If ritualism has been displaced by spirituality, and if law has been suspended by a principle—in other words, if the local has made way for the universal—why shrink from the admission that limited Personality has been exchanged for unlimited Influence?
How would Moses regard nineteenth century worship—say, of a Low Church and Evangelical type, as the true evolution of Leviticus? Where is the resemblance? The eye that can see the similitude is surely looking through an adapted medium. Yet the mystery would be dissolved if the Book of Leviticus were not open to reference.
The man is the completion of the child, but the child is no longer in existence.
The fruit is the fulfillment of the blossom, but the blossom is no longer available for comparison and for contrast.
Christianity is the consummation of Leviticus, but Leviticus remains—unlike the child and the blossom—and offers a series of dissonances or dissimilarities of the most positive quality.
Yet if Moses were living now he would be unchurched if he refused to identify the meaning of Leviticus in the service of the Christian sanctuary—the Papist nearest in gorgeousness, the Protestant claiming to be nearest in doctrine.
The Nonconformist Moses, in the absence of inspiration, would in this matter be the arch-heretic of the century.
NEBUCHADNEZZAR.
The moral character of Nebuchadnezzar is not such as entitles him to our approval. Besides the overweening pride which brought on him such terrible chastisement, we note a violence and fury common enough in Oriental monarchs of the weaker kind, but from which the greatest of them have usually been free; while at the same time we observe a cold and relentless cruelty that is particularly revolting. The blinding of Zedekiah may possibly be justified as an ordinary Eastern practice, though it is the earliest case of the kind on record; but the refinement of cruelty by which he was made to witness his sons’ execution before his eyes were put out was more worthy of a Dionysius or a Domitian than of a really great king.
Again, the detention of Jehoiachin in prison thirty-six years for an offence committed at the age of eighteen is a severity surpassing Oriental harshness.