no previous habits of sacrifice can be alleged, from which it might be difficult to wean man-there is no admixture with superstitious nations generating propensities, which it might be necessary to accommodate. The mind of man as yet is open to receive any impression-God is represented as in frequent communion with him, and in the habit of giving him directions respecting things, apparently far less important, than right opinions upon the subject of his acceptance with his Maker--Yet we are to conclude that God manifests his acceptance of the sacrifice as a mere human invention, and thus teaches his yet inexperienced creatures, that he is pleased with the death of an animal, and with the blood and fat of the victim; or else, according to Mr. Davison's theory (see Abel's case) that the offering is accepted. on account of man's righteousness, instead of man's. imperfect obedience accepted through the typical and expiatory character of the offering.

Surely the coherency and connection* which is

* Warburton (Book v. Sec. 2.) contends for the mutual dependence of each successive dispensation on the preceding one, and that they are parts of "one entire dispensation," "which are gradually enlarged and opened." But to deny the divine institution and expiatory character of primeval sacrifice, and to contend for its acceptance on account of the offerer's "personal righteousness" is at once to disunite the antediluvian world from this "one entire dispensation," by affirming their theology to be destitute of even the shadow of atonement, the sole principle of justification under that one entire dispensation."

Mr. Davison, after asserting that "the typical character of sacrifice as a rite of Atonement" commences with the Mosaic law,

has the following passage. "And as the human principle of expiatory sacrifice can never be vindicated at all, so the divine principle of it, in the Mosaic law, will never be explained to any purpose, with satisfaction to our reason or with honour to the divine economy, except by its reference, as a preparatory rite, and a prophetic sign, directed to its preordained Prototype in the evangelical dispensation." Davison on Sacrifice, 32, 33.

Yet this paralyzed, this lifeless rite, totally disjoined from the head, a mere human rite, is, according to Mr. Davison's theory, the chief; almost the only recorded rite of primitive, and patriarchal worship!

discernible in all God's dispensations seems to oppose itself strongly to the notion, that he should in any one part have omitted to display some intimation, however obscure, of that leading and characteristic doctrine, which is, as it were, the very spine of the whole, and from which no part can be separated without at once being paralyzed and deprived of its vital principle: I mean the doctrine, that man's imperfect righteousness could not render him or his gifts acceptable to God, but he is bought with a price, without blood there is no remission.

Lastly. Let the cumulative force of all these probabilities be taken into consideration, and they will be found I think to produce a conviction of the divine institution and expiatory character of sacrifice in the minds of most Christians, which the silence of Moses in his account of Abel's sacrifice, will not weaken, and with which conviction it would, indeed be far from "neutral in its import." What that silence really proves, I shall shew hereafter, when we examine the nature of the historical testimony. I now proceed to offer a few remarks upon the negative proofs of sacrifice being a divine institution, or the improbability of its being man's invention *.

* The universality of sacrifice is a fact affording a strong presumption of the divine institution of it. I do not enter upon it having nothing to add, to what has been already said upon the point. See Magee on Atonement, No. 55. and Disc. II. There are some excellent remarks upon the universality of sacrifice as irreconcileable. with its human origin, in Richie's Pec. Doct. p. 147. et seq.

Plato, in his Epinomis, has expressed his sense of the incompetency of man to discover the means of propitiating the Deity, and as a reason for which the established rites of religion should not be altered, uses the following remarkable argument. • δυνατον ειδέναι

τη θνητῇ φύσει των τοιέτων περι.

CHAPTER III.

On the improbability of man's inventing sacrifice.

MR. Davison has produced the following arguments to shew, that it was by no means improbable, that man, without any divine injunction, prompted by reason alone should have offered sacrifice" as a confession of guilt."

"In this sense of sacrifice; in its use as a confession of guilt; I venture to believe that, after a candid review, it will not be thought either inexplicable, or any paradox at all. Consider the first family of the human race, and how they stood with God. When He had denounced death as the punishment due to man's original transgression, and thereby given him to understand that death was the wages of all other sin; when He had made this doom the great penal sanction of his law, and the fearful sign of man's demerit in his disobedience; how can it be said that it was a thing so remote from the ideas of the worshipper, that he should make confession of his guilt, and of the deserved penalty of his transgression, by presenting a victim to be slain, as the appropriate, but interposed, symbol of his contrition and self-condemnation? The substitution of the victim was surely no improbable, no extravagant, no very devious effort either of nature, or reason, when nature was awakened, and reason prompted, by the sentence of the divine law; that law which held its terrors before him, to teach the offender by what measure to estimate the desert of his transgression, and almost to suggest the symbols by which he might most adequately express the justice

of his fore-doomed condition. As the representative of a forfeited life, the creature slaughtered was a confession made to the divine justice neither inapt to its object, nor arbitrary in its moral import. The action performed, and the sentiment implied, had a determinate correspondence. The one would exhibit the other. The sentiment was just; the representation of it natural. The Holocausts and victims of the primitive age, would not, therefore, in this first sense of them, be so perplexed in their design, that we should be obliged to resort to a supernatural appointment to account for their introduction*.

I must aver, that after having, to the best of my ability, given Mr. Davison's statements and arguments a "candid consideration," I am disposed to pronounce the matter " inexplicable" upon the principles which he has adopted; and certainly very far from being explained by his attemptt. On the contrary he appears to have produced not only a very artificial, and unnatural account, but also an account, which, to give it much probability, seems to require an admission of that postulate of Warburton's which, in a preceding page, he has himself justly condemned; namely, the "imperfection of language," and a consequent necessity for representation by action. For, not to mention many other improbabilities, we must suppose Abel to have been

* Davison on Sacrifice, p. 21, 22, 23:

No benefit appears to be proposed by Mr. D. as the expected result of sacrifice so offered.

"Language," says Dr. Magee, "which Scripture expressly states to have been derived to our first parents from Divine instruc tion, cannot be supposed so defective, in those terms that related to the worship of God, as to have rendered it necessary for Abel to call in the aid of actions to express the sentiment of gratitude or sorrow; and still less likely is it that he would have resorted to that species of action, which, in the eye of reason, must have appeared displeas ing to God, the slaughter of an unoffending animal." Magee on Atonement. Disc. II. Sec. also No LIII.

very deficient in the use of language, if he were unable to express his "contrition, and self-condemnation." without shedding the blood of an innocent lamb. Neither do I perceive the aptitude of the symbol, or the connection which could present itself to the mind of the offerer between the death of an unoffending * animal, and the sentence due to guilty mant.

The improbability of the human invention of this rite has been amply discussed by various writers, and the principal arguments may be seen in Dr. Magee's work upon the Atonement. They are generally known and I shall not enumerate them. But I wish to adduce one, which I have not observed to have been previously urged. It is this: that a strong degree of improbability opposes itself to the supposition, that Abel could have been led by reason, to offer animal sacrifice; because the natural reason of a good man, instead of expecting to propitiate God, would discover greater grounds to apprehend his displeasure, and must have shrunk with horror at the bare idea of inflicting upon an innocent animal death, which had been denounced as a cURSE AND PUNISHMENT upon himself. This very consideration alone would have been sufficient to deter a good man, and alone, I contend, is sufficient to explode the fanciful theory of Mr. Davison respecting man's offering sacrifice as a symbol of "contrition,

But how forcibly does the aptitude press itself on our reason, when we contemplate it as the type of our sinless Redeemer, our Lamb without blemish and without spot.

"By this reason," (says Jeremy Taylor, Duct. Dub. p. 356) we are taught that God must be worshipped, yet that cannot tell us how God will be worshipped," &c.

Against this cannot be urged what Mr. D., when discussing the subject of will worship, claims as concessions of Taylor's opposed to his own views. For here man has no principles, no previous knowledge to argue upon, no attributes of God from which he might deduce an inference that such offerings could cause him to be pleased with us.

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