" The swine … he is unclean to you. Of their flesh shall ye not eat, and their carcass shall ye not touch. Lev. 11:7, 8.

There was perhaps nothing more strictly forbidden to the Jewish people than the use of swine’s flesh. Apart from the ceremonial purpose to which God had subjected them "for our sakes," much has been made of the hygienic profit of abstaining from that food. Be that as it may, there was, we believe, a purpose in it for the Jews, which far outstrips the hygienic, and is correspondingly of importance to us.

The nations all around them, then as now, greatly relished that food, and made large use of it. But Israel had been called out from them to be a witness to the one true God amid all those idolaters. They were not to mingle with them at all, lest they should become like them and fall back into idolatry too. What a help, therefore, to keep separate, the being forbidden to eat of this most common food would be to them! What embarrassment, in a way, if a Gentile had been made a friend of, to be unable to offer him any of his cherished food! for they were not only to abstain from eating it themselves, but also from touching it. What a constant fear it would produce if there was an inclination to mingle with them, lest a piece of swine should be put upon the table, and the poor Jew, out of his proper place, have to partake of that against his conscience, or suffer ridicule for his bigotry and narrowness! Thus God made barriers for the protection of His poor, weak people, so easily betrayed into false paths, inconsistent with their calling.

And to us Christians, partakers of the heavenly calling, whom God has separated for Himself forever, who are not of the world, as Christ is not of the world, what a help it is to us to be forbidden the world's food! The word of God is our food-our God-appointed food from the Red Sea to Jordan, from start to finish. But it is not what the world relishes. If they invite us to their house or come into ours, and find only our food and the ways of life it produces, they will soon weary of us, and allow the line of demarcation between us and them to be established and well defined.

If we, through weakness, become entangled with them, and find their principles, their affections, their ways, to be what is not permitted to us, it will smite conscience and turn our feet again to our proper place and path.

How immensely important, then, the ceremonial was to the Jew! How immensely important its significance to us! May we hide it in our hearts, and thank God for His tender care.

Rationalism.

The writer cannot close this short introduction to the book without expressing the effect which the discovery of the perfectness and divinely ordered connection of the Scriptures produces in his mind as respects what is called Rationalism. Nothing is proved by the system so denominated but the total absence of all divine intelligence; a poverty associated with intellectual pretension; an absence of moral judgment; a pettiness of observation on what is external, with a blindness to divine and infinite fulness in the substance, which would be contemptible through its false pretensions if it were not a subject of pity because of those in whom these pretensions are found. None but God can deliver from the pride of human pretension. But the haughtiness which excludes God because it is incompetent to discover Him, and then talks of His work and meddles with His weapons according to the measure of its own strength, can prove nothing but its own contemptible folly. Ignorance is generally confident, because it is ignorant; and such is the mind of man in dealing with the things of God.-J. N. D., in Preface to Synopsis of the Books of the Bible.