ter, when the high priest's hands had been
laid on his head and all the iniquities of the children of Israel
confessed over him, was to be sent into the wilderness and loosed.
The former goat is called "a sin offering for the people." The
latter is called "a scape goat to make an atonement with the
Lord." The blood of the sin offering could not have been supposed
to be a substitute purchasing the pardon of men's offences,
because there is no hint of any such idea in the record, and
because it was offered to reconcile "houses," "tabernacles,"
"altars," as well as to reconcile men. It had simply a ceremonial
significance. Such rites were common in many of the early
religions. They were not the efficient cause of pardon, but were
the formal condition of reconciliation. And then, in regard to the
scapegoat, it was not sacrificed as an expiation for sinners; it
merely symbolically carried off the sins already freely forgiven.
All these forms and phrases were inwrought with the whole national
life and religious language of the Jews. Now, when Jesus appeared,
a messenger from God, to redeem men from their sins and to promise
them pardon and heaven, and when he died a martyr's death in the
fulfilment of his mission, how perfectly natural that this
sacrificial imagery these figures of blood, propitiation,
sprinkling the mercy seat should be applied to him, and to his
work and fate! The burden of sins forgiven by God's grace in the
old covenant the scape goat emblematically bore away, and the
people went free. So if the words must be supposed to have an
objective and not merely a moral sense when the Baptist cried,
"Behold the Lamb of God, that beareth off the sin of the world,"
his meaning was that Jesus was to bear off the penalty of sin that
is, the Hadean doom which God's free grace had annulled and open
heaven to the ranks of reconciled souls. There is not the least
shadow of proof that the sacrifices in the Mosaic ritual were
Divinely ordained as types pre figuring the great sacrifice of
Christ. There is no such pretence in the record, no such tradition
among the people, not the slightest foundation whatever of any
sort to warrant that arbitrary presumption. All such applications
of them are rhetorical; and their historical force and moral
meaning are clearly explicable on the views which we have
presented in the foregoing pages, but are most violently strained
and twisted by the Calvinistic theory to meet the severe
exig