Conscience and Sin: Daily Meditations for Lent, Including Week-days and Sundays

by S. Baring-Gould

2. It is not a matter on which we will tarry, to ask, Why it is so, but we will accept the fact that by God’s Will, transgression of His Commandment carries with it guilt, and can only be expiated by suffering. That it should carry with it guilt is indeed not a matter to perplex us, for guilt is the sense of transgression and the privation or stain that attends it, together with the sense of alienation from God. But that sin can only be expiated by suffering, is a law of God concerning which we will not now argue, but accept it. We see that a sense of sin has ever impressed on mankind consciousness of guilt before God, and a conviction that only through suffering could that guilt be done away.

The Sacrifices inexplicable in themselves and even absurd, find their signification in the consciousness of guilt: men felt that they were alienated from God, sinful before God, and they sought by Sacrifice, i.e., by suffering, to atone for their guilt.

The idea of Sacrifice contained in it these elements:

(a) It must be one of blood. Suffering and the shedding of blood was considered expiatory. “Without shedding of blood was no remission.” (Heb. ix. 22.)

(b) It must be either a human sacrifice, or it must be the sacrifice of that which was most useful, essential to man: not of a wild beast, for instance, but of a tame beast of domestic utility.

(c) It must be innocent and pure, without defect or spot. It was sometimes the first-born lamb or calf.

(d) It must be, if possible, voluntary. A Sacrifice was thought to lose half its efficacy unless it were a free-will offering. Among Greeks and Romans, water was poured into the ears of oxen brought to sacrifice, to make them nod their heads, and so give an appearance of consent to their death.

(e) It must be in part consumed by the fire, in part by the offerer. The fire was the symbol of God accepting; the participation in the sacrifice showed the man who offered that he received the benefits of the Sacrifice.

3. Sacrifice was not only expiatory, but it was also vicarious; that is to say, from the beginning man saw that the innocent might die for the guilty. Now this could only be so seen because indistinctly the human Conscience looked to the One Sinless Victim Who would by His Sacrifice of Himself, put away the sins of the world. But for this it would have been unreasonable.