“And first, we may take notice of the qualities of the sacrificed creatures, especially of the animal kind. It was not left as a matter of indifference, and wholly in the option of God’s peculiar people, with what victims they should stain his altars.—The integrity and perfection which God required in the bodies of these beasts may easily be accommodated to the glorious Antitype, who would have been wholly incapacitated, by any the smallest blemish, from the discharge of his priestly function. For though it became the typical nation of the Jews to have an high-priest involved in the same guilt of actual transgression with his brethren, who was therefore to offer first for his own sin, before he presumed to offer for the errors of the people; yet such an high-priest became us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners, Heb. vii. 26.—It is also worthy of notice, that of all those beasts the first-born was most acceptable, and according to the law, all such were holy unto the Lord. Was not this a prelude, that he whom God would give to expiate our transgression, should be the first born among many brethren, whom they should honor as the excellency of dignity, and to whom they should owe their deliverance from death, and title to inheritance?” “From the qualities of the victims let us go on to the sacred rites of oblation, and we shall find something in our great Sacrifice corresponding to them all. When the creature that was to surrender its life for its owner was pitched upon, it was brought unto the priest, and solemnly sisted before the Lord. But our Lord Jesus was not brought by others, like the irrational animal, but he voluntarily presented himself before the Lord, when his time was fully come. Fully apprised of what was to be done unto him, he set his face to go up to Jerusalem, and patiently expected, in the melancholy garden, the coming of the traitor, and his band of armed men, to whom he was to deliver himself. The sacred animal being sisted before the Lord, was rendered ceremonially guilty, by the imposition of hands on its head, and by confessing over it the sins of the offerer. It was the Lord himself that laid on him the iniquities of us all. O Jesus! it is our guilt alone that can justify the Judge of all the earth in taking pleasure to bruise thee! And this doubtless was one great reason why he opened not his mouth, while the Roman governor wondered at his silence. It was this consideration that fortified his mind at the approach of his inconceivably bitter agonies, and held in his mouth, as with a bridle, when these astonishing words dropped from his lips, ‘Now is my soul troubled, and what shall I say?’—In the next place, the blood of the innocent animal, now made guilty by imputation, was shed, was poured out, and sprinkled around; for, ‘without the shedding of blood was no remission of sin,’ Heb. ix. 22. That it is the blood that