may still derive from it. Any religious institution which has an outward organisation and a long traditional sanctity must, in some degree, be exposed to the tendency of resting, like the Jewish Priesthood, in the substitution of dogma, ceremony, antiquity, for morality and devotion. That the Levitical ritual should, even in the very time of its importance, and, we may add, of its usefulness, have called down those terrible denunciations, is one of the strongest warnings which the Bible contains against the letter—the form the husk-of religion, however near its connection with the most sacred truths. The crime of Caiaphas is the last culminating proof that the opposition of the Prophets to the growth of the Priestly and Sacrificial system was based on an eternal principle, which carries with it a rebuke to the office which bears the name of Priesthood throughout the world. But we must not so part with this great institution. That in spite of those tremendous denunciations, and in spite of those awful consequences of its tendencies, it should have existed at all, and received a sanction however limited, is an instance of the many-sided character of the Sacred History. The Jewish Priesthood was, as I have said, the mere skeleton of the Jewish religion; but it may also be said to have been its back-bone. It was its husk; but it may also be said to have been its hard shell. What Goethe has finely remarked of the Jewish people itself, that its chief claim before the judgment seat of nations is its steadfastness, cohesion, and obstinate toughness, is exemplified in the fullest degree in its Priesthood. Compared with the high and refined functions of Prophet, and King, and Psalmist, it repels us by the coarse 1 'At the judgment-seat of the God ' of nations, it is not asked whether this is the best, the most excellent 'nation,' but 'whether it lasts, whether 'it has continued. The Israelitish 'people... possesses few virtues and 'most of the faults of other nations; 'but in cohesion, steadfastness, valour, 'and, when all this could not serve, in 'obstinate toughness it has no match. ness of its grain, and the rudeness of its objects; but in sheer persistence and longevity it surpassed them all. It is a dynasty which began before the monarchy, almost before the Prophets. It outlived the monarchy altogether. It lived on through periods when Prophecy had totally ceased. It witnessed the fall of the Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and Grecian empires. It formed the rallying-point of the Jewish nation in the immense void of the return from the Captivity, in the death-struggle with Antiochus; and in the last agony of the nation, the High Priesthood is the last institution visible before the final crash of the system. And although since that time it has sunk into an insignificance which accords well with its secular and earthly character, yet it is the only institution dating back as far as the monarchy, which has survived even in form. The family names of 'Cohen' and Levy' still bear witness to the long recollection of the Priest' and 'the Levite.' The offices still linger, though in a form which shows, if proof were needed, how entirely distinct they are from the higher spiritual functions of teacher or preacher. The Priests still bless the people at the close of certain high ceremonies, and for a small fee ransom the firstborn of Jewish families, and if present at the synagogue have a right to read the law before anyone else. The Levites pour water on the hands of the Priests before the blessing, and take precedence after them in reading the law. The triple fingers of the benediction mark the gravestone of a Priest; the vase of water, the gravestone of a Levite. The meanness of their social position without wealth, without dignity, without the right of preaching or exhortation the mere appendage of some ordinary trade, immensely inferior to the Rabbi, who is the real representative 'It is the most perseverant nation in 'the world: it is, it was, it will be, to 'glorify the name of Jehovah through 'all ages.'-Wilhelm Meister, Travels, chap. xi. Christian illustra tions drawn from it. of the modern Jewish Church, is of itself a direct continuation of the essential characteristics of their ancient office. They are subordinate now, as they were subordinate during the larger part of their existence in ancient times. They are silent as teachers now, as they usually were before. Their functions are entirely mechanical now, as for the most part they were always. In the Samaritan community the office is somewhat more important. There the Rabbi has not assumed the position which he occupies in modern Judaism. The alleged descendants of Aaron, who are supposed to have continued at Shechem after their disappearance from Jerusalem, became extinct in the beginning of the seventeenth century. But their functions were transferred to Levites, by whom they have been exercised ever since. To this tenacity of life it is owing that, when out of the ruin of the Jewish Church the Christian Church arose, the Priesthood was the one fragment of the ancient system standing out in unbroken strength, on which to hang the new truths which the Jewish Apostles had to present to their countrymen. They, indeed, by the spirit which was in them their Master in the highest sense of all-continued the line of the Prophets far more directly than they could be said to continue or even to use the merely national and local institution of the Priesthood. Still, for most purposes of outward illustration, the Priesthood was more available than the Prophetic office. The very destruction which was impending over it rendered more imperative the need of showing how completely all that it expressed, or could possibly express, was answered in the Christian dispensation, not by any earthly or ecclesiastical organisation, but by the spiritual nearness to God, which, through the life and death of Christ, had been communicated to all who shared in His 1 A. D. 1631, Mills's Nablus and Samaritans, p. 186. Spirit. The stream of precious oil which enveloped the High Priest had invested him, in a prominent degree, with the name of the Messiah.' The Anointed Priest,' the 'Messiah Priest,' was one of the titles of his office. It was to the succession of the High Priesthood that even Christian writers applied the Messiah' of Daniel.' And when the name of the CHRIST' was added to JESUS, the son of Mary, it probably suggested to His contemporaries, beyond any other thought, that He was consecrated for His special nearness to God by that anointing of moral and spiritual fragrance, which breathed, as it were, myrrh, aloes, and cassia from all His garments. The blood of bulls, and 'goats, and calves,' is treated almost with the same contempt as it had been by the ancient Prophets.2 But it is taken to shadow forth to those who had seen it flowing, the only true sacrifice of the blood shed on Calvary — the sacrifice, not of dead, irrational animals, but of reasonable beings in the common acts of life, and of the will and spirit of Him who, by one decisive sacrificial act, destroyed the value of all Jewish and all heathen sacrifices for ever. The Priesthood,' with all its princely magnificence and venerable usages, became, as it were, a halo of glory for One who both in life and death dealt against it the heaviest blow that any earthly Priesthood ever sustained. The original idea of the royal Priesthood of the whole nation, of which the Levitical Priesthood had been a limitation and faint representation, was revived by the Apostles in its application to the whole Christian society, and has been, to a certain degree, preserved in the chrism,' or consecration as with the sacred oil of Priesthood, which in the Eastern Church indicates at Confirmation the Priestly consecration of every member of the Christian family.5 1 Dan. ix. 25, 26; Eus. H. E. i. 6. 2 Heb. ix. 12, 13, x. 4. Ibid. ix. 14. Heb. x. 5-12; Rom. xii, 1. tien Orthodoxe, p. 53. Even the last waving of those Priestly vestments, by which the office was handed on by the Roman governors to the Asmonean family, has left its trace in the language of the new dispensation which swept them away from the world. To be clothed' with the moral graces of the new faith,' to endue,' that is, to enrobe' the justice which alone is the true priestly consecration of every Christian soul, whether layman or minister, is the precept of the Christian Apostle, the prayer of the Christian Church. Thus it is that the long endurance of the most formal and material of all the institutions of Judaism was at once rewarded and rebuked, as in a kind of sublime paradox, by being made the vehicle of the most eternal and spiritual of all Christian truths. No new sense was ever won for old words, at once more alien to their outward sound, or more consonant to their inward meaning, than that which saw in the decaying Priesthood of the Jewish race, the anticipation of the universal consecration of the whole world by Christ and His Apostles. There was a secret correspondence of thought which made this application possible athwart the vast differences of time, and place, and circumstance. The Levitical Priest may have been the least divine of all the Mosaic institutions. The Levitical Book of Chronicles may have been the last and least of all the sacred books. Caiaphas may have been the impersonation of all that was narrowest and basest in the Jewish character. But the loftier purposes to which the Priesthood at times ministered, the occasional strains as of a higher mood that break even through the ceremonial narratives of the Chronicles, the indomitable determination, hereditary in the highest characters of the tribe of Levi-from Phinehas to Caiaphas-go far to justify the sacred homage paid to an institution in itself so Rom. xiii. 14; Col. iii. 9, 10; 1 Peter v. 5. 2 English Prayer Book, Prayer in the Ember weeks. |