e, with which this historical book is chiefly
interested, saw in the high priest the means of continually rendering to
God the service of its loyalty. Every day began and closed with the
burnt-offering of a lamb of the first year, along with a meal-offering
of fine flour and oil, and a drink-offering of wine. This would be a
sweet savour unto God, not after the carnal fashion in which sceptics
have interpreted the words, but in the same sense in which the wicked
are a smoke in His nostrils from a continually burning fire.

And where this offering was made, the Omnipresent would meet with them.
There He would convey His mind to His priest. There also He would meet
with all the people--not occasionally, as amid the more impressive but
less tolerable splendours of Sinai, but to dwell among them and be their
God. And they should know that all this was true, and also that for this
He led them out of Egypt: "I am Jehovah their God."

FOOTNOTES:

[40] Neither, it must be added, were the bodies of certain sin-offerings
of the lower grade, and in which the priest was not personally concerned
(Lev. x. 17, etc.).

CHAPTER XXX.

_INCENSE._

xxx. 1-10.

The altar of incense was not mentioned when the tent of meeting was
being prepared and furnished. But when, in the Divine idea, this is
done, when all is ready for the intercourse of God and man, and the
priest and the daily victims are provided for, something more than this
formal routine of offerings might yet be sought for. This material
worship of the senses, this round of splendour and of tragedy, this
blaze of gold and gold-encrusted timber, these curtains embroidered in
bright colours, and ministers glowing with gems, this blood and fire
upon the altar, this worldly sanctuary,--was it all? Or should it not do
as nature ever does, which seems to stretch its hands out into the
impalpable, and to grow all but spiritual while we gaze; so that the
mountain folds itself in vapour, and the ocean in mist and foam, and the
rugged stem of the tree is arrayed in fineness of quivering frondage,
and it may be of tinted blossom, and around it breathes a subtle
fragrance, the most impalpable existence known to sense? Fragrance
indeed is matter passing into the immaterial, it is the sigh of the
sensuous for the spiritual state of being, it is an aspiration.

And therefore an altar, smaller than that of burnt-offering, but much
more precious, being plated all around and on