approach to God, without any definite inquiry as to their meaning. But taking the Levitical system as a whole there seems to underlie it the theory of symbolical, although not piacular substitution. God owns man entirely, and that by right: his time, possessions, flocks, and lands; and demands from him the completest recognition of this ownership. Now in practice, this absolute demand can only be recognised by substitute and proxy; and so we have the recognition of God's claims by the observance of one holy day in seven, by the ransom of the first-born, by the sabbatical and jubilee years, by the tithes, and especially by the sacrifices. His dwelling in the land is symbolised by the respect paid to one symbolical holy place; and the continual service He demands is represented by the daily service carried on by the Levitical caste. But even if this be the intention of the system, it is nowhere so defined, and therefore it is not surprising to find that people soon forgot the symbolical meaning, and treated the symbol as a thing sufficient in itself; with the result, that the service of God came to be restricted to a performance of rites that had lost all significance. One explanation would soon silence any criticism of this scheme that might arise, namely, that God had so ordained that men should worship Him. But deeper still there lay a radical misconception of the very nature of God and of the service He seeks. God was conceived as inimical not so much to man's sin, as to man himself; and this danger was averted by the use of protective rites which needed to be performed with scrupulous care, lest a mistake might bring down on the worshipper immediate and awful destruction, quite irrespective of his moral condition. Doubtless the nation might be impressed by these means with the awful aloofness of God, and there must often have accompanied this some notion of the ethical character that was expressed in this separateness; but the means taken for satisfying this character and demand in the nature of God could never have had any other result than it did, namely, the conception that attention to details of ritual could be a substitute for the much more difficult service of repentance and righteousness. It is possible that we may be under-estimating the real motive of the Priests' work and its actual success in preserving religion under these forms; but the radical evil is clearly exposed when we come to the time of another calamity, that which befel the nation under Antiochus Epiphanes, when no other method of averting the anger of God seems to have been thought of, except that of increasing the rigour of this ritual law and fencing it round with still further restrictions, until it became a burden too heavy to be borne.