with burnt offerings, with calves of
a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with
ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my
transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

And the answer of the prophet is:

He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord
require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk
humbly with thy God?

Here we have a declaration in unmistakable terms that the moral ideal
and the religious ideal are one, and that to worship God properly the
worshipper must treat his fellow-men properly. We now get the idea
that sin against God is not something into which a man may fall without
knowing it, but the living of a selfish life.

+Atonement never an equivalent for penalty.+--We ought to recognise too
that the sacrifices of the Day of Atonement were never held to secure a
complete amnesty for all kinds of sin. If a man committed theft or
murder, he had to bear the appropriate penalty of his misdemeanour
because he had been guilty of an action directed against the well-being
of the community and the community had to take measures to protect
itself; the Day of Atonement availed nothing in such a case. Here is
where many who see in the Old Testament sacrificial system a type and
anticipation of the one perfect sacrifice of Jesus frequently go wide
of the facts. The Day of Atonement was a ceremonial and symbolical
assertion of the willingness of the individual and the nation to fulfil
their true destiny by being at one with God. If some particular man
had been so living as to cut himself off from the communal well-being,
he had to suffer.

+The significance of the blood.+--Many people seem to think that some
actual saving efficacy was supposed to attach to the shedding of the
blood of the victims offered on the altar of sacrifice, but that never
was so. No doubt in the ignorant popular mind material sacrifices came
to be looked upon as possessing some virtue in themselves, but the
intelligence of the nation never regarded them in this way. In the
offering of a victim the worshipper symbolically offered himself. The
Semites thought that the life of any organism was in the blood. Thus
in Numbers we read, "The life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have
given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it
is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the soul (or life)."
When,