Now the purpose of the Bible is to do this, and it seeks to effect this work by a dual operation. It places before us that Divine Ideal of which I have already spoken, and at the same time bases this ideal upon the recognition of a Divine Sacrifice. These two conceptions are so intimately interwoven in Scripture that they cannot be separated, but at the present day there is a growing tendency to attempt to make this separation and to discard the conception of a Divine Sacrifice as unphilosophical — that is, as having no nexus of cause and effect.
What I want, therefore, to point out in these additional pages is that there is such a nexus and that, so far from being without a sequence of cause and effect, it has its root in the innermost principles of our own being. It is not contrary to law, but proceeds from the very nature of the Law itself.
Therefore I will confine my remarks to the question how Love, as the originating impulse of all creation, can demand such a sacrifice. And to my mind the answer is that God does not demand it. It is Man who demands it. It is the instinctive craving of the human soul for certainty that requires a demonstration so convincing as to leave no room for doubt of our perfectly happy relation to the Supreme Spirit, and consequently to all that flows from it, whether on the side of the visible or of the invisible. When we grasp the fact that such a standpoint of certainty is the necessary foundation for the building up in ourselves of the Divine Ideal, then it becomes clear that to afford us this firm basis is the greatest work that the Spirit, in its relation to human personality, could do.
We are often told that the offering of sacrifices had its origin in primitive man's conception of his gods as beings which required to be propitiated so as to induce them to do good or abstain from doing harm; and very likely this was the case. The truth at the back of this conception is the feeling that there is a higher power upon which man is dependent; and the error is in supposing that this power is limited by an individuality which can be enriched by selling its good offices, or which blackmails you by threats. In either case it wants to get something out of you, and from this it follows that its own power of supplying its own wants must be limited, otherwise it would not require to be kept in good temper by gifts.
In very undeveloped minds such a conception results in the idea of numerous gods, each having, so to say, his own particular line of business; and the furthest advance this mode of thought is capable of is the reduction of these various deities to two antagonistic powers of Good and of Evil. But the result in either case is the same, so long as we start with the hypothesis that the Good will do us more good and the Evil do us less harm by reason of our sacrifices, for then it logically follows that the more valuable your sacrifices and the oftener they are presented, the better chance you have of good luck.
Doubtless some such conception as this was held by the mass of the Hebrew people under the sacrificial system of the Levitical Law, and perhaps this was one reason why they were so prone to fall into idolatry — for in this view, their fundamental notion was practically identical in its nature with that of the heathen around them. Of course, this was not the fundamental idea embodied in the Levitical system itself. The root of that system was the symbolising of a supreme ideal or reconciliation hereafter to be manifested in action.
Now a symbol is not the thing symbolised. The purpose of a symbol is twofold: to put us upon enquiry as to the reality which it indicates, and to bring that reality to our minds by suggestion when we look at the symbol; but if it does not do this, and we rest only in the symbol, nothing will come of it, and we are left just where we were.
That the symbolic nature of the Levitical sacrifice was clearly perceived by the deeper thinkers among the Hebrews is attested by many passages in the Bible. "Sacrifice and burnt offering thou wouldest not" (Psalms 40:6 and 51:16) and other similar utterances; and the distinction between these symbols and that which they symbolised is brought out in the Epistle to the Hebrews by the argument that if those sacrifices had afforded a sufficient standpoint for effectual realisation of cleansing, then the worshipper would not need to have repeated them, because he would have no more consciousness of sin (Heb. 10:2).
Now such an assurance cannot be based on any sort of sacrifices that require repetition, for then we could never know whether we had given enough either in quality or quantity. It must be a once-for-all business or it is no use at all; and so the Bible makes the once-for-allness of the offering the essential point of its teaching. "He that has been bathed does not need to be bathed again" (John 13:10). "There is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus" (Rom. 8:1).
But if we realise the Bible teaching that Christ is the Son of God — that is, the Divine Principle of Humanity out of which we originated, and subsisting in us all, however unconsciously to ourselves — then we see that sinners as well as saints are included in this Principle, and consequently that the self-offering of Christ must actually include the self-offering of every human being in the acknowledgement (however unknown to his objective mentality) of his sin.
If we can grasp this somewhat abstract point of view, it follows that in the Person of Christ, every human being, past, present, and to come, was self-offered for the condemnation of his sin — a self-condemnation and a self-offering, and hence a cleansing, for the simple reason that if you can get a man to realise his past error, really see his mistake, he won't do it again; and it is the perpetuation of sin and error that has to be got rid of. To do this universally would be to regain Paradise. Seen, therefore, in this light, there is no question of transference of moral guilt, and I take it this is St Paul's meaning when he speaks of our being partakers in Christ's death [1 Cor. 10:17 — Ed.].
Then there is the objection, How can past sins be done away with? If we accept the philosophical conclusion that Time has no substantive existence, then all that remains is states of consciousness. As I have said in the earlier part of this book, if the Self-contemplation of Spirit from any centre of individualisation is that of entire harmony and the absence of anything that would cause any consciousness of separation, then past sins cease to have any part in this self-recognition, and consequently cease to have any place in the world of existence.
The foundation of the whole creative process is the calling into Light out of darkness — "that which makes manifest is light" — and consequently the converse action is that of sending out of Light into Darkness — that is, into Not-being. Now this is exactly what the Spirit says in the Bible: "I, even I, am He that blotteth out thy transgressions" (Isaiah 43:25).
Blotting out is the sending out of manifestation into the darkness of non-manifestation, out of Being into Not-being; and in this way, the past error ceases to have any existence and so ceases to have any further effect upon us. It is "blotted out", and from this new standpoint has never been at all; so that to continue to contemplate it is to give a false sense of existence to that which in effect has no existence. It is that Affirmation of Negation which is the root of all evil. It is the inversion of our God-given creative power of thought, calling into existence that which in the Perfect Life of the Spirit never had or could have any existence, and therefore it creates the sense of inharmony, opposition, and separation.
As I have shown at the beginning of this book, the cosmic manifestation of principles is not sufficient to bring out all that there is in them. To do this, their action must be specialised by the introduction of the Personal Factor. They are represented by the Pillar Jachin, but it must be equilibrated by the Pillar Boaz — Law and Personality, the two Pillars of the Universe; and in the One Offering, we have the supreme combination of these two principles, the highest specialisation of Law by the highest power of Personality. [Jachin and Boaz: the twin pillars at the entrance to Solomon's temple (2 Chron., 3:17), symbolic of the subjective and objective forces respectively. See chapter. 6 of Troward's Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning — Ed.]
These are eternal principles, and therefore we are told that the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world; and because "thoughts are things", this supreme manifestation of the creative interaction of Law and Personality was bound eventually to be manifested in concrete action in the world conditioned by time and space; and so it was that the supreme manifestation of the Love of God to meet the supreme need of Man took place.
The history of the Jewish nation is the history of the working of the law of cause and effect, under the guidance of Divine Wisdom, so as to provide the necessary conditions for the greatest event in the world's history; for if Christ was to appear, it must be in some nation, in some place, and at some time; but to trace the steps by which, through an intelligible sequence of causes, these necessary conditions were provided belongs rather to an investigation of Bible history than to our present purpose, so I will not enter into these details here.
But what I hope I have in some measure made clear is that there is a reason why Christ should be manifested, and should suffer, and rise again, and that so far from being a baseless superstition, the Reconciling of the world to God through the One Offering once-for-all offered for the sin of the whole world, lays the immovable foundation upon which we may build securely for all the illimitable future.