ordained, and invested not only with the exclusive right of performing public worship, but with the sole custody of religious truth.
So with regard to the nature of the Jewish worship. All the nations worshipped God by sacrifice and through outward forms till the mind of man had been raised high enough to worship in spirit and in truth. The Hebrew lawgiver did not originate sacrificial rites; but he elevated and purified them, and guarded them against the most horrible aberrations as to the nature of God and the mode of winning His favour and averting His wrath; as all who know the history of heathen sacrifices, Eastern or Western, must perceive. The scape-goat has been and is a subject of much mockery to philosophers. Moses did not introduce that symbolic way of relieving the souls of a people from the burden of sin and assuring them of the mercy of God: but he took care that the scape-goat should be a goat, and not, as at polished Athens and civilized Rome, a man.
The religious system of the Jews was primitive, and therefore gross compared with Christian worship. It was spiritual compared with the religious system of the most refined and cultivated heathen nations. Nevertheless, to those who did not consider it in this comparative point of view, or with reference to the time of its institution, it has supplied arguments for introducing unspiritual forms, and something resembling sacrifice, into Christian worship.
It has been said by enemies of the Bible, with some exaggeration, but also unfortunately with some truth, that modern fanatics “feed their pride on the language
