ing a
large church, and I asked a workingman, who was eating his lunch
outside the building, the name of the church; and he answered,--'It's
just the auld Ram's Horn Kirk. They are putting a new minister in the
pulpit today and they seem weel pleased wi' their choice.'
"Now I am going to leave this subject with you. I have only indicated
it. Those who wish to do so, can finish the list, for the half has not
been told, and indeed I have left the most significant ceremony until
the last. It is that wonderful service in the Sixteenth Chapter of
Leviticus, where the priest, after making a sin offering of young
bullocks and a burnt offering of a ram, casts lots upon two goats for
a sin offering, and the goat upon which the lot falls is 'presented
alive before the Lord to make an atonement; and to let him go for a
scapegoat into the wilderness.'"
Then he took from his pocket a little book and said, "Listen to the
end of this service, 'And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head
of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the
Children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins,
putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away, by
the hand of a fit man into the wilderness.
"'And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land
not inhabited; and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness.'
"My friends, this night let all read the Fifty-third of Isaiah, and
they will understand how fitting it was that Christ should be 'offered
up' in Aries the Ram, the sacrificial month representing the shadows
and types of which He was the glorious arch-type."
Then there was silence, too deeply charged with feeling, for words.
The Bishop himself felt that he could speak on no lesser subject, and
his small audience were lost in wonder at the vast panorama of
centuries, day by day, century after century, through all of which God
had remembered that He had promised He would provide the Great and
Final Sacrifice for mankind's justification. Then Aries the Ram would
no longer be a promise. It would be a voucher forever that the Promise
had been redeemed, and a memorial that His Truth and His mercy
endureth forever!
At the door the Bishop said to Ragnor, "In a few hours, Friend Conall,
it will be Easter Morning. Then we can tell each other '_Christ has
risen_!'" And Conall's eyes were full of tears, he could not find his
voice, he looked upward and bowed his head.
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