An Orkney Maid. Amelia E. Barr
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sacrificed for a sin offering but a ram for a burnt offering. In Numbers we are told of the ram of atonement which a man is to offer, when he has done his neighbour an injury. In Ezra, the Tenth, the ram is offered for a trespass because of an unlawful marriage. On the accession of Solomon to the throne one 69 thousand rams with bullocks and lambs were ‘offered up with great gladness.’ In the Old Testament there are few books in which the sacrificial ram is not mentioned. Even the horn of the ram was constantly in evidence, for it called together all religious and solemn services.
“A little circumstance,” continued the Bishop, “that pleases me to remember occurred in Glasgow five weeks ago. I saw a crowd entering a large church, and I asked a workingman, who was eating his lunch outside the building, the name of the church; and he answered,––‘It’s just the auld Ram’s Horn Kirk. They are putting a new minister in the pulpit today and they seem weel pleased wi’ their choice.’
“Now I am going to leave this subject with you. I have only indicated it. Those who wish to do so, can finish the list, for the half has not been told, and indeed I have left the most significant ceremony until the last. It is that wonderful service in the Sixteenth Chapter of Leviticus, where the priest, after making a sin offering of young bullocks and a burnt offering of a ram, casts lots upon two goats for a sin offering, and the goat upon which the lot falls is ‘presented alive before the Lord to make an atonement; and to let 70 him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.’ ”
Then he took from his pocket a little book and said, “Listen to the end of this service, ‘And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the Children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away, by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness.
“ ‘And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited; and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness.’
“My friends, this night let all read the Fifty-third of Isaiah, and they will understand how fitting it was that Christ should be ‘offered up’ in Aries the Ram, the sacrificial month representing the shadows and types of which He was the glorious arch-type.”
Then there was silence, too deeply charged with feeling, for words. The Bishop himself felt that he could speak on no lesser subject, and his small audience were lost in wonder at the vast panorama of centuries, day by day, century after century, through all of which God had remembered that He had promised He would provide the Great and Final Sacrifice for mankind’s justification. 71 Then Aries the Ram would no longer be a promise. It would be a voucher forever that the Promise had been redeemed, and a memorial that His Truth and His mercy endureth forever!
At the door the Bishop said to Ragnor, “In a few hours, Friend Conall, it will be Easter Morning. Then we can tell each other ‘Christ has risen!’ ” And Conall’s eyes were full of tears, he could not find his voice, he looked upward and bowed his head.
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