ke atonement for
your souls (or lives): for it is the blood that maketh atonement by
reason of the life (or soul)" (Lev. xvii. 11).

No Hebrew could watch his fellow-sinner lay his hand on a victim's head,
and confess his sin before the blow fell on it, without feeling that sin
was being, in some mysterious sense, "borne" for him. The intricacies of
our modern theology would not disturb him, but this is the sentiment by
which the institutions of the tabernacle assuredly ministered comfort
and hope to him. Strong would be his hope as he remembered that the
service and its solace were not of human devising, that God had "given
it to him upon the altar to make atonement for his soul."

Taking courage, therefore, the worshipper dares to lift up his eyes. And
beyond the altar he sees a vision of dazzling magnificence. The inner
roof, most unlike the sullen red of the exterior, is blazing with
various colours, and embroidered with emblems of the mysterious
creatures of the sky, winged, yet not utterly afar from human in their
suggestiveness. Encompassed and looked down into by these is the
tabernacle, all of gold. If the curtain is raised he sees a chamber
which tells what the earth should be--a place of consecrated energies
and resources, and of sacred illumination, the oil of God burning in the
sevenfold vessel of the Church. Is this blessed place for him, and may
he enter? Ah, no! and surely his heart would grow heavy with
consciousness that reconciliation was not yet made perfect, when he
learned that he must never approach the place where God had promised to
meet with him.

Much less might he penetrate the awful chamber within, the true home of
deity. There, he knows, is the record of the mind of God, the
concentrated expression of what is comparatively easy to obey in act,
but difficult beyond hope to love, to accept and to be conformed to.
That record is therefore at once the revelation of God and the
condemnation of His creature. Yet over this, he knows well, there is
poised no dead image such as were then adored in Babylonian and Egyptian
fanes, but a spiritual Presence, the glory of the invisible God. Nor was
He to be thought of as in solitude, loveless, or else needing human
love: above Him were the woven seraphim of the curtain, and on either
side a seraph of beaten gold--types, it may be, of all the created life
which He inhabits, or else pictures of His sinless creatures of the
upper world. And yet this pure