Concluding Remarks on the Book of Leviticus

CONCLUSION.

The Israelites were chosen out of the midst of an idolatrous world to receive monotheism when all the nations of the earth had lapsed into polytheism. They were elected to conserve not only the doctrine of one God, but the doctrine of his spirituality and holiness, and to maintain a religion of the highest purity inseparably linked with a perfect morality. For this purpose, in the first stages of their religious development they received not a revelation of the moral attributes of God in the abstract, but in the concrete, enshrined in symbols and ceremonies, whereby the knowledge of God might be safely kept till the time of its manifestation in a purer and more heavenly form in the dispensation of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The peculiarity of the Hebrews did not consist in intellectual culture after the style of the Greeks, nor in the administration of civil law like the Romans, but their distinguishing characteristic was religion. Hence their frequent festivals, their constant sacrifices, their scrupulous purifications were impressive object-lessons, teaching the Divine unity and holiness. Their wars, their heroes, and their poetry had a sacred flavour, and their national code was full of the details of public worship. Every thing in their social and family life was connected with their religion, which had not been evolved out of the Hebrew consciousness but was revealed from heaven. Their ordinary employments were suggestive of the truths thus revealed, because they were at every point touched by divinely appointed and significant ceremonies. Nor was this religious cult, like those of the Gentile world, a mysterious creed in the sole possession of a sacerdotal class, but it was the common heritage of the learned and the ignorant. It was neither a recondite philosophy which might not be communicated to the masses, nor a weak superstition sneered at by the higher classes while controlling the lower. The religion of Moses, utterly destitute of any aristocratic element, was for the use and benefit of all — the poorest peasant and the wisest rabbin.

The one object of worship focalized the thoughts of the entire nation upon Jehovah. Their feelings were not dissipated and distracted by a fantastic mythology, where a multitude of gods with contradictory attributes claim the attention of the devout mind. There was in Mosaism no impassable gulf between morality and religion, which among other nations is the bottomless abyss of all impurity. The will and approval of Jehovah were the motive to virtue, and incentive and support of holiness wherever there was a faith in his word which raised men above their natural weakness, and gave the saints of the Old Testament, as well as of the New, victory over the world. Hence the Hebrew race occupies an entirely unique place in the history of religion. Inferior to their near neighbours, the Phoenicians, in commerce and worldly refinement, excelled by the Greeks in art and philosophy, and by the Romans and other nations in bravery, the sons of Abraham tower above them all in religious ideas, institutions, expectations, and, above all, in a self-consciousness which can only be the fruit of boundless arrogance or of exalted privilege, betokening a supernatural call to religious leadership. Notwithstanding all that Moses has in common with all other ancient founders of religion, his personality, his institutions, and his character would remain absolutely inexplicable, unless he had been the bearer of a special DIVINE REVELATION. The Book of Leviticus, whose sole aim is the inculcation of holiness, could not have been evolved from hearts prone to sin. Like begets like.