Leviticus is the gospel of the Pentateuch—glistening with purity, turning law into music and spreading a banquet in the wilderness. But its ritual is dead. This is hard to believe—hard because religious vanity is fond of ritualism, which makes no demand on the conscience. Yet ritualism had a divinely appointed function in the education of the awakening mind, and was the only influence which could hold the attention of a people to whom freedom was a new experience.
Spectacular religion is alphabetic religion; therefore, to revert to it is to ignore every characteristic and impulse of manhood and progress. But they who say so be prepared to complete the philosophy which that contention initiates.
It is not enough to dismiss ritualism on the ground that it has been displaced by spiritual worship. Admit that such is the case, and other and broader admissions are involved in the plea, and can only be shirked at the expense of consistency.
It is generally admitted, for example, that the Old Testament law has been displaced by a New Testament principle. So Ritualism and Law, in their ancient forms, have passed away. But let us be careful. When we say Ritualism and Law, we mean in reality the letter, and it is evident that if any one letter can be displaced every other letter may be outlived and completed. And what is “the letter” but a symbol of flesh—visibleness, objectivity, historic fact and bulk?
Apostle Paul went so far as to say that even Christ was no longer known “after the flesh”—yea, though He had been known after the flesh, that kind of knowledge was for ever done away, and another knowledge had permanently taken its place.
The Church has never adopted the whole meaning of that teaching. Willing enough to consign Leviticus to the shades, the Church still clings to some sort of bodily Christ—the figure of a man—a bulk to be at least imaginatively touched. This is easily accounted for without suggesting superstition, and yet it might be done away with without imperiling faith. We are held in bondage by a mistaken conception of personality. When we think of that term we think of ourselves.
But even admitting the necessity of this, we may by a correct definition of personality acquire a higher conception of our own being. Instead of saying personality is this or that, after the manner of a geometrical figure, binding it to four points and otherwise limiting it, say that personality is the unit of being, and instantly every conception is enlarged and illuminated—the meaning being that personality is the starting point of conscious existence; not the fullness, but the outline; not the maximum, but the minimum; the very smallest conception which the mind can lay hold of—the Euclidic point, to be carried on into ratios and dimensions which originate a new vocabulary.
We do not, then, define “God” when we describe Him as a “Person,” but we merely begin to define Him; in other words, we say that God can not be less than a Person. What more He is, we must gradually and adoringly discover.
So far as Christ is concerned, there is one enlargement of His personality which no school of thinkers will dispute. This is rhetorically expressed by M. Renan, when he says of Jesus:
“A thousand times more living, a thousand times more loved, since Thy death than during the days of Thy pilgrimage here below, Thou wilt become to such a degree the Corner-Stone of humanity that to tear Thy name from this world would be to shake it to its foundations.”