peace-offerings, meat-offerings, and sin-offerings, the consecrated cakes and animals for sacrifice, the rites for cleansing leprosy and all uncleanliness, the grand atonements and solemn fasts and festivals,—­all were calculated to make a strong impression on a superstitious people.  The rites and ceremonies of the Jews were so attractive that they made up for all other amusements and spectacles; they answered the purpose of the Gothic churches and cathedrals of Europe in the Middle Ages, when these were the chief attractions of the period.  There is nothing absurd in ritualism among ignorant and superstitious people, who are ever most easily impressed through their senses and imagination.  It was the wisdom of the Middle Ages,—­the device of popes and bishops and abbots to attract and influence the people.  But ritualism—­useful in certain ages and circumstances, certainly in its most imposing forms, if I may say it—­does not seem to be one of the peculiarities of enlightened ages; even the ritualism of the wilderness lost much of its hold upon the Jews themselves after their captivity, and still more when Greek and Roman civilization had penetrated to Jerusalem.  The people who listened to Peter and Paul could no longer be moved by imposing rites, even as the European nations—­under the preaching of Luther, Knox, and Latimer—­lost all relish for the ceremonies of the Middle Ages.  What, then, are we to think of the revival of observances which lost their force three hundred years ago, unless connected with artistic music?  It is music which vitalizes ritualistic worship in our times, as it did in the times of David and Solomon.  The vitality of the Jewish ritual, when the nation had emerged from barbarism, was in its connections with a magnificent psalmody.  The Psalms of David appeal to the heart and not to the senses.  The ritualism of the wilderness appealed to the senses and not to the heart; and this was necessary when the people had scarcely emerged from barbarism, even as it was deemed necessary amid the turbulence and ignorance of the tenth century.

In the ritualism which Moses established there was the absence of everything which would recall the superstitions and rites, or even the doctrines, of the Egyptians.  In view of this, we account partially for the almost studied reticence in respect to a future state, upon which hinged many of the peculiarities of Egyptian worship.  It would have been difficult for Moses to have recognized the future state, in the degrading ignorance and sensualism of the Jews, without associating with it the tutelary deities of the Egyptians and all the absurdities connected with the doctrine of metempsychosis, which consigned the victims of future punishment to enter the forms of disgusting and hideous animals, thereby blending with the sublime doctrine of a future state the most degrading superstitions.  Bishop Warburton seizes on the silence of Moses respecting a future state to prove, by a learned yet sophistical