It was made of shittim or cedar wood, overlaid with plates of pure gold. On this altar a censer full of incense poured forth its fragrant clouds every morning and evening; and yearly as the day of atonement came round, when the high priest entered the holy of holies, he filled a censer with live coals from the sacred fire on the altar of burnt-offerings, and bore it into the sanctuary, where he threw upon the burning coals the "sweet incense beaten small," which he had brought in his hand. Without this smoking censer he was forbidden, on pain of death, to enter into the awful shrine of Jehovah. Notwithstanding the washing of his flesh, and the linen garments with which he was clothed, he dare not enter the holiest of all with the blood of atonement, unless he could personally shelter himself under a cloud of incense. The ingredients of the holy incense are described with great precision in Exodus: "Take unto thee sweet spices, stacte, and onycha, and galbanum; these sweet spices with pure frankincense of each shall there be a like weight: and thou shalt make of it a perfume, a confection after the art of the apothecary, tempered together, pure and holy." This mixture was to be pounded into very small particles, and deposited as a very holy thing in the tabernacle, before the ark of the testimony, so that there might be a store of it always in readiness. According to Rabbinical tradition, a priest or Levite, one of the fifteen prefects of the temple, was retained, whose special duty it was to prepare this precious compound; and a part of the temple was given. up to him for his use as a laboratory, called, from this

circumstance, "the house of Abtines." So precious and holy was this incense considered, that it was forbidden to make a similar perfume for private use on pain of death.

It has been supposed by some writers that incense was invented for the purpose of concealing or neutralizing the noxious effluvia caused by the number of beasts slaughtered every day in the sanctuary. Other writers have attached a mystical import to it, and believed that it was a symbol of the breath of the world arising in praise to the Creator, the four ingredients of which it was composed representing the four elements. While a third class, looking upon the tabernacle as the palace of God, the theocratic King of Israel, and the ark of the covenant as His throne, regarded the incense as merely corresponding to the perfume so lavishly employed about the person and appointments of an Oriental monarch. It may doubtless have been intended primarily to serve these purposes and convey these meanings, but it derived its chief importance in connection with the ceremonial observances of the Mosaic ritual, from the fact of its being the great symbol of prayer. It was offered at the time when the people were in the posture and act of devotion; and their prayers were supposed to be presented to God by the priest, and to ascend to Him in the smoke and odour of that fragrant offering. Scripture is full of allusions to it, understood in this beautiful symbolical sense. Acceptable, prevailing prayer was a sweet-smelling savour to the Lord; and prayer that was unlawful, or hypocritical, or unprofitable, was rejected

"Incense is an abomi

with disgust by the organ of smell. nation to me," said the Lord to the rebellious Jews in the days of Isaiah. We are told that when the children of Israel murmured against Moses and Aaron, on account of the awful death of Korah and his associates, Aaron took, at the command of Moses, a censer, and put fire therein from off the altar, and put on incense, and standing between the living and the dead, swinging his censer, he made an atonement for the people, so that the plague was stayed. And Malachi, predicting the universal spread of Jehovah's worship, sums up that worship under the symbol of incense : "And in every place incense shall be offered unto my name, and a pure offering; for my name shall be great among the heathen, saith the Lord of hosts." Doubtless the Jews felt, when they saw the soft white clouds of fragrant smoke rising slowly from the altar of incense, as if the voice of the priest were silently but eloquently pleading in that expressive emblem in their behalf. The association of sound was lost in that of smell, and the two senses were blended in one. And this symbolical mode of supplication, as Dr. George Wilson has remarked, had this one advantage over spoken or written prayer, that it appealed to those who were both blind and deaf, a class that are usually shut out from social worship by their affliction. Those who could not hear the prayers of the priest could join in devotional exercises symbolized by incense, through the medium of their sense of smell; and the hallowed impressions shut out by one avenue were admitted to the mind and heart by another.

The altar of incense stood in the closest connection with the altar of burnt-offerings. The blood of the sinoffering was sprinkled on the horns of both on the great day of annual atonement. Morning and evening, as soon as the sacrifice was offered, the censer poured forth its fragrant contents; so that the perpetual incense within ascended simultaneously with the perpetual burntoffering outside. Without the live coals from off the sacrificial altar, the sacred incense could not be kindled ; and without the incense previously filling the holy place, the blood of atonement from the altar of burnt-offering could not be sprinkled on the mercy-seat. Beautiful and expressive type of the perfect sacrifice and the allprevailing intercession of Jesus-of intercession founded upon atonement, of atonement preceded and followed by intercession! Beautiful and expressive type too of the prayers of believers kindled by the altar-fire of Christ's sacrifice, and perfumed by his merits! No fitter symbols could the Apostle John find to describe the services of the upper sanctuary, even though in his day the symbolic dispensation was waxing old and passing away. The temple opened in heaven was a counterpart of the old temple of Jerusalem; and the four-and-twenty elders clothed in white, who sat around the throne of God, and represented the church of all time, held in the one hand harps, and in the other golden vials full of odours which are the prayers of saintsmusic and incense, audible sound, and visible vapour and invisible fragrance—eye, ear, and nostril—mingling together, and uniting in the fullest expression and

highest ideal of worship. Nor was this symbol altogether an arbitrary one. There was a fitness in the nature of things in incense being regarded as an embodied prayer. Perfume is the breath of flowers, the sweetest expression of their inmost being, an exhalation of their very life. It is a sign of perfect purity, health, and vigour; it is a symptom of full and joyous existence; for disease, and decay, and death yield not pleasant but revolting odours. And, as such, fragrance is in nature what prayer is in the human world. Prayer is the breath of life, the expression of the soul's best, holiest, and heavenliest aspirations: the symptom and token of its spiritual health, and right and happy relations with God. The natural counterparts of the prayers that rise from the closet and the sanctuary are to be found in the delicious breathings, sweetening all the air, from gardens of flowers, from clover crofts, or thymy hill-sides, or dim pine-woods, and which seem to be grateful, unconscious acknowledgments from the heart of nature for the timely blessings of the great world-covenant; dew to refresh and sunshine to quicken.

But not in the incense of prayer alone were perfumes employed in the Old Testament economy. The oil with which the altars and the sacred furniture of the tabernacle and temple were anointed-with which priests were consecrated for their holy service, and kings set apart for their lofty dignity—was richly perfumed. It was composed of two parts of myrrh, two parts of cassia, one part cinnamon, and one part sweet calamus, with a sufficient quantity of the purest olive oil to give it the

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