sacrifices present few traces.  It was indeed sought at a very early period to influence the doubtful or threatening mood of Deity, and make His countenance gracious by means of rich gifts, but the gift had, as was natural then, the character of a tentative effort only (Micah vi. 6).  There was no such thought as that a definite guilt must and could be taken away by means of a prescribed offering.  When the law discriminates between such sins as are covered by an offering and such sins as relentlessly are visited with wrath, it makes a distinction very remote from the antique; to Hebrew antiquity the wrath of God was something quite incalculable, its causes were never known, much less was it possible to enumerate beforehand those sins which kindled it and those which did not. 1

********************************** 1.  When the wrath is regulated by the conditions of the “covenant,” the original notion (which scorns the thought of adjustment) is completely changed.  What gave the thing its mysterious awfulness was precisely this:  that in no way was it possible to guard against it, and that nothing could avail to counteract it.  Under the pressure of Jehovah’s wrath not only was sacrifice abandoned, but even the mention of His name was shunned so as to avoid attracting His attention (Hos iii. 4, ix. 4; Amos vi. 10). ***********************************

An underlying reference of sacrifice to sin, speaking generally, was entirely absent.  The ancient offerings were wholly of a joyous nature,—­a merrymaking before Jehovah with music and song, timbrels, flutes, and stringed instruments (Hos. ix. 1 seq.; Amos v. 23, viii. 3; Isa xxx. 3).  No greater contrast could be conceived than the monotonous seriousness of the so-called Mosaic worship.

NOMOS de PAREISHLQEN (INA PLEONASH| TO PARAPTWMA ["But law came in, with the result that the trespass multiplied”.  Romans 5:20 NRSV)]

In this way the spiritualisation of the worship is seen in the Priestly Code as advancing pari passu with its centralisation.  It receives, so to speak, an abstract religious character; it separates itself in the first instance from daily life, and then absorbs the latter by becoming, strictly speaking, its proper business.  The consequences for the future were momentous.  The Mosaic “congregation” is the mother of the Christian church; the Jews were the creators of that idea.

We may compare the cultus in the olden time to the green tree which grows up out of the soil as it will and can; later it becomes the regularly shapen timber, ever more artificially shaped with square and compass.  Obviously there is a close connection between the qualitative antithesis we have just been expounding and the formal one of law and custom from which we set out.  Between “naturaliter ea quae legis sunt facere” ["do instinctively what the law requires” Romans 2:14 NRSV] and “secundum legem agere” there is indeed a more than external