of his divine mission to
which he constantly appealed: the book which was the greatest treasure of
the nation.

From the beginning to the end of the Old and the New Testament, the bodily
leprosy, with which the Jewish priest had to deal, is presented as the
figure of the spiritual leprosy, sin, the penalty of which our Saviour had
taken upon himself, that we might be saved by his death. That spiritual
leprosy was the very thing for the cleansing of which he had come to this
world--for which he lived, suffered and died. Yes! the bodily leprosy with
which the priests of the Jews had to deal, was the figure of the sins which
Christ was to take away by shedding his blood, and with which his apostles
were to deal till the end of the world.

When speaking of the duties of the Hebrew priests towards the leper, our
modern translations say: (Lev. xiii. v. 6.) "They will pronounce him clean"
or (v. 3d.) "They will pronounce him unclean."

But this action of the priests was expressed in a very different way by the
Septuagint Bible, used by Christ and the people of his time. Instead of
saying, "The priest shall pronounce the leper clean," as we read in our
Bible, the Septuagint version says, "The priest shall clean (_katharei_,)
or shall unclean (_mianei_,) the leper.

No one had ever been so foolish, among the Jews, as to believe that because
their Bible said _clean_, (_katharei_) their priests had the miraculous and
supernatural power of taking away and curing the leprosy: and we nowhere
see that the Jewish priests ever had the audacity to try to persuade the
people that they had ever received any supernatural and divine power to
"cleanse" the leprosy, because their God through the Bible, had said of
them: "They will cleanse the leper." Both priest and people were
sufficiently intelligent and honest to understand and acknowledge that by
that expression, if was only meant that the priests had the legal right to
see if the leprosy was gone or not, they had only to look at certain marks
indicated by God Himself, through Moses, to know whether, or not, God had
cured the leper before he presented himself to his priest. The leper, cured
by the mercy and power of God alone, before presenting himself to the
priest, was only declared to be clean by that priest. Thus the priest was
said, by the Bible, to "clean" the leper, or the leprosy;--and, in the
opposite case, to "unclean." (Septuagint, Leviticus xiii. v. 3. 6.)

Now, let us put