come from indifference to it. For such a purpose, what course could be so obvious as the one I have pointed out; what other can we think of that must not be less effectual?
It is not the course, you perceive, which Moses prescribes. We can scarcely conceive of one more opposed to it than his. Instead of beginning with saying what was to be gained for those who should perform this service at any given time, he speaks of it as commemorating an act which was done already, which might have been done ages before the conversation occurred. ‘By strength of hand the Lord brought us out from Egypt.’ ‘We are recollecting an event which ’happened to our fathers’ fathers, to men who were ‘suffering from evils which we are not suffering from, ’who were bondsmen in a land which we have not seen, ’and are never likely to see.’ But again, ‘This sacrifice ’which we are offering never did purchase the good- ’will of Him to whom it was presented—was not the ’influence by which in past days, any more than in these ’days, He was moved to look favourably upon our race. ’He Himself chose our fathers; He Himself wrought ’out their deliverance. The origin of it, the whole con- ’duct of it, was in Him. He claimed us for his people: ’by this act our fathers declared, and we declare, that ’He is our King. Do you think that we want to ’persuade Him to deliver us from certain mischiefs ’and evils which He has brought upon us? Why! we ’know Him only by that name of Deliverer. We were ’in bondage to a tyrant; He broke our chains. Pharaoh ’was grinding down our fathers with hard tasks, He ’said that He had seen their affliction and pitied them. ’Pharaoh would hardly let us go out of our bondage; ’by fire and by blood, and by the slaughter of the first- ’born, He obliged him to let us go.’
Still the child or the inquiring man might answer, ‘This does not explain the sacrifice; that has surely ’something to do with punishment and vengeance; that ’must be intended to avert punishment and vengeance ’from those who present it. You spoke of a slaughter ’of the firstborn in Egypt, both of man and beast; you ’spoke of the firstborn of the Israelites being passed ’over; you spoke of their offering a lamb, and marking ’the door-posts of their houses with the blood of it. If ’God is the Deliverer of some, He surely executes wrath ’upon others. Do you not offer the lamb and keep this ’feast, that you may be the objects of His mercy, not of ’His wrath?’ ‘Most assuredly,’ the answer would be, if it was framed in the spirit of the one which Moses gives us, ‘most assuredly we do believe in a God of ’wrath and vengeance—in One who executes wrath and ’vengeance upon the oppressor, and this without respect ’of persons. His anger may descend upon the king or ’the subject, upon the Israelite as well as upon the ’Egyptian. It not only may, but we know assuredly ’that it will. His government is not one of accident or ’caprice, but of fixed eternal law. He is the God of ’righteousness, and without iniquity; whatever is un-’righteous, iniquitous, sets itself at war against Him;- ’He is pledged to destroy it. Pharaoh was self-willed; ’he believed in might, not in right; he became an ’oppressor, and his people became oppressors of others, ’while they suffered from his wrong. Therefore, the ’righteous God smote them. Because He was the Deli-’verer of the poor, and of them that had no helper, He ’manifested His strength against those who trampled ’upon them, against the proud man of the earth. The ’slaughter of the firstborn tells us what it is that ’causes the great visitations upon the world—what ’overthrows families and kingdoms. Looked at on one ’side, it is their own tyranny, and brutality, and hatred; ’looked at from the other side, it is the righteousness ’and truth upon which the world stands, which the ’powers in heaven obey, which none can transgress ’without encountering that which is mightier. You are ’right, that our sacrifice has to do with the slaughter of ’the firstborn. It is therefore that we sacrifice the ’firstborn of every beast being male. This is the witness ’we bear, that we hold everything of the righteous Lord, ’the Redeemer; thus we declare that we look upon the life of every animal as given by Him; thus we declare ’that we do not worship this animal life in any creature, ’or in ourselves; thus we affirm that we have dominion over it, and that we are to devote it to the use of that ’which is higher than itself. But all the firstborn of my ’children I redeem. I dare not treat them as I treat the ’animals; I know that they are made in God’s image; ’I know that to slay them upon an altar would not be ’to sacrifice them to God; He wants them for other ’services than that. But He does want them, and I ’devote them to Him. I declare that they belong to ’Him as much as any beast belongs to Him; I offer ’them up as sacrifices to Him who has redeemed them; ’I declare that every day and hour they live, they are ’to bear witness of the redemption He has made for them—to prove, by their words and acts, that they are ’servants of One who cares for them and whom they ’can trust, not of a tyrant who uses them as his tools, ’and whom they hate.’
This offering of the firstborn, then,—of the firstborn of the animals as dead sacrifices, of the firstborn of men as living sacrifices,—was the dedication and consecration of the whole Jewish nation. The firstborn represented its strength, its vitality, its endurance. This act signified that its strength lay only in its dependence on God’s strength; that its vitality came from the life which is in Him; that it would endure from generation to generation, because He is the same, and His years fail not. By this earliest token, God signified that He had constituted a society upon this divine basis; a society which would stand so long as it confessed this basis—which would fall as soon as it tried to establish itself upon any other. What was true of the nation as a body, was true of each member of it. He was at once adopted into the covenant; he came in under this law of sacrifice. Before he could understand anything of its meaning, the devotion and consecration were made on his behalf; he was put into his right and reasonable position; he was claimed as a holy thing, separated to the Lord. His parents were bound to assert this privilege for him; it was the pledge that they looked upon him as their true child; it was the pledge that they did not look upon him only as their child, but as the child of Abraham; it was the pledge that they regarded the child of Abraham as united by a living bond to the God of Abraham. To fail in the act which denoted the sacrifice of the individual infant, was to show that they thought nothing of the privilege of being God’s servants and witnesses; that they did not hold that to be the inheritance of their sons; that they did not send them forth as the soldiers of the Invisible King. To omit the general annual service which attested the redemption and sacrifice of the whole nation—which affirmed that it was a holy nation, separated for holy uses and services—was to show that they were indifferent to their standing as Israelites, and were choosing out some new ground for themselves. To choose that new ground was, in fact, to choose a new God. Their calling, as Israelites, was the calling to confess a Redeemer of Israel, a righteous Being who had brought out their fathers from the house of bondage. It was certain that whenever they forgot this confession, whenever they became careless about the appointed means of expressing it,—they would cease to believe in a Redeemer at all. That name would not be their high tower, their refuge from all enemies. Gradually, if not at once, it would be changed for other names, indicating the most opposite convictions, involving the most opposite kinds of devotion and sacrifice; and out of that new name, that new worship, would proceed moral and political plagues and curses, which nothing would avert but a national repentance and a return to the faith which they had cast off.
I wish you to think of these plagues and curses as they are presented to us in the books of the Old Testament, that you may judge how truly human as well as divine the constitution of the Jewish nation was; how necessarily it was the one because it was the other; how exactly the Passover sacrifice and the dedication of the firstborn expressed the union. To say that belief in God as a Redeemer and a Deliverer is easy and natural for men, that it is their tendency to accept and retain this belief, is to contradict the evidence of all history. Egypt, Assyria, Phoenicia, every country with which the Jews came in contact, disproved such a dream. No doubt the belief was latent in every one of them; the more light one has upon their mythology, the more one sees that it is—the more one feels that it was—the truth which lay beneath the existence of every nation and sustained it. This undoubted fact is not at variance with the facts which show that there was a perpetual tendency in the popular mind to let go this truth, to substitute for it the worship of a tyrant—whom they could rarely, through God’s mercy, contemplate in one concentrated form—whom they were obliged to see in a multitude of broken inconsistent forms. The two parts of the evidence illustrate and confirm each other. These popular tendencies, which became moulded into a system by the priests who had first yielded to them, were the causes of a continually increasing superstition, division, brutality, cowardice; can there be a greater proof that in that which they were resisting and subverting we are to seek for the unity of every people, for the secret of the powers which it put forth? The Bible, instead of urging any claim of special virtue for the chosen people, is careful, as I have so often remarked, to point out how liable they were to every corruption of other people; how every element of superstition and division was lying secretly in their hearts; how it did actually manifest itself at every new opportunity, under any fresh provocation from without. The consistency of this testimony throughout all the books of their History and Prophecy, is one of the most curious signs of their unity, a sign which the most careless reader cannot help noticing, but which becomes more striking the more we reflect upon it. The plague and curse of the Israelites, as it is represented to us, not in one but in all of these books, was their falling into the acknowledgment of tyrant gods—of brute gods—their losing their faith in the High God, the Redeemer. The words are so familiar, so commonplace, that one can hardly fix the attention of hearers upon them; but what a key they are to the history of the old and of the modern world! All external plagues, famines, wars, are represented as means of reawakening their faith, of recalling the nation and its members from the idols to which they were bowing down, from the accursed principles which they were exalting to the throne of God. These idols, these accursed divinities, were all connected with sacrifices; they demanded the continual oblation, the fire upon the altar; they demanded the inward offering, the giving up of the spirit to that which was immoral and base. The heart was to confess an oppressor as God; then it must set up some human oppressor, or change the one it had into an oppressor; then it must utter itself in acts of oppression to all beneath. The sacrifice to evil powers embodies all the falsehoods and crimes that are at work in all directions throughout a country; it gives them their sanction, their inspiration; it provides for the degradation of those who are not yet utterly degraded; it hinders all efforts for the removal of the most flagrant outward grievances; it ensures their perpetual increase. It is a Sisyphus toil, to better the social maxims or the individual morality of a people which has accepted devils for gods; the gravitation of the stone downwards is mightier than all your efforts to force it up. But if you try the other course, which so many have tried, of denouncing sacrifice as being itself an unreal and mischievous idea, having nothing to do with the life of a nation or of a man—will you help the stone to ascend? Is not that a monstrous attempt to contradict the experience of mankind, to resist the witness of your own consciences? You know that sacrifice has been a part of the institutions of every people under heaven; you know that every better impulse of your own spirits leads you to it, that every right act you have done has been a sacrifice.
Oh! then consider manfully if there is not a better course; if it is not that which the legislator of Israel took, when he explained to his countrymen in his own day, when he bade them tell their children in all days to come, how they might resist the superstitions of the surrounding world, and in themselves; how they might go forth to fight with them; how they might at last extinguish them. By looking upon themselves as beings surrendered and sacrificed to the God of Truth, to the Deliverer of men, to Him who cares for the oppressed, to Him who puts down the wrong-doer and the tyrant; by feeling that they held all the powers of their minds and bodies, all the creatures he had committed to them, all their outward possessions, as instruments for the great work in which He is engaged; by keeping up this conviction in their own hearts, not suffering it to slumber through neglect of any ordinances that affirmed His righteous government and redemption, and united them to their countrymen as His subjects; by teaching these lessons to their sons, bringing them up as brave, hardy, cheerful citizens of God’s kingdom and of that land which He had given their forefathers; by holding all external sufferings and bodily calamities to be nothing, in comparison of the moral diseases which stifle and eat up a nation’s spirit; by regarding the one as a necessary effect of the other, and God’s blessed method of curing them: thus Moses instructed the Israelites that they might be a nation indeed, one which would be a pattern to the nations, one which, in due time, would break the chains which bound them to visible and invisible oppressors. Their patriotism; their heathenism; the victories which they won in their weakness; the contempt into which they fell when they boasted of their strength; the mighty blessings which they have achieved for the world and have bequeathed to it; the curse that has come on their pride, exclusiveness, and money worship; these are the witnesses of the veracity of the history, of the worth and certainty of its principle, which make our petty arguments on behalf of either look very pale and contemptible. But it is not for this chiefly that I refer to them. It is because I think we have here set forth to us the ground upon which every nation stands now—the ground on which our nation is standing; the ground which we must each of us feel to be beneath his own feet, if we are not to rock and reel in any great convulsions which may be appointed for us. Let us understand it well, Brethren; we too are a people dedicated and sacrificed. To some power or other, good or evil, we must be devoted; there is no choice about that. It may be to Baal or Moloch or Mammon. It may be to the Lord God of Abraham; the Redeemer, the Holy One, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ; to Him from whom comes the Spirit of Truth and Freedom and Unity. Our fathers said that it was this God, and not any of the others, to which we were offered up. They said that when we were baptized He who breaks asunder the bonds of the captive, chose us as His redeemed children; that then and there we were sacrificed to Him and signed with the sign of sacrifice, in token that hereafter we should not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified, and to fight valiantly under his banner against sin, the world, and the devil. That is our national consecration; that is our individual consecration. In the strength of that, we may go forth, we are pledged to go forth, against every false principle, and base, dishonourable practice, that enslaves ourselves and that enslaves the world. In the strength of that dedication and sacrifice we are bound to eschew every kind of worship and sacrifice that is not offered to a Righteous and Gracious King and Deliverer; we are bound to watch and suspect the growth of it in ourselves and in our land,—to combat it, as it only can be combated, by continually remembering the true ground and meaning of sacrifice,—by continually recollecting to Whom it is that we are given up, Who has sealed us, and with what Spirit, as a witness that He has accepted the offering and that we belong to Him. And never for a moment let us try to separate, or dream that we can separate, our individual life from our national. Our vocation is the same in the most private occupations, and when we are fulfilling what are called our duties as citizens. Every duty is a civic duty. We are fighting in our closets for our nation, if we are fighting truly for ourselves; our soldiers should go out to open battle against the foes of freedom and order with the same recollections, with the same sense of self-devotion as that which we would cultivate at home. Commonly they shame us: there is more simple surrender, more casting away of themselves, not for fame or glory, but simply because it is their calling, their plain duty, than we can pretend to in our most sacred private or public acts of devotion. We should try to learn from them this indifference to effect and to consequences; we should try to teach them what the true basis of it is, how it is laid deep in God’s own claim that we should be like Him,—that we should be witnesses for Him,—that we should do His work. When once we understand that, self-sacrifice can never be an ambitious thing—a fine way to get the reputation of saints or the rewards of another world. It will be regarded as the true ground of all action; that on which all the blessed relations of life stand; that upon which all the charities and sympathies of life depend; that which is at the same time the only impulse to and security for the hard and rough work of the world—for the reluctant but necessary blows which are inflicted upon the miscreants who abuse God-given power to the service of the devil, and the injury of their fellows—for the wrongs which are endured by those who testify to the world that the works thereof are evil. Sacrifice is the common root and uniting bond and reasonable explanation of all those acts which seem in the eyes of men, often in the eyes of those who perform them, most hostile to each other, but which God sees to be essentially alike, and which in due time justify themselves as proceeding from the same children of wisdom, though one may be said to have a devil because he wears camels’ hair, and a mightier than he be called a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber, because He eats and drinks with publicans and sinners. But Sacrifice cannot have this ennobling and mysterious power—it will be turned into self-glory, and lose its own nature and acquire a devil nature—if it is not contemplated as all flowing from the nature of God; if it is not referred to Him as its author as well as its end. Think of this as you kneel at the altar, which is more wonderful than any Jewish altar because it speaks of a finished Sacrifice. Think of it as you eat that feast which is like the Jewish Passover, because it is individual, because it is common, because it testifies of God as a Redeemer, because it testifies of Him as the avenger of all evil; but which is higher than the Jewish Passover, because it is human and universal, because in it we partake of a Sacrifice which has been offered to gather together in one the children of God that are scattered abroad,—offered that they might be able to offer themselves as children to do their Father’s work and will.