By law, then, there was nothing of the paschal lamb burned on the altar: and by custom there was no part offered to Jehovah or given to the priests: and without these characteristics, there is no proper sacrifice.

Archbishop Magee admits, that the ceremony of laying the hand on the head of the victim, which was observed in the undoubted sacrifices, did not take place in the rite under consideration: and he notices the statement of Philo, that the animal was slain, not by the priest, but by the individual presenting it.[[637]] He considers Philo to have been mistaken, however, in his assertion that this immolation by private hand was peculiar to the passover; and cites the language of Lev. i. 4, 5; iii. 2; iv. 24, to show that the burnt offering, the peace-offering, the sin-offering, might all be slain by the offerer. Certainly these passages appear to leave such permission open to the Israelitish worshipper: but it seems more likely that the sacrifices here enumerated were intended to be made by the hands of the priest: nor would it be easy to reconcile the liberty of private sacrifice with the sacerdotal duties and privileges defined in Num. xviii. 1-7. As to the actual practice, it cannot be reasonably doubted that Philo was correct: and his expressions seem to imply that, in the paschal rite, the priest might be altogether dispensed with, and his intervention required for no religious act. He says: “On the fourteenth day of this month, at the coming of the full moon, is celebrated the public festival of the passover, called in the Chaldee language the Pascha: when, instead of the private citizen presenting his victim at the altar to be slain by the priest, the whole nation officiates in sacred things, every one in turn bringing and immolating his own victim with his own hands. The whole people is festive and joyous, every one being entitled to the dignity of priesthood.”[[638]] He uses similar expressions in his treatise on the decalogue: The festival, “which the Hebrews in their language call the Pascha,” is a time “when each and all of them slay their victim, without waiting for the services of their priests: the law, on an appointed day of every year, conceding to the whole people the sacerdotal functions, to the extent of permitting them to officiate for themselves at a sacrifice.”[[639]] This language evidently implies, that every essential part of the passover rites, every act necessary to constitute and complete its character as a religious celebration, was performed by private hand: so that the auxiliary operations of the priests,—the pouring out of the blood and burning the inwards,—must be regarded as non-essentials and accessaries; menial contributions to the main act; and in the performance of which, therefore, the usual law, forbidding to the non-official Jew all approach to the altar, came into effect again. Had the paschal celebration required, as an indispensable ingredient in it, any transactions at the altar, the private Israelite, being temporarily invested with whatever sacerdotal privileges were needful for the rite, would have gone himself to make his offering. Philo indeed obviously conceived of the subsequent part of the ceremony, in which the temple and the priest had no share,—the domestic meal which took place in the several homes of the people,—as its peculiarly sacred element: “Each house,” he says, “at that time put on the form and sanctity of a temple, the victim that has been slain being made ready for a suitable meal.”[[640]] Fond as this writer is of types, it is impossible to express the retrospective and commemorative character of the passover more emphatically than in his words: ὑπομνητικὴ τῆς μεγίστης ἀποικίας ἐστὶν ἡ ἑορτὴ, καὶ χαριστήριος.[[641]]

In one passage of his note on the Passover, Archbishop Magee appears to admit that the paschal lamb was not a “sacrifice for sin,” and affirms that he “would not dispute with Dr. Priestley any conclusion he might draw from so productive a premiss.”[[642]] Yet, a few pages further on, he quotes with apparent approbation the arguments by which Cudworth sought to prove the rite to be an expiatory sacrifice.[[643]] I cannot pretend to reconcile these two portions of his Essay. But if the passover cannot be shown to be an expiatory sacrifice, I do not see what the advocates of the doctrine of atonement gain by proving it a sacrifice at all. If the paschal lamb was not a sin-offering, to what class did it belong? It must have been either of the eucharistic kind, or else unique and simply commemorative; and so far as the death of Christ was analogous to any such offering, it was destitute of expiatory efficacy: and either was an expression of thanksgiving, (which seems absurd) or, like the blood of the lamb sprinkled on the lintel, a mere sign of some deliverance which it was not instrumental in effecting, but which, simultaneously perhaps, yet independently occurred. Those, therefore, who are disposed to strain the resemblance between the passover and the cross, must either maintain the expiatory nature of the Jewish right, or admit the Lord’s Supper to be, not even the celebration of a real deliverance, but the mere commemoration of a sign.

Postscript.

In the notes to the Sixth Lecture of this series (p. 89-92,) I have adduced an example of Archbishop Magee’s misrepresentation of Mr. Belsham, and stated that the Prelate had quoted his opponent falsely. In comparing the two authors, I employed the latest editions of both their works; not being able to procure a copy of the first edition of the Calm Enquiry, which has been out of print for twenty-two years. At the same time, I thought it only just to insert the following note: “There is a possibility, which I think it right to suggest, of a difference between the two editions of Mr. B.’s work; as, however, the accusation is still found in the newest edition of the Archbishop’s book, I conclude that this is not the case. Indeed, even if the Prelate’s quotation had been verbally true, it would in spirit have been no less false; for, at all events, Mr. B. cites the Vulgate, to give evidence as to the text, not the translation; and had he used the word renders, it would only have been because the term naturally occurs when a VERSION is adduced to determine a READING.”

I have since obtained a copy of the first edition of the Calm Enquiry; and I hasten to acknowledge that the Archbishop’s quotation is “verbally true,” as far as it goes. But I regret to say that this makes only a formal difference in his favour; for by stopping short in his citation, he accomplished the very same object, of leaving an absolutely false impression, which I had supposed him to have effected, in this as in other instances, by direct falsification of his author. He wishes to make it appear, that Mr. Belsham (purposely mistranslating for the occasion,) appeals to a certain verse in the Vulgate in evidence, not of a READING, but of a RENDERING; and so he cites these words from the Calm Enquiry: “The Vulgate renders the text, the first man was of the earth, earthy; the second man was from heaven, heavenly;” but he leaves out the very next words, in which the point intended to be proved by this testimony of the Vulgate is cited, “This is not improbably the TRUE READING.” Doubtless it was one of Mr. Belsham’s incuriæ that he did not attend to his italics in his first edition: but the charge of intentional mistranslation is simply injurious; except indeed, that it is also absurd, seeing that Mr. Belsham has put the Latin of his mistranslated passage at the bottom of the page;—a policy which this heresiarch could scarcely have thought safe, unless he had taken his Unitarian readers to be either more “dishonest critics,” or more “defective scholars,” than even our learned opponents are prepared to think them.

Footnotes for Lecture XIII.

[607]. Ps. li. 16, 17.

[608]. Is. i. 13, 14, 16.