CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES
Hebrews 9:18. The first covenant.—Reverting to the older and safer term. Hebrews 9:16-17, are a sort of aside, a sudden thought that came to the writer, somewhat in the Pauline manner. Dedicated.—Or “initiated.” There was a foreshadowing of the death of Christ in the blood-sealings of the covenant.
Hebrews 9:19. Spoken.—Read aloud the commandments which were the covenant requirements and conditions. Of calves and of goats.—A general expression for the “sacrificial victims.” Goats are not especially mentioned on this occasion (Exodus 24:5). Scarlet wool, and hyssop.—Not mentioned in Exodus 24. “The water (itself an emblem and means of cleansing) was designed to prevent the coagulation of the blood, and to increase the quantity of the purifying fluid. The ‘scarlet wool’ may have been used to bind the hyssop to the stick of cedar-wood, which was the instrument of sprinkling” (Moulton). The book.—Not specially mentioned in Exodus 24:6-8. (“This is one of several instances in which the writer shows himself learned in the Jewish legends, Hagadoth.) Book and people may be taken as representing the two parties to the covenant.
Hebrews 9:21. Tabernacle.—Nothing is actually said of their being so sprinkled; only of their being anointed with oil. Josephus, however, confirms the text. See Exodus 11:9-10.
Hebrews 9:22. Almost all.—Some were cleansed by water (Leviticus 16:26; Leviticus 16:28; Numbers 31:22-23). The cleansing efficacy of blood is a symbol, not a fact. Is no remission.—The writer does not say “of sins,” and these words should not be added to the verse. He is stating a historical fact with regard to the old Mosaic system, and refers entirely to ceremonial offences. The Rabbins have a proverb, “No expiation except by blood.”
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Hebrews 9:18-22
The Blood of the Covenant.—The word “testament” used in the previous verses is supplied in Hebrews 9:18, and it would have been better to have put in the old and familiar term “covenant.” This is done in the R.V. Any arrangement made between two parties for their mutual benefit, which may be ratified by some common act, is called a “covenant.” In the simple society of the ancient East, covenants could only be ratified by the taking of mutual vows and pledges, or by the sharing together in some symbolical and suggestive act. Sometimes a bargain was ratified by the two parties joining hands, before witnesses, in the gate of the city; at other times by mutually raising a heap of stones, and calling it by a particular name. There was also a custom of this kind: Wine was poured into an earthen vessel, and the contracting parties, cutting their arms with a knife, let some of the blood run into the wine, with which they stained their armour, and of which both parties drank, uttering at the same time the most dreadful curses upon the party that violated the treaty. In this passage the ratification of the Old Testament covenant with God is in part described. The great leader and lawgiver, Moses, had been in the mount with God, had received the law as from the Divine hand, and on his return to the camp he had gathered the tribes in a solemn assembly, and received from them the emphatic declaration of their resolve, “All the words which the Lord hath said will we do.” Then Moses prepared for a solemn act of ratification. He built an altar under the hill; that altar was to represent Jehovah, the one party to the covenant. He also set up twelve pillars, according to the number of the tribes of Israel. These represented the people, the other party to the covenant, the party to whom the covenant terms were offered. Then Moses slew certain animals, and divided the blood that flowed from them, sprinkling some on the altar, in token of God’s making a vow to observe and keep all that He had pledged and promised in the covenant. The other half of the blood he kept back awhile, until he had again read to the people the covenant terms and the covenant sanctions, and had again received the people’s acceptance in their united exclamation, “All that the Lord hath said unto us will we do, and be obedient.” Then he took that half of the blood, and sprinkled it on those twelve representative pillars, expressing thus the solemn vow of the people, and making the vow take this impressive form: “We pledge our very life to our obedience. If we fail to keep this covenant, let our life be forfeited, let that life be taken, as has been taken the life of these beasts.” Now in this ancient and formal Jewish covenant we are to see the model of the spiritual covenant which God makes with man in creating him, and arranging his sustenance and circumstance—the covenant which man makes with God in accepting life at His hands. Nobody is obliged to live: to choose to live is to accept God’s covenant terms. We may not, as individuals, be able to appeal to a personal scene of ratification. That was done for our humanity by our first human father, Adam—just as it was done for all the Jewish race by that one Mosaic generation. And it was broken for us by that first father, as representing us. So we all come into the world with the claims of the everlasting covenant as strong upon us as upon Adam, but with all those disturbed conditions about us which have followed upon breaking the covenant, and with our life forfeit (as part of the life of humanity), in accordance with the solemn vow and pledge of that covenant. If then we are to be restored to gracious relations with God, we need—
I. That God should be honoured by the surrender of the life that was pledged, if the covenant was broken.—The Israelites sealed their covenant with blood. They thus expressed their readiness to surrender their own blood if they broke the covenant. They did break it, and their lives we forfeited. God might have demanded the life of every Israelite, in vindication of His broken covenant. The fact that it was a covenant of mercy offered by God, and freely accepted by man, only makes the conditions more solemn. God can righteously demand one of two things—obedience to the covenant conditions, or the yielding of the forfeit. No man can save his honour, if he permits a covenant made with him to be broken, without taking any notice of the forfeit or penalty. Meeting us in our human sphere, and graciously using our human language, God shows us that He could not. The life of all Israel stood forfeited unto God. In this we have a model—a representation in material things of spiritual realities—of the great human covenant. To that also life is vowed and pledged. And that covenant too is broken. Our life, our whole life, is forfeit unto God. God cannot pass by that dishonoured covenant of His mercy. The penalty to which man pledged himself to submit must be exacted. Covenant-breakers must die,—die the death of the Divine absence from them; die the second, the spiritual death. Or else such satisfaction must be offered as shall uphold the Divine honour, declare the righteousness and worth of the Divine covenant in a most glorious manner, and so allow the penalty to be remitted. God can make no new covenant with men until, in some altogether satisfactory way, the old is honoured. And this every man feels is necessary to meet his deepest sense of right. How then has the difficulty been met? God has been pleased to permit the penalty to be exacted from one person only, a great race-head, a second Adam. Instead of demanding the forfeited life of every man, He required only the death of the representative man. And then comes in the marvel of all marvels. The God of the broken covenant was willing Himself to provide that one representative man. Here is a glimpse at least into the mystery of Christ’s death. God saw humanity in Him—God accepted Him as the yielded life that was forfeit by the terms of the broken human covenant. In that one God-man’s voluntary death the old covenant is honoured, even while it is put away for ever. We could have no sure ground of hope, if that old covenant had not been so gloriously vindicated and honoured, or if God had not released the Sin-bearer from the grave, and accepted Him as the great human representative.
II. We need that the covenant should be newly made and newly ratified.—And that also is done for us in Christ. He who bears for us the forfeit of the old is the gracious Mediator of the new. And the new covenant is a better covenant,—a covenant not of formal terms, but of gracious promises; not of particular deeds, but of the inner heart, and of the whole life. And this second, or new, covenant was also ratified by blood-shedding. It was taken under the same tremendous vows as the old; it was sealed by an infinitely more worthy sacrifice. “The patterns of things in the heavenlies were purified with blood of bulls and goats, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these.” Yielding His life, as at once the forfeit of the old covenant and the solemn vow of the new, behold God and man are now one again, in Christ. “Ye who sometime were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.”
III. The new covenant must be definitely accepted by each individual.—We must personally and voluntarily enter into covenant. Its reconciliation, its access, its privileges, its status, cannot be ours until we willingly and lovingly accept the covenant made for us, and sealed for us, by the Lord Jesus Christ. He stands for men; by his own act of surrender each man must ensure that He stands for him, and is his Representative, his Mediator, and his Lord. But each must enter into the covenant for himself. No man can do it for him. No covenant of any fellow-creature will stand for him. Those who are within the privileges and responsibilities of the new covenant are counted one by one.
The Blood is the Life.—The warm blood of men, and of quadrupeds and birds, seemed to contain the very soul or life of the living earthly creature—to be almost identical with his soul. Now when the life and the soul were held to be something sacred, and the more tender feelings of certain nations took this view very early, it would follow that the blood too must be considered a sacred thing, and be regarded quite differently from the rest of the body. The sight of that which was held to be the soul itself carried the mind immediately to thoughts of God, placed directly before it something full of mystery, and filled it with profound awe.—Ewald.
Death for Remission.—How can the death of Christ be a condition of the remission of sins? This the crux of the whole subject.
1. The writer never suggests that Christ liberates us from liability to punishment by being Himself punished in our stead. It is true he said that Christ “was offered to bear the sins of many” (Hebrews 9:28), but he does not say that this was to bear the punishment of sins; on the contrary, he carries our thoughts away to ideas of sacrifices in his use of the word “offered.”
2. Neither does the writer teach that the value of the Atonement was derived from the amount of pain endured by our Lord. As we have seen, he attaches great importance to the sufferings of Christ, but this is in regard to His priesthood, not His sacrifice. He became a perfect priest, fully able to sympathise with His people, by means of the things which He suffered. Certainly the spirit of surrender requisite where much suffering has to be faced is proportionately greater than where the sacrifice is easily made. Thus suffering comes to enhance the value of sacrifice. But it does this indirectly, and it is not the suffering itself, but the refusal to shrink from it, which is valued. In the Hebrew ritual the death of the victims was as painless as possible; there is not a hint that their sufferings entered into the consideration of the worshippers. The real sacrifice was made by the offerer in the surrender of his property. The case of our Lord is entirely different—for one thing, because He appears in the two functions of sacrificing priest and sacrificial victim. It is in regard to the former of these functions, as the priest making the offering, that His sufferings come to be considered with supreme interest.
3. Where, then, is the specific value of His sacrifice? The author emphatically contrasts the tabernacle sacrifices with the sacrifice of our Lord, affirming that the former could only have a subjective influence on the worshippers as reminders of sin, not any objective efficacy in expiration thereof, because “it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins” (Hebrews 10:4). That is to say, he saw quite clearly that no animal sacrifice could constitute a real atonement. Coming to the very different sacrifice of Christ, he quotes from Psalms 40, “Sacrifice and offering Thou wouldest not, but a body didst Thou prepare for Me” (Hebrews 10:5). The first step, then, is the Incarnation. Christ comes in a human body. The following words in the quotation from the psalm are cited to indicate the purpose of the Incarnation in this connection: “Lo, I am come (in the roll of the book it is written of Me) to do Thy will, O God” (Hebrews 10:7). Christ was incarnate in order that, among other things, He might be subject to obedience. We are reminded of St. Paul’s thought that He took on Him the “form of a servant” when He was “found in fashion as a man” in order that He might become “obedient even unto death” (Philippians 2:7-8). Further on the author tells us distinctly that our sanctification—and the whole course of the argument shows that by this he means our consecration to God in the cleansing of our consciences, i.e. the effecting of the Atonement—is accomplished by our Lord doing the will of God: “By the which will we have been sanctified” (chap.Hebrews 10:10). The whole of our Lord’s life was a course of perfect obedience to the will of God; that obedience was most severely tested, and, standing the test triumphantly, reached its crown and climax at the cross. We need not search through regions of theological speculation; the truth is writ large upon the plain facts of our Lord’s history. He would have been false to His mission if He had turned aside at the last, and fled into some safe retreat out of the reach of His enemies to end His days in obscurity. He was a martyr to His mission. His death was more than martyrdom, because He was more than man, and so through martyrdom could effect what no merely human martyr ever accomplished. His obedience was a superhuman obedience in a human life. Hence its supreme value. Can we not understand how God would accept this as the most precious of all offerings? Primitive man presents fruits from his farm and animals from his flock. These are simple, childlike gifts. Christ offers the one real sacrifice God cares for. God has no delight in blood. Mere death cannot be any satisfaction to Him. But He rejoices in obedience to His will; and when that obedience climbs to its highest pinnacle in an unflinching submission to death, He has the greatest offering that can be made. It is in response to such an offering, the obedience unto death of His own Son, that God grants remission of sins. This seems to be the idea of the author of the epistle to the Hebrews, and I venture to say it is a nearer approach to a theory of the Atonement than is to be found anywhere else in the New Testament.—Prof. W. F. Adeney, M.A.
SUGGESTIVE NOTES AND SERMON SKETCHES
Hebrews 9:22. No Remission save by Blood-shedding.—Heathen and Jewish sacrifices rather show us what the sacrifice of Christ is not than what it is.—Jowett.
Repentance insufficient.—By the general prevalence of propitiatory sacrifices over the heathen world, the notion of repentance alone being sufficient to expiate guilt appears to be contrary to the general sense of mankind.—Bishop Butler.
Taking the Blood.—The death of the victim, instead of being a vicarious punishment, was no essential part of the transaction, but merely incidental as a means of affording the blood. The essence of the whole sacrificial service was the sprinkling of the blood, as the bearer of the life, upon God’s altar, thus symbolising the giving away of the offerer’s life to God; in other words, his returning back again to God, by repentance and faith and self-dedication, after being separated from Him by sin.—Bähr.
The Blood as a Type.—Nearly all things were purged with blood; certainly without blood was no remission—that peculiar thing “remission” was inseparable from blood. Sin-offerings were not merely tokens of the restoration of friendship between God and the offender; but the blood was the type of the great propitiation, and an acknowledgment, on the part of the offerer, that he had himself deserved death. It showed also that the death and suffering, not of the offender, but of one perfectly guiltless and incapable of sin, alone could procure remission.—Webster and Wilkinson.
Sin and Trespass were atoned for, in a civil and ecclesiastical point of view, by appropriate sacrifices which bore the like names. But in this case the remission was only from a temporal penalty or calamity. It was not possible that such sacrifices could atone for sin, as viewed by the righteous governor of the world. God, as the head and king of the Jewish nation, granted remission of the penalty which Jewish law inflicted in many cases, on certain conditions. But this had respect merely to this present world, and not to the accountability of transgressors before the tribunal of the universe, in the world above. Even temporal forgiveness could not be obtained without shedding of blood—so the necessity of atoning blood which possessed a higher virtue than that of beasts, in order to remove the penalty against sin, that was threatened in respect of a future world.—Moses Stuart.
Remission and Blood-shedding.—In these words, “apart from shedding of blood is no remission,” we may find a fact stated and a fact suggested. The fact stated is that, under the Old Testament dispensation, the particular thing called “remission” was always attended with “blood-shedding.” The fact suggested is that, under the New Testament dispensation, Jesus Christ did actually shed His blood for the remission of sins. It is possible to sweep away all the deeper meanings of the Jewish sacrifices by regarding them only as expressions of dependence and trust. We have to ask, not what is sacrifice to a man, but what to a sinful man, one who carries the burden of conscious transgression, and the fear of just penalty. In the Jewish sacrifices the sin of the individual or the nation was symbolically transferred, by confession, to the victim that was sacrificed. The Jewish view of sacrifice is thus stated by Abrabanel: “The blood of the offerer deserved to be shed, and his body to be burned, for his sin; only the mercy of the Divine Name accepted this offering from him as a substitute and propitiation, whose blood should be instead of his blood, and its life instead of his life.” In the New Testament is given the historical fact that Jesus did die; or, to use the familiar figure, did “shed His blood.” These two facts, the blood-shedding of Judaism and the blood-shedding of Jesus, answer to each other, as do type and antitype. “The patterns of things in the heavens (spiritual things) were purified with these (the blood of animals); but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these”—even with the life, the will, the surrender, the sacrifice, of a spiritual being. The reality was not found in the Jewish sacrifices. They were but pictures of the reality. They bore relation to ceremonial offences, not to sin, in a spiritual sense. In the Old Testament economy there was a figure and an underlying reality. And in the New Testament sacrifice there is a corresponding outward figure and underlying spiritual reality. The Jewish system required of its worshipper a sacrifice which could have a twofold relation:
(1) Could die as the bearer of his penalty, and
(2) in its spotlessness could be accepted in his stead. That was the figure; but the man who rightly apprehended that ceremonial penalty and pollution saw it to represent the moral penalty under which his sin had brought him, and the moral pollution with which his sin had defiled him. A spiritually minded Jew must have said, “Restored to the tabernacle service, I am not restored to God: looked upon as clean by the priests, I am not looked upon as clean before God. No blood of beasts can touch moral pollution: no death of bulls or goats can carry away moral penalty.” And so in the infinite sacrifice and meritorious blood-shedding of the Son of God there is a figure and an answering reality. If the sacrifice of Jesus had been only a spiritual sacrifice, if it had found no expression in bodily sufferings and bodily death, we men, so imprisoned in the senses, could never have realised it, could never have reached the blessing of it. Christ’s bodily sufferings and blood-shedding are not, in themselves, His great sacrifice. They are the form it took for bodily eyes to see, the body it wore for this mortal sphere, the temple within which the real sacrifice of an obedient will was offered. And as the Jewish worshipper looked past the blood of bulls and of goats, and rested in the spiritual sacrifice, which was to be made in the person of Messiah, so the Christian worshipper now goes in behind the bodily sufferings and human death of our Divine Lord, which are to him somewhat as the outward ceremonies were to the Jew, and discerns the inner, spiritual, infinitely satisfying sacrifice presented by Him when He made “His soul an offering for sin.” Sin is a spiritual thing. It may express itself in deeds done in the body; but, in its essence, it is a thing of the spirit and the will. The sin is a soul-sin. The penalty is a soul-death. The remission can only come by a soul-sacrifice. When we say that Christ, as our sacrifice, bore the penalty for us, we mean the spiritual penalty. It found fitting outward expression in the agonies of an ignominious and violent death, but the infinite depth of suffering lay hidden—in behind—in the Redeemer’s soul. Finding only once what seemed a suitable utterance in human language, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” The chief objection against the truth of our Lord’s substitutionary sacrifice is, that it represents the innocent as suffering for the guilty, which is supposed to override our natural sense of justice. But higher laws do affect lower ones. Abraham in loyal obedience to God put aside parental justice, and assayed to offer his son. Are there no cases in which our sense of justice permits the innocent to suffer for the guilty? Is there any law, in heaven or earth, that prevents an innocent man from voluntarily taking the place of the guilty? Is our sense of justice wronged when a man knowingly and willingly marries an almost bankrupt woman, and makes himself legally responsible for all her debts? And may not the Lord Jesus, knowingly, and willingly, and lovingly, marry this poor bankrupt bride of Humanity, and, with His eternal riches, bear all the burden of her debt? May not the Lord Jesus sustain such a relation to us, of His own free, generous, pitying sympathy, that, most righteously, our penalty should be transferred to Him? In the voluntary sacrifice of Christ; in that yielding of His soul, through the body, to the sinner’s spiritual death, all men may see God’s authority vindicated, God’s honour established, sin exhibited in its hatefulness, sin smitten and broken in its power, and men deterred from loving and seeking it. And since it is God Himself who provided the sacrifice—nay, God Himself who is in the sacrifice—the revelations of the Divine glory and justice do not affright us; the disclosures of the infinite hatefulness of sin do not overwhelm us. The sacrifice of Jesus brings us full remission—holiness and mercy hand in hand: in it “righteousness and peace have kissed each other.”
Christ’s Voluntary Sin-bearing.—When we see the offended God, the injured Sovereign, holy, just, and good—when we see Him at such a cost Himself provide the expiation which the dignity of His own law demands, and actually send His Son to die in our room, it is then that we begin to see the exceeding sinfulness of sin, the beauty and majesty of the Divine character, and the generous tears which suffuse our eyes are the first tears of true repentance which we have ever shed. That cross of Christ, with its great atoning sacrifice, lets me see God to be so great, and man so little—the Sovereign to be so good, and the rebel to be so bad: it shows on the one side such holiness and such love, whilst it shows on the other guilt so heinous, wickedness so inexcusable, and ruin so complete, that we need not wonder though we find man’s pride reject the humbling truth. Orthodox people are charged with teaching that the philosophy of sacrifice consists in the necessity of punishing—that it is justice to let the blow fall somewhere, no matter where; blood must flow. But we never affirm that God visited our sins on the head of one who had no connection with these sins at all. God visited the sin on the head of One who, though personally innocent of it, did nevertheless put Himself voluntarily into such a relationship to the sinners as involved Him in the fullest legal responsibility for the sin. A man is beheaded for crimes that his hands have committed—the body is a whole. So Christ and His Church are one body; He is the Head. When God the Father exacted the penalty of His people’s sins from Jesus, He did so from One who, as the Head of the body, was as righteously responsible for them as if He had committed them all.—Article, “Family Treasury,” August 1868.
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 9
Hebrews 9:22. Propitiation by Sacrifice.—It has often been remarked that the idea of propitiation by sacrifice is to be found in connection with all the sacrifices of heathen nations. This is strikingly illustrated by the following account of one of the festivals of the North American Indians:—Dr. Edward Walsh describes a village, the houses of which surrounded a large green or common, in the centre of which the council-house or temple was erected. “It was lighted,” he says, “by a few small, square apertures, close to the eaves, which also let out the smoke; consequently, it was somewhat dark. The door facing the west had a rude but spacious portico. The roof, which had a high pitch, was propped up within by four strong posts, between which was the hearth, with a large kettle over it. There was a seat all round, and the walls, which were formed of split plank, were half-way up covered with mats. Here we found a great number of Indians assembled. The women were ranged outside the wall, and the men surrounded the fire inside, at the head of whom was the high priest in his pontificals. His face was painted like the quarterings of a coat of arms, and he was furnished with a beard: he wore on his head a high tiara of beaver fur, stuck round with dyed porcupine quills: he had over his chest a kind of stomacher, worked in figures, and ornamented with wampum, which was supposed to represent the Jewish Urim and Thummim; in this, the Indians imagine some little spirit resides, which they talk to and consult in dubious events. Whilst the usual dance or chorus was performing, a dog which had been previously selected and fattened was boiling in the kettle: when cooked, the flesh was cut off, and the bones scraped clean and wrapped up in its skin. The flesh was then divided into small bits, and handed round on a wooden platter, to all those that surrounded the fire: at the same time, the high priest dipped a branch of hemlock pine in the broth, and sprinkled it everywhere, as well on the people as on the walls. The ceremony concluded with the circular dance and chant, in which the women joined. This chant, or hymn, is sung by all the Indian nations in North America, however they may differ in custom and language. Humboldt even heard it in Mexico, and it is supposed to be synonymous with the hallelujah of the Psalms. It was pricked down for me by a gentleman who understood musical composition. To my ears it sounds like the lullaby of the nursery:—
‘Tam le yah al lah le lu lah tam ye lah yo ha wah ha ha hah!’
It must be admitted that this ceremony bears some rude resemblance to the feast of the Passover, substituting a dog for a lamb, of which they have none; but dogs are sacrificed on all solemn occasions.”
Eastern Covenant Customs.—While in Abyssinia, Bruce the traveller wished to go from one place to another, and the sheikh had assured him that the journey might be undertaken with safety. “But,” said Bruce, “suppose your people meet us in the desert, how shall we fare in that case? Should we fight?” “I have told you, sheikh, already,” said he, “cursed be the man that lifts his hand against you, or even does not defend and befriend you to his own loss, even were it Ibrahim, my own son.” Then after some conversation, the old man muttered something to his sons in a dialect Bruce did not understand, and in a little time the whole hut was filled with people, the priests and monks of their religion, and the heads of families. “The great people joined hands, and uttered a kind of prayer—really the oath—about two minutes long, by which they declared themselves and their children accursed if ever they lifted their hands against me in the field, in the desert, or on the river; or, in case that I or mine should fly to them for refuge, if they did not protect us at the risk of their lives, their families, and their fortunes, or as they emphatically expressed it, ‘to the death of the last male child among them’ Medicines and advice were given on my part, faith and promises pledged on theirs; then two bushels of wheat and seven sheep were carried down to my boat.”
Classical Covenant Customs.—An ancient writer relates that Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks at the siege of Troy, “to confirm his faith sworn to Achilles, ordered victims to be brought. He took one, and with his sword divided it in the midst, placed the pieces opposite to each other, and holding his sword, reeking with blood, passed between the separated pieces.” Livy, the Roman historian, relates that in the time of Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, it was the custom, at the lustration or purification of the armies, to cut off the head of a dog, and then make the whole army file between the head and the trunk. Compare Jeremiah 34:18.
The Scottish League and Covenant.—The most remarkable modern reproduction of the ancient covenant may be found in Scottish history. It was a confession of faith made in the year 557, A.D., and a mutual agreement to maintain that confession even at peril of death. “As the hour drew near people from all quarters flocked to the spot, and before the commissioners appeared the Greyfriars Church and Churchyard, Edinburgh, were densely filled with the gravest, the wisest, and the best of Scotland’s pious sons and daughters. The long roll of parchment was brought, the meaning and purpose of the covenant explained. Then a deep and solemn pause ensued; not the pause of irresolution, but of modest diffidence, each thinking every other more worthy than himself to place the first name upon this sacred bond. An aged nobleman, the venerable Earl of Sutherland, at last stepped slowly and reverentially forward, and with throbbing heart and trembling hand subscribed Scotland’s covenant with God. All hesitation in a moment disappeared. Name followed name in quick succession, till all within the Church had given their signatures. It was then removed into the churchyard, and spread out on a level gravestone. Here the scene became still more impressive. The intense emotions of many became irrepressible. Some wept aloud; some burst into a shout of exultation; some after their names added the words ‘till death’; and some, opening a vein, subscribed with their own warm blood. And when every particle of space was filled, there was another solemn pause. The nation had framed a covenant in former days, and had violated its engagements; if they, too, should break this sacred bond, how deep would be their guilt! Such seems to have been their thought; for, as if moved by one spirit—the one eternal Spirit—with low, heart-wrung groans, and faces bathed in tears, they lifted, with one consent, their right hands to heaven, avowing by this sublime appeal that they had now joined themselves unto the Lord in an everlasting covenant, which should not be forgotten.”—T. Guthrie.