We have some rays of light on this point from the writer to the Hebrews who says: “_By faith_ Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts.” Now the simplest idea of faith, the one element always present in it, is _bowing to God’s authority with implicit confidence in his word_. But in this case bowing to God’s authority implies that God had given some word in reference to bloody sacrifices――the offering of a lamb by shedding its blood upon the altar. And if God had given any such word of command, it is certainly to be presumed that he had also given at least this general idea, that the blood of the innocent lamb took, in some sense, the place of the blood of the guilty offerer, so that the sacrifice would imply the confession of guilt, and also faith in a bloody substitute of the Lord’s own providing.――――Prosecuting our investigations we find this broad fact of history bearing on the case, viz. that Noah, Abraham and Isaac built altars wherever they were sojourning and offered bloody sacrifices thereon. Further, God directed Noah to preserve in the ark clean animals by sevens, but animals not clean only in pairs――two of a species――a fact which can not be reasonably accounted for save with reference to their customary use in sacrifice. We have then before us the well-established fact of the early custom of bloody animal sacrifices. * * * * * _How came this custom into existence?_ It did not originate _with men_――certainly not with _good men_. Apart from divine suggestion, they could not have supposed that the slaughter of an innocent animal would be pleasing to God. The presumption would be utterly against this. They could not have thought out the divine idea of atonement for sin by the death of Christ, God’s own incarnate Son: the very supposition is absurd, for it supposes that men were able to sound the infinite depths of God’s wisdom and of his love, and to grasp the relations and bearings of his vast moral government with a reach of thought, not human but divine. Yet further; it is not supposable that, having excogitated and discovered the grand idea of atonement, they could have devised the plan of prefiguring this atonement by the bloody sacrifice of the most innocent, harmless and lovely of the animal races.――――And further, if they could have thought out this miracle of God’s wisdom and love――both the divine idea of atonement, and the expediency of illustrating it for ages by a foreshadowing system of bloody sacrifices――it would still have been the height of presumption in them to have started this system of sacrifices without God’s special and sanctioning appointment.