antees at once a typical mystery latent in Gen. xiv.
and the rightness of its development in the passage here before us.

But now, what "message" has our chapter for us, in view of the needs of
our own time?

First, as to its sacerdotal doctrine. It throws a broad illumination on
the grand finality and uniqueness of the mediatorial priesthood of our
Lord, the Son of God. It puts into the most vivid possible contrast the
age of "the law" and that of Christ as to the priestly conception and
institution. Somehow, under the law, there was a need for priests who
were "men, having infirmity." For certain grave purposes (not for all,
by any means, even in that legal period) it was the will of God that
they should stand between His Israel and Him. But the argument of this
chapter, unless it elaborately veils its true self in clouds, goes
directly to shew that such properly mediatorial functions, in the age of
Christ, are for ever withdrawn from "men, having infirmity." Where they
stood of old, one after another, sacrificing, interceding, going in
behind the veil, permitted to draw nearer to God, in an official
sanctity, than their brethren, there now stands Another, sublime,
supreme, alone. He is Man indeed, but He is not "man having infirmity."
He is higher than the heavens, while He is one with us. And now our one
secret for a complete approach to God is to come to God "through HIM."
And this, unless the chapter is an elaborate semblance of what it is
not, means nothing if it does not mean that between the Church, and
between the soul, and the Lord Jesus Christ, there is to come
_absolutely nothing mediatorial_. As little as the Jew, for ceremonial
purposes, needed an intermediary in dealing with his mortal priest so
little do we, for the whole needs of our being, need an intermediary in
dealing with our eternal Priest.

In the age of Christ, no office can for one moment put one "man having
infirmity" nearer to God than another, if this chapter means what it
says. Mediatorial priesthood, a very different thing from commissioned
pastorate, has no place in apostolic Christianity, with the vast
exception of its sublime and solitary place in the Person of our most
blessed Lord.

Then further, the chapter, far from giving us merely the cold gift (as
it would be if this were all) of a negative certainty against unlawful
human claims, gives us, as its true, its inmost message, a glorious
positive. It gives us the certainty that,