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Updated: June 23, 2025
Its incense rises in every clime, as from one vast altar dedicated to its worship, before which ancient holocausts, the smoke of burnt-offerings in the old Jewish rites, the censers of the Church, and the joss-sticks of the East, must "pale their ineffectual fires."
We have now reached the point where divisions arise, where religion branches out into religions. "Wherewith shall I come before Jehovah, and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings, with calves a year old? Will Jehovah be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Here were ingenuous worshippers preserving a form of observance as primitive as the burnt-offerings before a god of bronze or wood. They went to church and placated their god, and swore they believed certain things the acts of their lives repudiated. They made a festival at Christmas time and worshipped at the manger and declared God had come to dwell among men.
They seemed addressed less to the God of mercy, to the Son who listens to prayer, than to the inflexible Father, to Him whom the Old Testament shows us, overcome with anger, scarcely appeased by the smoke of the pyres, the inconceivable attractions of burnt-offerings.
Suppose a private man offer a burnt-offering, he must slay either a bull, a lamb, or a kid of the goats, and the two latter of the first year, though of bulls he is permitted to sacrifice those of a greater age; but all burnt-offerings are to be of males.
And Noah built an altar to Jehovah and took one of every beast and bird that was fit for sacrifice and offered burnt-offerings on the altar. And Jehovah said to himself, "I will never again condemn the ground because of man, nor will I again destroy every living creature, as I have done.
Fifthly, even in the orthodox Jahveh-worship, some symbols, as the twelve oxen in the porch of the temple, the horns of the altar for burnt-offerings, perhaps also the in part oxlike form of the cherubim, point to an earlier worship of the deity under the form of an ox, the symbol of the highest might, especially among the Semitic races.
Burnt-offerings and peace-offerings differed mainly in the use made of the sacrifice, which was wholly consumed by fire in the former, while it was in part eaten by the offerer in the latter. The one symbolised entire consecration; the other, communion with God on the basis of sacrifice.
The priests were to have the charge of the sanctuary and the altar, which being once kindled the priest was always to keep it burning. In later times, and upon extraordinary occasions, at least, they flayed the burnt-offerings and killed the Passover.
"The nuns chosen by our Lord," replied the abbé, "as victims of expiation, as whole burnt-offerings, are in fact few, and they are generally, especially in this age, obliged to unite and coalesce in order to bear without failing the weight of misdeeds which try them, for in order that a soul may bear alone the assaults of Satan, which are often terrible, it must be indeed assisted by the angels and elect of God."
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