And the answer of the prophet is:
He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?
Here we have a declaration in unmistakable terms that the moral ideal and the religious ideal are one, and that to worship God properly the worshipper must treat his fellow-men properly. We now get the idea that sin against God is not something into which a man may fall without knowing it, but the living of a selfish life.
+Atonement never an equivalent for penalty.+—We ought to recognise too that the sacrifices of the Day of Atonement were never held to secure a complete amnesty for all kinds of sin. If a man committed theft or murder, he had to bear the appropriate penalty of his misdemeanour because he had been guilty of an action directed against the well-being of the community and the community had to take measures to protect itself; the Day of Atonement availed nothing in such a case. Here is where many who see in the Old Testament sacrificial system a type and anticipation of the one perfect sacrifice of Jesus frequently go wide of the facts. The Day of Atonement was a ceremonial and symbolical assertion of the willingness of the individual and the nation to fulfil their true destiny by being at one with God. If some particular man had been so living as to cut himself off from the communal well-being, he had to suffer.
+The significance of the blood.+—Many people seem to think that some actual saving efficacy was supposed to attach to the shedding of the blood of the victims offered on the altar of sacrifice, but that never was so. No doubt in the ignorant popular mind material sacrifices came to be looked upon as possessing some virtue in themselves, but the intelligence of the nation never regarded them in this way. In the offering of a victim the worshipper symbolically offered himself. The Semites thought that the life of any organism was in the blood. Thus in Numbers we read, "The life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the soul (or life)." When, therefore, a man offered the blood of a victim upon the altar, he was symbolically declaring his recognition of the truth that the individual life belongs to the whole and must give or pour itself out to the common life and to God the source of all. Only in this way could individuality realise itself; apart from the whole it was meaningless and valueless.
+The truth beneath all sacrifice, however barbarous.+—This helps us to see how, even underneath the most horrible and repellent modes of ancient religious sacrifice, there was something essentially great and noble. When a heathen mother passed her child through the fire to Moloch, did the sacrifice cost her nothing? To be sure it did. It must have been much harder to give her baby than to give herself. She did it because she had been taught to believe that to give one's best and dearest possession for the life of the whole was an action acceptable to God and worthy of our relationship to Him. We have deepened and purified that ideal, but we have not lost it; we never can. As time went on men came to see that there was a higher way of giving the self to the whole than that of immolating a physical life, and a better way of symbolising that offering than by shedding the blood of bulls and goats; but the essential truth beneath all the intricate sacrificial systems of ancient Israel and her neighbours is one that can never perish.
To sum up. Atonement is the assertion of the fundamental unity of all existence, the unity of the individual with the race and the race with God. The individual can only realise that unity by sacrificing himself to it. To fulfil the self we must give the self to the All. This is the truth presumed in all ancient ideas of Atonement. The idea of placating a manlike God for offences committed against his dignity has been a concomitant of this perception, even a hindrance to it, but it has never wholly obscured the truth itself. That truth is constant and essential to all religion and morality, and is the coördinating principle to all between them.
CHAPTER X
THE ATONEMENT
+III. The Doctrine in Christian History and Experience+