Lecture III. The Filial Dispensation

HEBREWS XI. 39—40.

And these all having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise: God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.

However desirable it may be to understand rightly the sense in which the Jews were subject to a divine Ruler, we are often told that the question is one only of historical interest. That crisis which the writer of the Epistle looked for, was, it is said, the termination of theocratical government. This opinion seems to be maintained with almost equal strength by those who believe the Jewish theocracy to have been real, and by those who suppose it to have been a mere conception or habit of thought characteristic of a Semitic people. The former express themselves in words of this kind; The Jewish nation stood alone in the world. The other nations were under a general providential direction; the Jews were in a peculiar sense under a divine King. Not merely the provision for their bodies, the time of their births and deaths, was appointed by the Lord of all; the order of their society was established and directed by Him, towards a particular end. When that end was accomplished it was no longer needful that such a government should exist among men. The awful words, which were heard in the temple, “Let us depart,” the events which interpreted these words, showed that it had ceased. The Canon of Scripture became the one record of its existence. The others speak thus: “In the infancy of society it was desirable, perhaps necessary, that men should feel themselves under some mysterious guidance. Not only the Hebrews spoke of such a rule; each nation fancied it had some tutelary divinity; most were led by conquests, or by mixture with other people, to enlarge their mythology; thus they lost the definite sense of a Governor which they had at first; some, the Greeks especially, by degrees found a philosophical explanation of their early personifications. The Hebrews, separated by circumstances and rigid customs from other lands, preserved the feeling of their tribe for a much longer period; the priests kept it in existence by artificial contrivances when the nation had really outlived it; at last it could endure no longer; the army of Vespasian destroyed it along with the shrine in which it had so long dwelt. Thenceforth the world began a freer course; often, indeed, haunted and oppressed by the old theocratic decrees, revived and assuming new forms; but gradually emancipating itself from such dreams, and struggling toward a period of full development, when they should be dispersed altogether.”

We may concede at once to this last class of reasoners two points in which they are at variance with the former. In whatever sense the Jewish nation was peculiar it was not so in this sense, that it alone of all people recognized a divine government. In whatever sense the Jewish institutions were peculiar they were not so in this sense, that the other nations had nothing corresponding to them. Among those which we have seen passing under the review of the writer of this Epistle, only one was exclusively Hebrew. The sabbath-day belonged strictly to the Israelite. Kings, prophets, lawgivers, priests, temples, purifications, sacrifices, were to be found everywhere. Will it be said that there was nothing common between these names in the Hebrew and the Gentile use of them? Does not history tell us clearly that in every land the conviction existed, that the visible king must have an invisible counterpart; that there must be men whose words proceeded from a fountain of inward inspiration; that law must have a divine authority and sanction; that buildings must be set apart to some distinct permanent object of worship; that the worshipper must be separated from earthly pollutions; that the worshipper must offer to the God that which had been given to him, that which was dearest to him, even himself. Had not these institutions a like signification to the Jew? Was he sent into the world to tell men, “The convictions which your institutions indicate are false, are untenable, are merely the fruits of your own invention or wit?” Was he not rather commissioned to say, “These convictions are true; deeply true, and you must have received them from God. For see how you have corrupted them by your inventions. The invisible King is not the image of the visible, but his archetype; the inspiration of the prophet is wholly spiritual, not produced by the exhalations of any fountain; it is the I Am, not a wood-nymph, who teaches the lawgiver; the priest enters an unseen Presence of which he may conceive no likeness; the idol in the Temple destroys its witness for the distinction of God from the works of his hands; purifications must signify that it is the inner man who approaches the unseen living God, or they signify nothing; sacrifices must express the submission of the lower will to the true divine absolute will, they cannot be the means of bringing the higher will into consent with the lower.” Was it not the great sign of the Jew’s high calling, that he was able to bear this witness to the world, against its evil tendencies and his own? His covenant was, “In thee and thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” I cannot conceive a clearer evidence of the reality of his covenant, a more wonderful explanation of its meaning than this, that he did not trample upon the faith of mankind, but justified it; preserved it from perishing under the mass of evil with which it had become encrusted; foretold that the blessing which he expected for himself would satisfy the desire of all nations, that the glory of Israel would be a light to lighten the Gentiles. From first to last he testified against those idolatries which of necessity divided the nations from the one Lord in whom they might be one. There is no pretext then for the notion that the theocracy would of course pass away, when the exclusive position of the Jewish nation became no longer tenable, because it was bound up with that exclusive position. Suppose it to be a truth, and not a fiction, it was a truth for mankind; it was asserted to be such by the cries of all the people of the earth; it was asserted to be such by the Jewish separation.

If, on the other hand, it were a fiction, and not a truth, I quite admit that it, like all other fictions, could only last a certain period, and that the destruction of Jerusalem was an event which was as likely as any to determine its existence,—nay, was one which it could scarcely survive. Only I contend that those who maintain this hypothesis, must do something more than merely repeat the phrases, “proper to an infantine state of society;” “preserved beyond its natural date by the skill of priests;” “crushed at last by the Roman legions”—which may be so easily repeated when they have once been learned by heart. It becomes them to show by what other belief than this, that the unseen Lord was their King, the Israelite was preserved from that subjection to sensual impressions, which is commonly considered a great characteristic of infancy, and was characteristic of him in spite of his Semitic derivation. It becomes them to show by what other faith than this he was enabled to resist the taunts and persecutions of priests and prophets in a hundred groves and high places, who accused him of being irreligious, even atheistic, and whom he could only answer by saying, “Whether I be religious I know not and care not; I adhere to the Covenant which God made with my fathers and with me; I obey his law.” Lastly, they ought to consider whether the belief has ever passed out of the heart of any living man, that his personal and social life is as sacred as the course of the planets and the succession of day and night; whether that belief has not been strongest when men have been most brave and free, weakest when they have been most base and cowardly; whether it be not easier for one whose heart and reason are awake, to think of the order of nature as exempt from the habitual government of a divine will, than to think of himself, his relations to his fellowmen, the evolution of events, the order of history under such a condition?

The writer of this Epistle certainly could not have borne such a contemplation. His mind had been formed in the belief that the more perfectly man is brought under the divine government, the more blessed his state is; that to escape from it is to be accursed. His conviction that the greatest blessing the world ever received had just been vouchsafed to it, did not change this belief, but deepened and established it. He speaks of the Patriarchs as looking for “a city which had foundations, whose builder and maker was God.” Their faith, he says, substantiated the promise, but they did not receive it: the actual gift was reserved for another day. Nay (and he applies the words to the Jews in every stage of their history) they without their children could not be made perfect. He exhorts the Christians of his day to believe that they had received a kingdom which could not be moved. He tells them that the coming earthquake, which must shake not earth only, but heaven, would make it manifest. The natural inference from such words certainly must be, that our Lord’s ascension would lead to the establishment of some fellowship of a larger, deeper, diviner character than that which had existed formerly. I cannot understand how they could convey any other meaning to a Hebrew Christian.

He knew what had been told him of the fathers of his nation. The sense of belonging to a divine kingdom had gone with them all their lives through; the dread of death which sometimes seized them was the dread of not finding that kingdom again when they had passed into the unseen world—of being beyond the region of the divine order and government. The hope which sustained them was, that He who is and was and is to come, must reign, here and everywhere: that there could be no corner of His universe over which He would not one day assert his dominion. And now, says the writer of the Epistle, He whom they looked for is come, the Son over the house; the King in whom the right is. And the city that hath foundations is revealed, and you have received a kingdom. His discourse of the past swells into poetry. His vision of the present and the future becomes almost a rapture. Could he mean to deceive those whom he was thus preparing for the most tremendous and actual calamities? Must he not have deceived them, if his sense of the words “city and kingdom” did not in the least correspond to that which for generations had been affixed to them?

There is, however, a passage wherein the writer speaks of a world to come which is not subject to angels. Here, it has been said, he undoubtedly alludes, not to an earthly, but a heavenly society, to one upon which men enter after death. If so, why may not this passage determine the meaning of those which are most ambiguous? Why may not the City and the Kingdom, as well as the “World,” point to a state wholly celestial? I have no doubt that all these words do express the same idea; that one as much as another denotes a state, in the purest, strictest sense of the words, heavenly; that this state is one which nothing but death can fully disclose to any human being, seeing that He who opened it did Himself first overcome the sharpness of death. But if the world which is not subject to angels, be one into which men do not enter till death, the argument of the Epistle would be set at nought. The writer of it maintains that by Christ’s resurrection and ascension he had claimed for man the blessing of fellowship with Him who is Lord of angels. In the earlier stages of his growth, when he had not yet understood the highest capacities of his being, though they were unfolding themselves under the divine education, when he had not yet realized his true position—though God was in different methods discovering it to him—there was reason enough why he should feel himself subject to angels, why he should suppose that they stood between him and the High and Holy One. His privilege, his duty, was now utterly to deny such subjection, such mediation; to reject it as treason against that Lord who had taken his nature and invested him with his spiritual glory.

You see at once that this statement would have been worth nothing, if it had been possible to reply, “Yes; after death we may doubtless come into a state like that which you describe; on earth we must still, according to your own showing, remain subject to angelic rulers, be dependent upon the help of angelic intercessors.” The world to come whereof the Epistle speaks, cannot then, I conceive, answer to our ordinary notion of a future state; it must denote some kind of order established among human beings even here; one which was not yet shown to be the divine order of the universe, but of which Christ’s coming was to all who understood its meaning, the clear indication, the corner-stone. In that sense it will accord perfectly with the idea of a city or kingdom, to which the Jew had been trained by his long course of discipline. For he had never been taught to look at the invisible world as altogether separate and remote from that in which he was living. In the daily toil of life, amidst his flocks and herds, amidst his children, on the judgment-seat, in the battle-field, he had sought God and found Him. Could that have seemed to him a more perfect, state of things in which heaven and earth should be hopelessly divided? Above all, could this be the effect and blessing of His appearing, who was the Son of God and the Son of Man, who had perfectly hallowed each, and who was gone up on high? Would not the change he had reason to expect, be rather that the dream of a ladder set upon earth and reaching to heaven, should now become a firm, substantial reality?

But what indications were there that such a society would rise out of the ruins of the Jewish commonwealth? Every institution which the heathen had received as the witness of a connection between the visible and the invisible world, which the Jew had recognized, as proceeding from the Lord of all, had lost its original meaning, had become changed into something which contradicted and subverted that meaning. The idea of a king ruling in the name of an unseen King, was surely not preserved in the Herodian princes, or in any of the tetrarchs or sovereigns, who governed by the permission of Rome in its provinces, Practically that idea had been merged in one part of the earth as much as another, in the acknowledgment of an emperor, a commander of armies, in his own apprehension and that of his subjects the real King of kings and God of gods. The Prophet, from whom men had asked a higher truth than they could discover for themselves, was converted among the heathen into the lying augur; if any one claimed the name in Judæa, it was on the warrant of being a more reckless assassin than the rest of his countrymen. The Law in which the Greek had heard the Eternal Voice, upon the awe of which Roman greatness had stood, was believed to rest on the will of the Cæsar; the confidence of the Jew that he possessed the divine Law was an excuse with him for the perpetration of every crime. The sabbath-day had been a main reason for calling Christ a blasphemer and condemning him to death. The priesthood in all lands seemed to have grounded itself upon the denial of any thing not visible. Abominations were set up in all the temples, might soon be set up in the temple in Zion. The rites for purification were changed elsewhere into filthy orgies—the Jewish rulers were practicing them at the time they taught the people to shout, “Crucify Him!” before Pilate’s judgment-hall. Sacrifices were prized in Rome and Jerusalem, as means of purchasing the right to sin.

If from these spectacles you turned to the different Christian assemblies, there was indeed, amidst much that was discouraging, a beautiful realization of human brotherhood, of devotion to an unseen object. But how would a bystander, especially if he were a Jew, have regarded the ordinances by which these societies were distinguished? Would he not have said, “Truly you preserve the ceremony by which we admit Gentile converts to the privileges of the outer sanctuary; you say this is a sufficient sign to you of being admitted into God’s covenant; you have again a rite which seems to be a bond or love-pledge to a departed Friend; you permit those whom He chose as His apostles to exercise a kind of fatherly government over you, and you have provided for a special emergency arising out of the outward, material wants of your members, by delegating some of the duties, which these apostles at first took upon themselves, to other officers. But can you pretend that such customs as these, which no awful penal edict proceeding from the throne of God has created or enforced, are any thing to compensate for the loss of those sacred institutions which all nations have confusedly recognized; which we have received in their purity from the Lord of all, and by Him have been taught to understand?”

We might fancy that both these objections had been overlooked by the writer of this Epistle. His allusions to the ordinances which belonged to the disciples of Jesus, as such, are rare. He assumes the existence of Christian assemblies, for he warns the Hebrew Christian not to forsake them; he speaks of Baptism once or twice, perhaps once of the Eucharist; the fact that there were persons bearing rule in the Church is mentioned incidentally, but the word which describes the rulers is the most indefinite that could have been selected. But the Jewish objection to the dignity and sacredness of the Christian ordinances had been encountered in a far more satisfactory manner; the whole doctrine of the Epistle is an answer to it. The Aaronic priesthood was established upon a formal positive law; therefore, contends this writer, did those who possessed it feel discontented with it. They craved for a priesthood resting, not on an outward commandment, but on the oath of God. The priesthood is but one application of this principle, though perhaps the most remarkable. Each institution is shown to be imperfect, in so far forth as it was merely an institution: till the eternal ground of it in the relation of Man to God, in the relation of the Divine Son to the Father, in the Self-affirming Being of God, was manifested, its truth and meaning were still hidden. When this ground had been declared, that converse of the spirit of man with God for which he had been educating it, would be in the fullest sense possible. Then the method, whatever it might be, which the divine Wisdom chose for setting forth the relationship of Humanity with God as a realized fact, and for enabling men, as sharers of that Humanity, to enter into the highest and most mysterious communion, would of necessity transcend all those previous methods, which, till they were seen in the light of that whereto they were leading, seemed only formal and arbitrary. Supposing this principle to be admitted, the Christian was entitled to say, “Just because these ordinances of ours have that character which you have ascribed to them,—because they do not come forth clothed with legal penalties, but were merely enjoined in a few loving words, because they speak of a relationship to One Unseen and to all His brethren, because they involve an obedience of the inner man to an authority which can enforce no other; therefore do they embody the whole mystery of that New Dispensation, which law and letters could only at a distance shadow forth and describe. Our Master was in the water owned as the Son of God and the Spirit descended upon Him. We ask no other witness that it has pleased the Father to make us the sons of God in Him, and to endow us with His Spirit; no other proof that in us Jews, as well as in heathens, every thing which is our own, every thing which we do not derive from God, must and will be washed and purged away. Our Master said, the night he was betrayed, ‘This is my Body, This is my Blood. Do this in remembrance of me.’ We ask no other proof than this bread and wine, that place does not separate from Him; that we are truly with Him now that He has ascended on high, as He was with us when He came down and was born of a Virgin and died for us; that being with Him, we are united to all who own Him on this side of death and on the other: that He can raise us to fellowship with them and Himself, enabling us to give up our selfish position: that He can fill us with His own life, enabling us to give up our own life. We want no other ground for obedience to His Apostles, than the fact that He chose them. A fatherly rule we feel to be the highest rule—one which speaks to our spirits, not to our senses. A filial subjection we feel to be the most perfect subjection, because it is that subjection of the spirit which only the Divine Spirit can bestow.”

Without the slightest exaggeration, then, the writer of this Epistle could speak of those whom he addressed, as having come to the heavenly Jerusalem, as being admitted into the company of the first-born, to the spirits of just men made perfect, as being in the presence of Jesus the Mediator of the New Covenant, and of God the Judge of all. Either the ordinances which had been given to them meant nothing—were mere formalities and therefore impious—or they meant this; they implied an actual fellowship between earth and heaven; they declared that man had been brought into the condition for which all the discipline of past ages had been preparing him. They said that the revelation of the Unseen God, which prophets and kings longed for, had been made to the children of the Covenant; they said that the words of that Covenant, “In thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed,” were fulfilled, for that the blessing—emphatically the Jewish blessing, the glory of Israel—the knowledge of God, had by their seed been brought within the reach of all people and nations and languages; that a society had grown out of the defined, formal, national society, which could have no limitation, because its basis lay in the original constitution of Man, that is to say, in Him in whom all things were created; in his relation to the Father, of whose glory He is the brightness, of whose Person He is the express image.

The belief that a heavenly commonwealth or kingdom such as this, was already established upon earth, might sustain a Jewish Christian in the prospect of any possible dissolution of that fabric which God had raised up for his fathers and for him. It would at once explain to him why he was not to look for any new Sinai, for the creation of any order of priests by any formal edict to succeed the tribe of Levi, for the sudden appearance of any heir of the throne of David, or of any new dynasty to assume the place of the old covenant kings. By such expectations he would have shown that he had not entered into the divine purpose, that he had not taken in the prophetical idea, or was content to live without a real adequate fulfilment of it.

But was there no answer in the doctrine of the Epistle, to that part of the question which was suggested, not by a notion of the feebleness of Christian ordinances, but by the abuse and subversion of those institutions in which heathens and Jews had both discerned a proof of the Divine Presence? These institutions still existed: there was no reason to suppose they would pass away in that judgment which overhung the Jewish nation. If they survived it what witness would there be upon earth that they had any worth—that they were not the original rightful property of the spirit of Oppression and Falsehood? The Jewish nation was bringing forth something larger and deeper than itself; it would die in its travail. How would its child, the New Society, be related to these old social forms? Would it stand aloof from them; would it extinguish them; would it cast them anew? To an unbelieving Jew or heathen such questions would have sounded simply ridiculous. What could these insignificant little bodies, the oldest of which could hardly maintain its ground in the country of its birth, have to do with the great kingdom of the world? How could the policy of the emperor and the intricate machinery of pagan life be affected by the presence of these men, more than of any other fanatics or criminals who might from time to time require to be restrained by the sword of justice or by a contemptuous toleration? But supposing a person in that or any later day to have believed that a stone had been cut out of the mountain without hands, which must in time break in pieces whatever opposed it, would this Epistle give him any help in ascertaining whether all or any of these old institutions could co-exist and harmonize with that power which had grown up in the midst of them; and if so, under what conditions? Let us examine this question in reference to each of them.

I. The Davidean king had been a witness for the permanence of the nation in an Unseen Lord; a witness that the king and the nation were alike in covenant with this Lord, that their union to each other stood in their common allegiance to Him; a witness against all idolatry or confusion of visible things with the Invisible Lord, as destructive of national existence; a witness against all Babylonian attempts at universal dominion, as rebellious and impious efforts of the creature to become absolute and independent.

These principles and objects of the Jewish kingdom were formally enunciated by lawgivers and prophets; were interpreted by the progress of the history. In them lay the undeveloped truth that One who is the Son of God and the Son of Man is the real Head of Humanity; the promise that He would be manifested as the Lord of the universe.¹ Among those who believed that this truth had been brought to light, this promise accomplished, was there any place for a visible king?

If it were true that Humanity had been glorified, there could be no one claiming to be a king of the exclusively righteous Nation. Yet still less than in former days could there be one claiming to be king of the world; a Roman emperor must more interfere with the belief of a crucified man reigning over the creatures whose nature he had taken, than a Babylonian monarch had interfered with the belief of an unmanifested King seated on the holy hill of Zion. If ever the conviction became strong in any number of hearts, that Jesus of Nazareth was really the King of kings and Lord of lords, it must struggle with the pretensions of the Cæsar to that title, till one or other should be worsted. But if out of that kingdom a number of distinct nations should appear, would it be any thing inconsistent with the idea of a new dispensation, that each of these should be ruled by some man confessing allegiance and subjection to the divine Son; reigning under the conditions of a covenant; judging the people in His name; even carrying on a war with false gods, not wholly unlike that of the old Jewish monarchs?

Is there any thing in that glorification of humanity and its forms whereof the Epistle speaks, to make such a result as this impossible? Might not one rather expect that if such a revival of national existence as I have imagined ever took place, this would be the great sign, in some sense the moving principle of it?

II. The Jewish prophet was a witness that men here upon earth are capable of receiving divine communications; that every true teacher must receive them; that only so far as he does receive them can he understand the past, the present, or the future, or sympathize with the wants and sorrows of his fellowmen, or open to them the mysteries of God. The prophet, in his person as well as in his words, pointed to One who should perfectly fulfil these functions; should declare the counsels of the Holy One have entire fellowship with men, reveal to them the Father of all. Were those who thought that such a fulfilment had actually come to pass, to say, “Now the office of the prophet is obsolete; we have no need of it?” Unquestionably they might have spoken thus respecting a multitude of accidents necessary to the Jewish prophet, partly in consequence of his exclusiveness, partly because the light was breaking in gradually upon himself and upon those he taught, through mists and vapors; partly because, till man’s relation to God was fully set forth, divine inspiration must have seemed, to a certain extent, sudden and fortuitous. Unquestionably also it was now less possible than ever for any man to call himself the prophet, the teacher of the world. Under what form soever such a pretension should appear, it must wrestle with the belief that the divine filial prophet had actually appeared, till one or other were overcome. But is it credible that the assertion, “Man has been brought near to God; the Spirit of God has come down to dwell among men,” could extinguish human inspiration; could do any thing but expand and deepen it, taking it out of the circle of strange phenomena, and exhibiting it as the rightful law of all thoughts, feelings, studies, acts; making it the anomaly and contradiction that gifts or powers by which any men, or any classes of men are made helpful to their brethren, should seem to be self-originated, and not to have their first spring and well-head, their continual renewal, in the Perfect Wisdom?

III. If the office of the Jewish Prophet imported a communication between the Spirit of God and the Spirit of man, and a submission of one to the other, that of the Jewish lawgiver as clearly imported that resistance to the divine will is characteristic of man—that there are tendencies in all men which lead to that resistance. It declared that there is a distinct, formal, divine punishment, for transgression; that every disobedience must receive its just recompense of reward. This penal jurisprudence also was declared to proceed from the voice of God. Therein he spoke not by the creature, but directly, distinctly, terribly to the creature. The law was dispensed by the judge, or king; he could not dispense with it. He was not its master, but its servant. Its decrees and sentences applied as much to him as to the meanest of his subjects. At the same time, as the book of Deuteronomy shows (and that is but a key to all the books, and to the whole history), there was a distinct recognition in every period of a meaning in the law which was higher than its letter; of this meaning, as constituting its essential righteousness, as well as its mercifulness and graciousness; of this meaning being that which the true servant of the Covenant sought to fulfil and delighted in; the law of the Lord, in which he meditated by day and night. It remained clad in all its terrors for the evil nature which was in him; he used these terrors to coerce it; he knew that these terrors would prove their reality upon every one who set up idols in the place of God, or violated his neighbor’s landmark; yet to be told that there was no law, or that he was not under it, would have been the heaviest, most frightful curse which could have been pronounced against him. How was the case changed in that new dispensation which rested upon the acknowledgment of One who had the law in his heart, who was content to do it, who perfectly fulfilled it? Assuredly there must have been this change. That idea, which was but an idea under the Jewish economy of something transcending positive penal law, having been accomplished in a Person, the law of life in that person must be the highest utterance of the Divine will—penal positive law only the secondary and subordinate. Man must be regarded first in his true state, in his relation to God; his evil rebellious nature must be treated as a hateful excrescence to be cut off. But so long as that evil nature exists, and testifies its existence by its fruits, can it ever be pretended that penal law has lost its function, or is absorbed into a spiritual power and principle? As every distinction becomes clearer and sharper in proportion as the light is clearer and stronger, such a confusion would be even more incompatible with the character of the new economy than of the old. Supposing then the Christian Faith ever to become triumphant over that upon which the imperial power rested, supposing the acknowledgment of the Son of Man and Son of God to become the groundwork of society, one would surely expect, along with that revival of distinct nations and distinct national sovereignties of which I spoke, a revival also of reverence for Law, as having its source in the unseen majesty of God, its obligation in “The Lord saith.” The deepest and most dreadful issues of all would indeed be connected, as they are in this Epistle, with the abuse of spiritual privileges, with the rejection of the divine voice speaking from heaven. But it would be surely acknowledged, just so far as the Christian principle was acknowledged, that the Divine Voice did still speak also, in language suitable to earthly notions, fleshly apprehensions; that it might still be heard in every denunciation of specific punishments for specific overt acts against the peace and order of a national society; that the judge was still a divine functionary to discern the boundaries of right and transgression, and all the police of the country, civil or military, divine instruments for asserting the one, and preventing the other, or executing wrath upon it; so that whenever unrighteous decrees were made, or wrong deeds habitually perpetrated by these powers, they should be felt to be violations of a trust which He from whom it had been received would come out of his place to avenge.

IV. As an illustration of the last topic, still more for its own sake, the sabbath-day requires especially to be considered in its relation to the new economy. Its obligation to a Jew rested on a literal positive law; yet it belonged to a period earlier than all positive, literal law: it spoke, as the Epistle tells us, of a rest accomplished; it spoke of a rest unaccomplished; it spoke of a rest of God, the rest of Creation; it spoke of a rest for man, the rest of deliverance from servitude; it spoke of man’s rest as the image of God’s rest; of man’s rest as only perfect when he entered into the rest of God.

According to the doctrine of the Epistle, the former precept ordaining this as well as every other institution, was leading on to the discovery of a Person in whom its meaning was fulfilled; to the discovery of one in whom God and Man meet and are reconciled, in whom both may rest. Did this institution lose its significance for those who believed that this Person had been manifested? As in all other cases, the ground of the precept having been made known, the precept cannot be pleaded as a naked authority, apart from its ground. Any attempt to maintain a mere creation sabbath, because the commandment enjoins one, is to set aside the reason which the commandment itself gives. Some change therefore must be expected to take place in this appointment, or it would stand as an inexplicable anomaly in the new order of things. But could it be pretended that the relation of work to rest, which is set forth in the relation of the sabbath-day to the six—the difficulty of practically realizing and representing which was one of the main characteristic difficulties of the Gentile world, one which may be traced in all its mythology and philosophy—had ceased to exist, or needed less to be wrought into the order of time, into the tissue of human life, now than formerly? Could it be said, that because the meaning of man being made in the image of God was now revealed, the idea of the rest and work of man being images of the rest and work of God had lost its significance, or could less be expressed, or less needed to be expressed, in a practical form? Could it be contended that, because Christ had glorified the estate of poverty, the rights of the poor man which this ordinance had so blessedly asserted, and had so connected with what is most divine, must not henceforth be put forth in so simple, direct a method, or that the method must no longer be regarded as divine? Could it be said that because Christ had fully entered into the rest of God, this rest should not any longer be felt by the weary oppressed creature as a reality dawning upon him through his ordinary earthly experience?

V. That same entering of the Son of Man into the perfect rest of God, which substantiates the idea of the sabbath, substantiates also, according to the teaching of this Epistle, the idea of the Priest. The Jewish High Priest represented the holiness of the separated, sanctified nation; he was divinely elected to this dignity as the nation was elected to its dignity. His was a family designation, as all the Israelites constituted a family. He was the head of a body, a family of priests, all called to their office by formal consecration; he the representative of the nation as a whole, they of its individual members. He drew nigh to God in the name of the nation, offering its sacrifices, setting forth the greatness and holiness of the nation to be not in itself, but in Him who had taken it into covenant. Yet in all these respects the Epistle teaches us the office was imperfect. The designation was imperfect; it was merely legal, not significative of a direct relation between the priest and the Lord of all. It was a tribal, not an universal office; he represented at best the purity of a nation, not of humanity. He only represented this purity, but did not actually show it forth; he had for himself, as well as for the people, to make offerings for sin. He was not therefore effectually one with the whole people; sin separated him from them as well as from God. He did not actually enter into the presence of God; the figures of the Temple expressed that only at certain seasons the veil between the worshipper and his Creator could be withdrawn. Supposing the faith to establish itself, that a filial Priest had appeared, that he had the highest designation, that He was the representative of humanity, that He was perfectly pure, that He had perfectly sympathized with men, that He had sat down at the right hand of God—what place remained for priests upon earth? We must answer: If the argument of the Epistle signify any thing, for a High Priest there could be no place. He who should assume to be the Priest of the Universe, would by that claim interfere not with some accident of the New Dispensation, but with its primary idea; with that which for ages and generations had been unfolding itself under the divine education. Such an effort, however it might disguise itself, must struggle with the principle to which it is opposed till one or other be overthrown. Though this effort to establish a mortal High Priesthood should at first proceed from a real earnest wish to make the Invisible Priesthood more a fact to human consciousness, though it could actually be shown to have produced this effect, yet in it must lie hid—to be displayed one time or another—the denial of an actual relationship between man and God. Out of it must proceed the degradation of man’s spiritual rights; the subjection to creatures; all the evils which the writer of this Epistle saw threatening the Palestine Christians. It must involve not merely the loss of the Christian idea of priesthood, but of the Jewish also—the formal adoption of the heathen notion, which the heathen himself struggled against as a corruption—that the priestly order is not the representative of Humanity, but is separated from it; not the head of a kingdom of priests, but one whom they were to admire, because he is wholly different from themselves. Without advancing a step beyond the experience of the world in its Jewish and heathen divisions, we might assume that this principle, lying in the very nature of man, would assault Christianity. Without advancing a step beyond the teaching of this Epistle, we may affirm what the effect must be if the tempter prevailed. But are we therefore to say, The idea of priests upon earth, of men witnessing of that filial High Priest who has ascended into the heavens, witnessing for the real relation between God and man, witnessing for the spiritual glory of Humanity, connected as an order from generation to generation, yet having no tribe limitation, standing not upon the law of a carnal commandment, but upon the gift of the divine Spirit; declaring that the oil of gladness is not theirs exclusively, that it goes down from the head to the skirts of his garment, that the powers, gifts, means of benefiting their brethren, which they receive, are signs that all gifts and powers bestowed upon any class of men for any work have the same source—are we to say that such an order of priests would be incompatible with any maxim of the new economy? Can we think that it would interfere with the heavenly and perfect character of the Head, or with the privileges of the body, or with the distinctness of any one of its members? Are we to say that such an order would have only a figurative, not a real, right to the name of priests? In what one characteristic of the office would they be deficient, save those which were the incidents of an imperfect period, or that which is the one property of Him to whom they all refer themselves, and apart from whom they have no reality? Must we not rather think, that if the priestly idea dropped out of the circle of Christian ideas, the sense of what mankind had gained by the ascension of Christ would disappear also; that if it were limited to Him who has fully realized, and can alone fully realize it, the belief of his union with the creatures whom he has called his brethren, would grow feeble; that if it were claimed merely by the Christian body, the belief of the unity of that body in its distinct portions, and as a whole would evaporate, and merely a vague blessing be asserted for each person, the consciousness of which would be sufficient to exalt him in his own esteem, not to give him the practical assurance that he might draw nigh with a pure heart and spirit to God?

VI. It must have been a deeply interesting reflection to a Palestine Jew at the time this letter was written; “This temple made with hands is about to perish from off the earth; He said so who glorified it with His Presence, who called it His Father’s house. We know that His glorified Body is the Great Temple of all; we know that we are spiritual temples in which He has promised to dwell. But supposing the earth should not at once be destroyed; supposing buildings for all earthly purposes should continue to be raised;—will those who hear the gospel of Christ and receive it, be prevented by that divine, mysterious faith of theirs, from raising temples to the Unseen Majesty of heaven and earth?” Once more the Epistle seems to determine the answer. A temple importing, as the Jewish temple did, that the veil was not withdrawn which separated men from God; a temple binding men to a figurative, not a real worship; leading them to think that the idea of God lay somewhere hidden in the forms of nature and art, and had not been embodied in the person of a man, must be at variance with the Christian revelation. And because the temptation to these dangers lay very near the heart of men, and had continually re-appeared in the Jewish as well as the heathen world,—it was no unreasonable thought, that perhaps Christian men might for a time be turned away from the contemplation of outward forms, and of their connection with the invisible, or at least might be hindered from any elaborate effort to express their awe of the one through the other. But since the imagination, turned out of one direction, is likely to disport itself wildly in another; since it may play quite as mischievously with intellectual as well as with sensual shapes,—such a provision, needful for a time, might not perhaps continue. The temple of the Jews, instead of being in itself a means to idolatry, had been the great witness against it. Animal and earthly forms had been by it redeemed and dedicated to the Unseen God, that they might not be honored in themselves. The separation and consecration of a building had signified that God is not a Presence in earth or air, but a living Person. Such a testimony might not be less wanted in the new time, than in the old. The belief, that Christ had redeemed the earth by dwelling upon it, proved indeed that no portion of it was unholy. It could not prove that one or another place in the earth might not be set apart as a witness of its holiness—as an assertion of his dominion over it. He had gone into the unseen world; this might show that men were not to dwell among visible things; it could not show that visible things might not be converted into tokens of the invisible,—into means of withdrawing men from themselves. Christ had spoken in parables drawn from nature, and outward things, and then had promised to show men plainly of the Father. This might prove that the perfectly spiritual and pure vision is the highest and best thing of all, a blessing too which one as much as another, the poorest saint often more than the most learned, might attain. It could not show that He would not hereafter endow His servants, as he did of old, with the power of translating the language of earth into that of heaven; of compelling wood and stone to testify of the Holy and Infinite Presence, and of man’s ascent into it, as they had testified to Greek minds of the human and the finite, and of men’s power over it.

VII. The Church will speak to us to-morrow of One who was presented pure to God in substance of our flesh. Here we have the realization of that idea of purification which was expressed in various forms under the Old Economy. Some of these forms were manifestly adapted to the education of an Eastern people; a moral education beautifully blended with the removal of physical evil and the promotion of bodily health. If universality were given to these, the idea of a dispensation for all people and languages would be set aside; if sacredness were given to them merely because they had proceeded from a divine Lawgiver, law would be exalted above its end and meaning, in contradiction to the maxim which this Epistle so diligently enforces. If any outward purification should be used merely to denote the need of purification of the conscience, and not to show that it might be effected by a divine process, the difference between the new and old economy was destroyed. If outward purifications should be used as a substitute for inward purifications, not the Old Economy, but the pharisaical conception of it, would be restored. Lastly, if it were taught that any purifications, outward or inward, were to make men pure in themselves as apart from Him in whom the purity of man dwells, the central truth of the New Testament is denied. But the Jews of Palestine had been practically taught that an outward act of purification was the introduction into the Christian family. This act had every sign of universality; it would be intelligible to all people in all lands. The words which accompanied it showed that it did not speak of any thing legal, but expressly of adoption into a filial covenant; of any thing external, but of service to an Unseen and Holy Lord; of any thing merely prospective, but of a purity already obtained for men in Christ; of any thing unreal, but of a purification and deliverance of the heart and conscience from the corruptions of the world and flesh and the temptations of the Evil Spirit, to be wrought by the indwelling of a Divine Spirit. To suppose that this token of an accomplished and ever-continuing blessing, in which was gathered up the whole purpose to which the Old Economy was pointing—the great revelation of the New—could ever become obsolete, would have been the same thing, as to suppose that every imperfect apprehension of Judaism, every false and dark dream of heathenism would be allowed to prevail against the truth which had come to satisfy the one and to disperse the other. Such apprehensions and dreams might return—in all probability they would; but in every age this simple rite of Baptism, interpreting itself by the words of Scripture, would be found the great barrier against them.

VIII. I have been led unawares into the next subject of which the Epistle speaks—that of the Covenant. It would be an abuse of language to speak of this as a Jewish institution; it was rather that which explained all the institutions, which gave the Israelite an assurance that they were really divine. Believing in it, Kings, Priests, Law, Sabbath-days, Temple, Purifications, were all unspeakably precious; losing his faith in it, all were dreary formalities, dead letters—only temptations to worship idols or glorify himself. In the days of Ahaz, forgetfulness of the Covenant was the sin; then it led to the worship of Syrian idols, and to distrust in God’s care for the family of David: in the days of Zedekiah it was the sin; then it led to wilful confidence that the armies of Nebuchadnezzar could not destroy the sinful city: in the days of our Lord’s Incarnation it was the sin; then it led to a feeling that God could not really manifest Himself to His creatures, that He was afar off, and not nigh; to theories about Him, instead of faith in Him; to sects and parties, instead of national fellowship; thence to an incapacity of recognizing the true King; thence to the cry, “We have no king but Cæsar!” thence to ruin and extirpation. Now the Hebrew Christians were told in this Epistle, that the Old Covenant had passed away, that a new one had taken its place, of which they were the heirs. There were two important questions then to ask respecting themselves and all Christians in times to come: In what respects is this Covenant different from the Jewish? Will the effects of forgetting it be the same or different? To the first they could answer at once, if they understood the doctrine of the Epistle, A covenant of sonship is different from a covenant of servitude; adoption is better than mere election. By circumcision we are cut off directly from other nations, implicitly from our own evil natures. In baptism the main thing is separation from the evil nature, only the accidental separation from any other people. Circumcision was Jewish; baptism is human; circumcision was the sign that the males of one country were taken by the Lord of all to be his subjects, baptism is the sign that men and women and children of all countries are adopted into one family, are sealed with the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

To the second question the warnings of the Epistle replied still more decisively. The Jewish Christians are reminded in it again and again, that their sin was essentially like that of their forefathers; for it was the sin of distrust, the sin of not believing that they had been taken under the divine government, and that God was really holding intercourse with them. But they are told also that the degree of wrong and peril in the two cases was very different. To disbelieve in the heavenly Covenant was another thing from disbelieving in the earthly: to deny that they had a birthright in the divine kingdom was casting away a blessing quite unlike that which Esau cast away; not to claim citizenship in the New Jerusalem was to choose an exile with which theirs who gave up the privilege of circumcision and the Law, that they might be like the heathen round about, could bear no comparison.

Supposing then the tendency to forget the Christian Covenant, which appeared so early in the Church, should under one form or another characterize it in all periods, now tempting men to make it less comprehensive, now to empty it of its spiritual reality and reduce it to a form; now to treat the sign of it as if it were something in itself, apart from Him who gave it as the witness of his relation to his creatures; now to make its worth contingent upon human acts or faith or feelings; now under some pretext or other to shut out baptized men from its privileges, powers, responsibilities;—we must expect from the intimations of Scripture that all other evils—superstition, recurrence to Judaism and heathenism, party spirit, godlessness would come in the train of this sin; that divine judgments would often bring men to the sense of it; that as it contains in itself the principle of apostasy, this, if the warnings were not heeded, would be its ultimate issue.

IX. Following the order of the Epistle, we come at last to the subject of sacrifices;—a subject which, closely as it is connected with that of the priesthood, may yet be treated distinctly. It should be remembered that the Jewish notion of sacrifice is not only expressed in the daily offering or in the yearly atonement. Every Jew was considered as a sacrificed man. The firstborn, the chief of the man’s strength, the representative of the whole family, was formally devoted to God, was formally redeemed from death by the giving up of an animal. Sacrifice then was not merely a provision against transgression, and anomaly. It was regarded as the true state of a creature in covenant with God. By entering into that covenant, he gave himself up, the sign of death was put upon him; he held his life as by respite, though it might extend to threescore years and ten, or to fourscore. Every offering of an animal day by day was a renewed confession of death being his natural condition, that from which God was keeping him. Every offering for a specific transgression was an acknowledgment of having departed from the true state of an Israelite, of having broken loose from allegiance to the King of the nation, from union to its members; it was asking to be restored; a witness that giving up of that which had caused the separation is necessary to restoration.

The Perfect Sacrifice realized the idea in both its aspects. He offered Himself as a Son, because His delight was to do the will of the Father in human flesh, as it had been before the worlds were. He offered himself for transgressions, because the creatures whose nature he bore, instead of delighting to do His Will, had rebelled against it—had lived to themselves, instead of devoting themselves to Him. How then would those who believed that this atonement had been made, think henceforth of sacrifices? Animal sacrifices could not be now that the human Sacrifice had been offered; figurative sacrifices had been lost in the real Sacrifice—sacrifices to take away the sin of the world in that which had taken it away. There might be attempts again to substitute the figure for the reality—the imperfect for the perfect. Since the struggle of the flesh against the Spirit is so great, since man strives so hard not to be a receiver, such contrivances of the conscience to delude and satisfy itself might surely be predicted. By these untruths others could not fail to be generated, fearful confusions of spiritual objects and sensible, perhaps even of the thing offered with Him to whom it is offered. No doubt such contradictions, if they appeared in the Christian doctrine or worship, would have a long and desperate struggle with the principle which they disturbed, till they should be cast out by it. But what would they have to encounter, if not the principle of Sacrifice in its highest form?

Must not that idea penetrate even more deeply into this dispensation than it did into the old? Must not the presentation of the one real perfect Sacrifice to the Father, the continual thanksgiving for that sacrifice, be the central act of all worship to God—of all fellowship among men? Must not the offering of the worshipper’s soul and body as living sacrifices to God be the necessary fruit and accompaniment of this act, that which gives a meaning to all the greatest and meanest services—to the most transcendent and the commonest acts of life? Must not a return to Jewish and heathen notions of sacrifice, with the dark superstitions which accompanied the last, be the reaction against a temper of mind which undervalues sacrifice? Must not that temper of mind at last destroy the very idea of communion between heaven and earth, nay between man and man, and substitute the creed and practice of unmitigated selfishness for the creed and practice of the Gospel?

With these hints which we have gathered from the study of this Epistle as our guides, we may, I think, venture upon the difficult problems which the history of the Church presents, trusting that if we do not find the solution of them all, we shall at least be taught to discern a clear line between that which is the work of God, and that, however intimately blended with it, which has proceeded from an evil, counterfeit, destructive principle.