he purely
critical point of view in the way of the theory that the account of the
Tabernacle was invented by "Levitistic" leaders of the time of the
Captivity. The work has been translated into English, and published by
the Religious Tract Society "_Are the Critics right?_"

Then it proceeds to a similar presentation of one great feature in the
ritual, the "praxis," connected with this Tent of Sanctuaries. It takes
the reader to his Book of Leviticus, and to its order of Atonement.
There (ch. xvi.) a profound emphasis is laid upon both the secluded
sanctity of the inner shrine, the place of the Presence, and the
sacrificial process by which alone the rare privilege of entrance into
it could be obtained. The outer chamber was the daily scene of priestly
ministration. But the inner was, officially at least, entered once only
in the year, and by the High Priest alone, in the solitary dignity of
his office. And even he went in there only as bearing in his very hands
the blood of immolated victims, blood which he offered, presented, in
the Holiest, with an express view to the Divine amnesty for another
year's tale of "ignorances" ([Greek: agnoemata], ver. 7), his own and
the people's.

Such was the sanctuary, such the atoning ritual, attached to the first
covenant. All was "mysteriously meant," with a significance infinitely
deeper than what any thought of Moses, or of Ezra, could of itself have
given it. "The Holy Ghost intimated" (ver. 8), through that guarded
shrine and those solitary, seldom-granted, death-conditioned entrances
into it, things of uttermost moment for the soul of man. There stood the
Tent, there went in the lonely Priest, with the blood of bull and goat,
as "a parable for the period now present,"[H] the time of the Writer and
his readers, in which a ritual of offering was still maintained whose
annual recurrence proved its inadequacy, its non-finality. Yes, this
majestic but sombre system pictured a state of jealous reserve between
the worshippers and their God. Its propitiations were of a kind which,
in the nature of things, could not properly and in the way of virtual
force set the conscience free from the sense of guilt, "perfecting the
worshipper conscience-wise." They could only "sanctify with a view to
the purity of the flesh" (ver. 13), satisfying the conditions of a
national and temporal acceptance. Its holiest place was indeed
approachable, once annually, by one representative person; enough to