themselves, to be intermediaries between his own majesty and the terror-stricken offender: they had been sent forth armed with full power to receive the submission which the guilty feared to offer to Himself in person, furnished with instructions as to the exact mode in which the satisfactory propitiation was to be made. These commissioners were the especial body of the clergy,—the successors and representatives of the Levitical Priests under the Law,—the offerers of the sacrifices,—to whom the spirit of God had been exclusively communicated in the ceremony of their ordination, and who thereby became possessors of the divine authority, to bind and loose, to forgive sins on earth and in the world to come. The clergy therefore undertook to direct the suffering and heart-broken outlaw to the throne of peace. Again, as the merely human preacher of atonement possessed of himself no means of ascertaining the genuineness of repentance, a system of penances was established which might serve as a test of the penitent’s earnestness: and too soon a miserable error grew up that, by submitting to self-inflicted punishments, the sinner might diminish the weight of the penalties which he had earned in a future state. But he might exceed or fall short of the just measure, if not duly weighed and apportioned by those who were in possession of the divine will in that respect: men had even without their own knowledge become holy and justified by their works of self-abasement and humiliation and charity: such men might exceed the necessary limit of penance and mortification:—happily for the sinner and the saint, the priest had a code of instructions at hand by which the difficulties in all cases could be readily adjusted.