OGICAl St ’'* 1 b%0 .S3 S 4 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/sacrificeitspropOOscot SACRIFICE ITS PROPHECY AND FULFILMENT THE BAIRD LECTURE 1892-93 Printed by AY 6° R. Clark FOR DAVID DOUGLAS, EDINBURGH LONDON . . SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT AND CO. CAMBRIDGE . . MACMILLAN AND BOWES GLASGOW . . JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS LIM. SACRIFICE ITS PROPHECY AND FULFILMENT THE BAIRD LECTURE FOR 1892-93 BY ARCHIBALD SCOTT, D.D. MINISTER OF ST. GEORGE’S, EDINBURGH AUTHOR OF ‘ BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY : A PARALLEL AND A CONTRAST ’ EDINBURGH DAVID DOUGLAS, 10 CASTLE STREET 1894 All rights reserved TO Congregation of (forge’s TO WHOM MANY IDEAS IN THESE LECTURES MUST BE FAMILIAR THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED IN GRATEFUL RECOGNITION OF THEIR GENEROUS SYMPATHY BY THEIR MINISTER PREFACE Were I to name all the authors to whom I have been indebted for material assistance in the preparation of the following lectures, I should require a very large list. The theme was suggested more than thirty years ago by Archbishop Trench’s Hulsean Lectures (1846) upon “ Christ the Desire of all Nations, or, the Un¬ conscious Prophecies of Heathendom.” That work powerfully impressed me at the time, and it has given direction to much of my reading ever since. It sent me to study the “ EvayyeXi/cr} npo7rapao-/cevr)” of Eusebius and other works of the early fathers of the Church; to admire and profit by the vast stores of information available in the magnificent folios of English scholars like Spencer, Selden, Lightfoot, and Warburton, and so it prepared me to welcome with thankfulness the ever multiplying literature which the study of Comparative Peligion has produced in our generation. I am not ashamed to confess that the great world of belief and thought represented by the 5 Ylll SACRIFICE Pre-Christian and Non -Christian religions has always had for me a peculiar attraction : “ Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum putoT 1 It should be no surprise to any one to discover that our religion is not marked off and differentiated from all other religions by hard lines of antagonism. It is indeed as distinct from, and as superior to heathenism, as the mountain is unlike to and is above the plain; but Christianity so reaches down to heathenism, and heathenism so aspires towards Christianity that it is difficult sometimes to say where the plain ends and the mountain begins. This is just what the bounder of our religion and its earliest Apostolic interpreters instructed us to expect. Christianity is a Divine revelation to humanity as a whole ; its fundamental truth is the organic unity of the human race; and its Divine pur¬ pose is the reconciliation of all things unto God by His Son. This revelation is given to us through One who is essentially Divine and thoroughly human. One who manifests not God and man, but God in man, and man in God; God-Man so truly one, that Man thinks only what God knows, does only what God wills, and desires only what God delights in. “ I and the Fatliei are one.” 2 No believer in the Gospel truth of the unity of humanity, and in God’s purpose of “reconciling all 1 Terence, Eeauton act i. scene 1, line 25. 2 John x. 30. PREFACE IX things unto Himself by Christ,” need be alarmed at the application, even to religion, of the modern theory of evolution. Like all new theories it is unfortunate in many of its expounders, who find in it only another weapon for running a tilt against “the faith.” As rightly apprehended, however, the word evolution de¬ scribes only a method and not an originating prin¬ ciple. Evolution creates nothing; but creation may proceed through evolution. Evolution at best only explains the ways in which the Creative mind or spirit works, and discloses the stages through which the creative purpose is displayed. 1 The theory is not incompatible with Scripture, which traces the principle of the unity of the world to where modern philosophy under different terms has found it, in the intelligence and will of Deity. Moreover, the idea suggested by it seems to be kindred to, and to follow naturally from, the idea of the unity of humanity. If it be a fact that God “ hath made of one blood all nations of men,” 2 or that God “ made of one every nation of men,” 3 then it follows that humanity everywhere will testify to or manifest its Divine Original. As matter of fact, humanity does not manifest Him uniformly or always in the same degree. In its lowest grade, that in which he is nearest to the animal, man exhibits traces of 1 Martineau, Essays, Reviews, and Addresses, vol. iv. p. 257. 2 Acts xvii. 26. 3 Revised Version. x SACRIFICE what is divine: but it is not in that grade, but in the very highest—that in which humanity is seen at its divinest — that there is clearly disclosed what man originally was designed to be. The creative ideal of humanity is thus revealed in Christ, and in that “ image,” after that “ likeness,” God in this period of the history of the universe is creating man anew, through spiritual regeneration, from a very evil con¬ dition. When we consider the facts disclosed in that condition, we find that no other term than “ regenera¬ tion ” can adequately suggest the Divine process: and it seems strange that some who would discard the term from theology, appropriate it in sociology as the only one adequate to describe special human improvement and unexpected national revival. 1 So without accept¬ ing or rejecting the theory of evolution in religion, we may regard it without anxiety. Instead of being another difficulty to faith, it may prove to be a real aid to faith. For it may suggest the method whereby the Almighty and Omniscient Worker—whose “ years are throughout all generations,” and whose working is not confined to what goes on in this world—will eventually realise His eternal purpose, and prove that 1 For example, we read of “re- these changes, we are witnesses of naissance ” in art or literature, of an outflow of the same creative the “regeneration” of society, spirit which in Christ is recreat- and, as in the case of Italy, of the ing the race, and is making all “ resurrection ” of a nation; yet things new. in the light of Providence, in all PREFACE XI in spite of man’s present evil condition God has not made man for nought.” In any case, in Christ, towards whose advent “ all the movement of the ancient world had been converg¬ ing” and from whose advent “all the modern world has O’ started,” 1 we have the pledge that however appalling may be the present evil condition of the human race, the most perplexing of the Divine dealings with mankind 01 rather the seeming lack of Divine dealing—will be justi¬ fied by their adaptations and effects when seen in the light of a completed dispensation. To those who believe that God is immanent in, and is divinely directing human¬ ity, the life and death of Christ at first appear to be the most inexplicable of mysteries. Christ s experience of human life"seems to indicate the existence of no benign Providence, or if so, of a Providence not regnant as they expected, but defeated and baffled. And yet when contemplated from the standpoint of Christ, we find that out of this greatest darkness of human history lio-ht has arisen, in which the Crucifixion is disclosed as the guarantee of Divine victory in the redemption of humanity. It is not the horror but the glory of the Cross that now fills our souls. In that most appalling exhibition of human cruelty and guilt, we find the grandest manifestation of Divine benignity and power. We have revealed in it the real relation of the Creator 1 Prof. Edward Caird, The Evolution of Religion, vol. ii. p. 266. Xll SACRIFICE to the evil that is in His universe; for we learn from it that if God was to he in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, He could not be in Him in any other fashion. It behoved Christ thus to suffer, and in the increasing light which is being shed upon us by that death, and by Christ’s resurrection and ascension, we feel that everything inexplicable in Providence has its meaning, and especially that our poor diseased, corrupt humanity is quietly but surely being restored and healed by One who has a balm for its every wound. These lectures represent a humble but earnest en¬ deavour to exhibit a little of the significance and pur¬ pose of the Mission and Passion of Christ, as disclosed by their adaptation to the religious necessities of man¬ kind. They are not meant to form a treatise either upon sacrifice in general, or upon the system of Hebrew sacrifice in particular. Into discussions as to the sym¬ bolic and typical import of the Hebrew system of sacrifice they do not enter, for I accept the interpreta¬ tion given of the religious institutions of the previous economy by the writers of the Old and Hew Testaments. I have simply attempted to sketch, in popular language, that is, language plain and free from scientific and technical terms, the essential ideas underlying and sug¬ gested by the most prominent forms of sacrifice in all grades of religion that we are acquainted with, from the lowest to the highest. My object has been to show PREFACE Xill that the desires and beliefs of man at his best, in an} and in all stages of religions experience, are really prophecies; and that these prophecies have found, and are increasingly finding, their fulfilment in Christ. He is satisfying the desires of every living man. By the “ once offering up ” of Himself for our salvation, He has abolished the necessity for material sacrifices and offerings, and yet, by drawing us into fellowship with His sufferings for us, He is rendering imperative to the love in us which His own love has evoked, the per¬ petual thank-offering of our holy living selves to God. So what seemed for long only a means devised to secure a great and worthy end, is discovered by those who be¬ lieve in Christ and rest upon Him alone for salvation, to be the highest end of all. For the rule or example of Christ’s life is the moral law of the Christian, and this moral law, originating in the being and blessedness of God, is essential and absolute sacrifice. Very likely I have failed in my object; indeed I am painfully conscious of the defects of my work, which has had to be done in such intervals as could be snatched from a very busy professional life; but surely it is well to have tried. And so, thankful for the oppoitunity, I venture to send the lectures forth, in the hope that they may help to bring into the lives of otlieis some¬ thing of the comfort which I have experienced in preparing them. XIV SACRIFICE I record my heartiest thanks to my friend Mr. Campbell of Stracathro, who has generously rendered very valuable assistance in correcting and revising the proofs. ARCHIBALD SCOTT. Edinburgh, 14 th December 1893. CONTENTS LECTURE I Introductory The crucifixion of Christ the most outstanding fact in history The purity and sublimity of Christ’s character admitted—He is there¬ fore unique, and His mission is exceptional—His own conception of Himself and His mission—His method was sacrificially to give His life a ransom for many—The history of humanity before His advent an unconscious prediction of Him—Sacrifice universal in religion, belief in its efficacy ineradicable, and therefore may be regarded instinctive—The instinct to sacrifice is a typical, a prophetic ele¬ ment—Questions as to the origin of sacrifice and rationale of sacri¬ fice—Leading theories of Spencer, Mede, Sykes, and Warburton referred to ; but these are of subordinate importance if it be the fact that sacrifice is an action as natural to man as is prayer, springing from the fountain of religion—The constituents of religion ; sense of dependence, reverence, but the sense of affinity with Deity, though often overlooked, is also universal in religion—Difference between belief in this affinity, in the religions of nature, and the faith expressed in the Bible—The aim of religion by means of prayer and sacrifice to improve relations with Deity into communion and fellowship—Nowhere evidence that fearless communion with Deity has been realised, even in Genesis represented as broken ; religion and sacrifice intended to reknit it—Our purpose to sketch the salient features of sacrifice in all religions—In the aim or intention of the sacrificer we get the type or the prophecy of sacrifice—In the dis¬ pensation of grace, humanity is the unit—What was revealed to the Jew was revealed for the Gentile—Analogies between Jewish and XVI SACRIFICE Gentile sacrifices not so frequent nor so significant as their con¬ trasts—Some of these contrasts noted—The chief contrast is the fact that heathen sacrifices represent the endeavour of man to concili¬ ate Deity, and sacrifice is represented in Scripture as a divinely appointed means of grace whereby Jehovah seeks to save man— These contrasts indicate a providential training of one people for the sake of all mankind—The mystery of the election of the Jew, matched by the fact that the most degraded of Gentiles were maintained in their capacity to receive the Divine revelation of redemption when communicated to them—Illustrations of this to be given in the succeeding lectures . . . Pages 1-56 LECTURE II Sacrifice as exhibited in Animism and in Lower Polytheism The terms savage, barbarian, civilised, applied to different sections of mankind, only relative—In civilisation are found many survivals of barbarism furnishing a rich vein for interesting research—The study of savage rites and beliefs not useless, but important and valuable—Difficulty of ascertaining them—A savage’s religion a “ mystery ” in the classical use of the word—His mental condition renders him unable satisfactorily to account for his “customs” —His religion best described by the term Animism—Definition of Animism—The aim of a savage to protect himself against invisible and dangerous powers by his fetish — Fetishism, Shamanism, not religions, though recognising rites and even sacrifice, but wholly based upon magic or sorcery and practised in self- defence—The real religion of a savage is rooted in another belief, expressed by different customs—All comprehended under the term Totemism—Origin of Totemism yet unsolved—Mr. Frazer’s hypothesis explained—Totemism as a phase of religion described — Specified animals, different in different clans, sacred, and for the same reason that a clansman is sacred—The blood in its veins is believed to be identical with that of the clan— If not a god in the estimation of a clan, it is divine as the living nexus between the clan and the god—The slighest insult or injury done to it sacrilege—Yet there are occasions when it may be slaughtered though divine, and there are others when it must be sacrificed because it is divine—It must die for the clan to reinforce the life of the clan, yea to preserve all things from death—On such occasions there is always sacramental communion CONTENTS XVII in its flesli and blood—These sacrifices annually connected with the purgation of the land from all the evils of the year Under most horrible and revolting rites, traces of beliefs which, if not typical, can be utilised for communicating to the most degraded savages the loftiest religious truths—But the savage not the type of heathendom, he rather represents its residuum—Above him there is an ascending series of humanity, the highest representing great culture—Value of the study of the Mexican and Peruvian religions as illustrating the religion of Europe, Asia, Egypt, in ancient prehistoric ages—Superior to Animism—Worship of the most imposing physical forces and phenomena personified not in zoomorphic, but anthropomorphic forms — Human sacrifice ac¬ counted for by the old animistic belief—Victims offered because divine, or because transubstantiated into divinities ; also sacra¬ mentally partaken of,—“ The god who is eaten ”—Peruvian ritual purer ; worship of the sun ; the theocracy of the Inca ; animal sacrifice daily ; human sacrifices on rare occasions—Crowning act of religion—Sacramental communion of the Inca with his court, then with the whole people once a year in sacred cakes and liquor —The Peruvian vestal virgins or nuns — Astonishment of the Spaniards at these and other resemblances to their own religious institutions—Application to our subject . . Pages 57-108 LECTURE III Sacrifice as Exhibited in Higher Polytheism Religions superior to Mexican and Peruvian ; represented by immense literatures containing the history, philosophy, and theology of peoples very ancient—In them the history of religious thought not shown to be always one of progress—Diversity of opinion as to their actual antiquity, and the relative antiquity of their several parts Notably the case in regard to the Vedas, Avestas, and so-called sacred books of Chaldea ; danger of employing them in support of any theory as to the origin and growth of religious conceptions ; yet all very valuable as exhibiting very ancient and widespread beliefs and practices—In all, sacrifice is an essential part of wor¬ ship, yet in none of them is it a means of grace—A device, for securing self-advancement—In Persia and China offering of saciifice limited only to the good—In most of them sacrificial slaughter not extravagant—Explanation of this—Belief in transmigration, and in that of the infusion of the divine soul into animals Indian XV111 SACRIFICE beliefs akin to Egyptian—Indian belief in efficacy of self-torture deeply rooted ; how accounted for—In polytheism of higher types, always two religions—Along with the popular religion, an esoteric faith, the religion of the thoughtful—Sacrificial worship of an ancient Brahman householder described—Its highest action or function, communion with the gods in the enlightening Soma sacrifice—Shraddha or funeral rites described—Difference between the ancient Iranian sacrifices and the Indian—In Iran sacrifice not so much an act of worship as a service rendered in extending the kingdom of Ah ura—Sacrifice of no use to atone or expiate sin according to the Avesta—The highest sacrificial ceremony in China described ; sacramental communion of the living with the departed in the Hall of Ancestors—Egyptian religion attractive because greatly concerned with what of human life lies beyond death—The Book of the Dead—Sinister influence exercised by the Egyptian religion upon the development of Christian theology and ritual—• Powerful influence of Egypt upon Rome, and especially Greece —The higher religion of Greece expressed in “the mysteries "— In all these religions no atoning efficacy in sacrifice in our sense of the word—Sacrifice piacular to affect the working of the cosmos, and in the stage of belief represented by the many forms of Baal worship, to appease or keep friendly deities who would rather injure than help men—Revolt of the higher minds of Greece from such conceptions—The gods of iEschylos and Sophocles, strict guardians of justice—Belief in the retributive law symbolised in the Erinnyes, co-existing with faith in the efficacy of sacrifice to atone for blood-guiltiness—How the Erinnyes would become to the suppliant the Eumenides — Impossible for man to work out his own redemption—Plato’s conception—His approach to Christianity —In what sense he and many others may be called -rrcudaycoyol ds 'Kpuxrov ..... Pages 109-177 LECTURE IV Sacrifice as exhibited in the Hebrew Bible—Patriarchal and Mosaic Sacrifice The relation of the Gospel to the Law an illustration of the relation of Old Testament to the higher religions of polytheism—Old Testa¬ ment refines what of other religions it has assumed—Coincidences between traditions and ceremonies in other religions with those CONTENTS xix described in Old Testament undeniable—Yet the Old Testament is original in regard to the use to which materials that are common to all are put—Bible as we have it begins at a higher point than other religions ever reached—The best minds in some of them attained to pantheism, even theism—Bible starts with monotheism, and every tradition and every rite is utilised to express or enforce or illustrate ethical or spiritual truth—The Sabbath an illustration ; also sacrifice, which, taken for granted as a natural part of reli¬ gion gets quite a new significance — A divinely appointed or sanctioned means of grace — Of one form of sacrifice recorded in Genesis it may be said “ The Lord sanctified and blessed it”— Abel’s sacrifice in faith contrasted with Cain’s “heathen’’one— Noah’s sacrifice explained—First mention of a Divine “covenant” ; the word anthropomorphic, but the idea to be suggested by it is spiritual — Co-operation of Divine and human agency required in evolving a scheme of redemption from the primeval curse—Series of “covenants” recorded—Their design to instruct man that redemption can only be obtained by trustful surrender to Divine will, and by hearty acceptance of the Divine method—Covenant with Abraham—Its seal and pledge, circumcision—Heathen circum¬ cision contrasted with the Hebrew rite—The test of Abraham’s fidelity to the covenant in the sacrifice of his son—How in the light shed on it by the Gospel it fits in naturally with this stage in the history of revelation—The covenant with the nation, in Egypt; its seal the passover — Heathen and Biblical passovers differentiated—The passover only an inauguration of the Covenant ceremonial; its conclusion at Sinai after the giving of “the Law ” —The Covenant sacramental feast—The aim of the Covenant, to constitute the holy nation for the blessing of all mankind— New Testament interpretation of the Passover and Covenant sacrifices ...... Pages 178-230 LECTURE Y Sacrifice as exhibited in the Hebrew Bible—Mosaic and Levitical Sacrifice The legislation generally described as Mosaic in the Pentateuch can only in regard to fundamentals be ascribed to the Mosaic Age— Leviticus as we now have it, a late production, the work not of one man nor of one age, but the outcome of the experience of XX SACRIFICE many generations—It must have been built, however, on some very archaic institutions—Theory formulated in the Pentateuch that the prophet of the religion of Jehovah laid the foundations of the publicworship of Israel in a sanctuary, priesthood, and sacrificial ritual, a reasonable one—The institutions were all required for the maintenance of the covenant—All such as Moses could originate and provide out of such resources as the tribes then commanded —All as now described founded on monotheist beliefs, and designed to guard against tendency to physiolatry and polytheism—Differ¬ ence between the tabernacle and Egyptian temples—Description of the tabernacle, its intention or design clearly indicated by its designations and by the symbolism of its construction, furniture, and uses—The New Testament interpretation of its typical import — The priesthood no graft from the religion of Egypt, though idea probably suggested by it—The development of the priesthood and the Levitical order in Israel according to Scripture was gradual—Its original intention essentially contrasted with that of the Egyptian priesthood ; designed not to fence off, but to draw the people near to Jehovah—A priest in Israel only holy because of his consecration to office—This clearly indicated by the ceremonials for the ordination of the priests and of the high priest and for “the purification of the sons of Levi”—Failure of the priest¬ hood to fulfil the ideal of their vocation—Application of this fact by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews—The sacrificial system described in the Pentateuch as essentially symbolic, based upon confession of sin, repentance, desire for reconciliation—The inten¬ tion of the authors of the last edition of Pentateuch to represent it as the natural development of patriarchal worship, and as acceptable only when offered in the spirit of Abel, Noah, and Abraham—Founded in belief in necessity for atonement; blood peculiarly sacrosanct ; its application a symbol well understood —A sacrifice described—Different kinds of sacrifices explained ; the root idea in all the same—Necessity for atonement emphasised in the sin and trespass offerings ; their significance and intention explained — All that Levitical religion could effect or embody summed up in the ‘ ‘ Day of Atonements ”—Description in Leviticus of its ceremonial refers to a late period in the history of Israel, but the day and its peculiar rites very ancient—Description of the ceremonial in its most salient, symbolic, and typical features ; peculiar application of the blood of the sin offerings ; the sending away of the other half of the sacrifice—La Azazel—Special feature in all cases of atoning sacrifice—That atonement was not demanded from the tribes, but provided for them and given to them by CONTENTS xxi Jehovah—A Divine suggestion therefore of the way by which a broken covenant might he renewed . . Pages 231-290 LECTURE VI The Prophecy of Sacrifice fulfilled in Christ Sacrificial worship even when used in faith as a means of grace could only have pacified the conscience in a certain stage of experience —The ritual, manifestly insufficient, pointed forward to a more satisfying faith—Indications of this more frequent in the teaching of the prophets ; all these connected with belief in the Messiah— First gleams of Messianic hope in Genesis ; clearest in the call of Abraham—In Mosaic age the nation believed to be the Messiah in whom all were to be blessed—On the failure of the theocracy to fulfil the idea, the hope centred in a “ son of David ”—Monarchy proved as great a failure as the theocracy—Necessity for the Exile to purify and spiritualise “ the hope ”—The “ holy remnant ” ; its ideal personified in the “servant of Jehovah” — His prophet, but rejected, despised, bearing the sins of many—The influence of Isaiah in maturing the faith of John Baptist; his testimony to Jesus “ the Lamb of God ” given in the spirit and power of Isaiah —Christ’s testimony to Himself and His mission given in the spirit and power of the sacrificed “servant of Jehovah” — Baptist’s application of the whole atoning sacrificial system in one word to Jesus — Christ’s application of the sacrificial symbolism to Himself, but always with a far higher import than a Jew would have conceived—Instances in the Synagogue at Capernaum in the discourse upon “The bread of God” ; at the last passover, “Lo my body ! lo my blood shed for many ! —The fulfiller of the new covenant promised by Jeremiah—Christ’s faith alone explains His conduct which led to His capture, condemnation, crucifixion— Apostolic testimonies uniformly point to Christ the Divine sacrifice —St. Peter, St. Paul, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, St. John—The revelation of the Divine sacrifice summed up and com¬ pleted in “The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world ”— Distinction between the fact of the Divine sacrifice and the theories devised to explain it—Many theories may be required to account for it, but the life of the Church is nourished by faith in the fact—The revelation of the fact final, but its interpretation XXII SACRIFICE progressive and is still proceeding—Attempt to sketch the faith in the Divine sacrifice as held by the Church to-day after so many centuries of Divine teaching — I. The necessity for the sacrifice : the estrangement of the creature fallen from the holiness and blessedness of God the Creator, but in no case from the Creator’s faithfulness ; various relations in which God may be conceived as standing to man—Sovereign—Judge bound to main¬ tain universal order ; theories founded in these conceived relations true, as far as they go, but all inadequate—God also Creator and Father of the spirits of men, upon whom therefore the weight of their sin was sure to fall most heavily—The Divine sacrifice rooted in the faithful Creator’s love for His sinful creatures—II. The nature of that sacrifice : the Divine passion for sin as intoler¬ able ; the Holiest taking its burden—This fact in the eternal nature revealed in the mission and sacrifice of Christ—Suffering of no account in the sacrifices of the Law ; of primary import in the sacrifice of the Gospel—Christ’s sufferings what ? due to His sinlessness and to His sympathy — His agony and passion the culmination of His realisation of the significance of sin, heart¬ broken under the load—He alone knew what sin means, alone could confess it, alone feel its full weight and curse, alone could glorify God in His Divine condemnation of sin, and was glorified of God in consequence as the Redeemer of the race which He was not ashamed to call His brethren — III. The effect of the Divine sacrifice: “the remission of sin,” not of its penal consequences — Scripture meaning of forgiveness — Sin only remitted when covered, made an end of—Negative effect of the Divine sacrifice to condemn sin in the flesh, destroy the sinful impulse, to disclose sin as essentially unnatural and inhuman—Positive effect far more fully set forth in Christ’s discourses—Sacrifice as the motive and goal of true religion—The communication of His spirit, the law of His own life to all who believe in Him — Christ’s law of self- abnegation the moral law for all His followers—He that seeketh to save his life shall lose it, he that loseth shall find it unto eternal life—Gospel theory of life different from and more sublime than the theory of Altruism as popularly expounded — God’s love and God’s sacrifice the true source of living sacrifice in man— Thus salvation is sacrifice—Application of the whole subject— Postscript ..... Pages 291-372 LECTURE 1 INTRODUCTORY The dominant personality in humanity is Jesus Christ, and the most outstanding fact in history is His cruci¬ fixion. Ho other life has excited so great admiration and wonder, no other death has occasioned so prolonged and ardent controversy to account for its consequences. He had scarcely vanished from the gaze of men before His life began to be represented as that of a defeated religious reformer, whose death was simply a lament¬ able catastrophe marking the untimely end of one who had endeavoured, like many other martyrs, to “ fulfil great hopes at the wrong time, or in impracticable ways.” Yet after eighteen centuries of similar attempts to minimise their significance, the awe inspired by the life and death of Jesus is deeper than ever, and by in¬ creasing multitudes in each successive generation His cross is accepted as the symbol of their faith, and the divine pledge of their salvation. Although the discussion is still proceeding and in¬ deed is being waged with greater earnestness than ever B 2 SACRIFICE it has already yielded some very important results. For example, historical criticism has decided that Jesus as presented in the Gospels is no fiction. Whatever ques¬ tions may still be pending as to the structure of these narratives themselves, there is no longer any question as to the reality of their subject. Jesus, in the marvel¬ lous purity and sublimity of character there uncon¬ sciously delineated, is admitted to be a fact by even anti-Christian writers. The reverence of the unbe¬ lieving world for Jesus is steadily increasing. Now, when we consider the conditions of time and place under which Jesus appeared, the country, and especially the people from whom He was supposed to have sprung, we find that a vast deal is involved in this admission. It means that in a period of general corruption, of moral and religious declension which law and philosophy were powerless to arrest or remedy, one emerged from the prevailing depravity in the likeness of sinful flesh, who could confidently challenge the world to convict Him of a single fault or indiscretion. Characterised by no idiosyncrasy, for all the qualities that mark ideals of character were harmoniously exhibited in Him,—manlier than the bravest man, tenderer than the gentlest woman, —He confronted the world as a new type in whom there was neither “Jew nor Gentile, neither male nor female.” 1 Alone of all good men, who in proportion to their good¬ ness have invariably confessed their evil and deplored their hard struggle to do their duty, He felt no struggle, and owned to no defeat. Never did there 1 Galatians iii. 28. INTRODUCTORY 3 escape from His lips a single confession of sin, 01 one prayer for pardon for Himself*, and yet, though He acknowledged and felt no sin in Himself, the sins of others affected Him more grievously than they affected sinners themselves. As He grew in experience, sorrow for the sinfulness of others became a burden heavier than He could bear, for it involved Him in an agony unapproachable by all other human beings, and at last in a death due far less to the pangs of crucifixion than to the anguish of a broken heart . 1 A life so unique cannot be estimated by the measure of a man; it cannot be accounted for upon the prin¬ ciples by which we endeavour to explain human nature and history. Its exceptional character implies an exceptional origin. Life, like water, cannot rise highei than its source. If He were only the outgrowth of humanity the failings that are insepaiable fiom humanity would have manifested themselves in Him, so that while proving Himself to be the best of men, He would have shown Himself to be only a man at the best. When, however, we observe that the sinfulness universal in humanity could not touch Him, except in the way of causing Him unparalleled grief, we feel that we contemplate in Him a new phenomenon. He is no more the “ product of the age than the sun is the pro¬ duct of the darkness which it bursts and chases away. Nor is He the result and fruit of the best foices of 1 Cp. Dr. Stroud, The Physical Haughton, M.D., Church Quar- Cause of the Death of Christ . terly Review , January 1880, re- London: Hamilton and Adams, printed in The Speakers Com- ed. 1847, 1871. Rev. Samuel mentary on 1 John, pp. 349-50. 4 SACRIFICE human nature matured in a long series of antecedent ages.” Even after eighteen centuries of ever-enriching experience, no one expects humanity to produce such a man as Jesus of Nazareth. By universal confession He is far greater than the Church which He founded, transcending alike the imagination and the faith of His followers. He is still a fact which no science of man, no philosophy of history has accounted for. He is “ The Wonderful,” in truth the greatest wonder that has occurred in the world since the first appearance of man. Tried by the standards of the creatures beneath him, man is found to be the miracle of nature; for while he is all that nature beneath him is, he is what the most highly developed natural outgrowth, by no training, however patient and skilful, by no process of selection, however prolonged, has ever been observed to become. In like manner, when tried by the standard of man, Jesus Christ is the great miracle of humanity. Manifesting in our nature a holiness such as never was conceived by the purest imagination of the saints, He confronts us in the evolution of the Divine purpose not as a product of nature or humanity, but as a sign of transition or revolution, in reality an incarnation, through whom there is introduced into human history a higher standard of character and a new principle of life. When we examine into the significance and purpose of this miracle, and inquire what eternal interests were at stake in creation requiring the manifestation of Jesus, we get the answer not only reflected from His INTRODUCTORY 5 person, but uttered in His words, with unmistakable clearness. We learn at once that we have to do with no mere prophet or reformer who had been raised up to promote the education of men by correcting their errors and enlarging the spheres of their knowledge. He is, in the peculiar simplicity and sublimity of His faith—that is, of His absolute and loving surrender to God as His Father—a witness against man as he is. At the same time, in His peculiar holiness and power, He is a prophecy and pledge of what man may be. It is manifest that nowhere and at no point of his history has man realised the ideal of his nature. On the con¬ trary, both “ in himself and in society and in the out¬ ward world there is a hostile element ever working to warp and corrupt that ideal.” 1 Only potentially or ultimately can man be described as made “ in the image and after the likeness of God.” By whatever theory we endeavour to account for his present condition, it is undeniable that he requires supernatural aid to educate, ay, to keep him from decline. It is a fact of his natural life that, though conscious of a moral law, he breaks it upon the very first temptation, through his self- assertion to the corrupting or undoing of his original nature . 2 In Christ we learn how very far man is from being what man was meant to be, and from Christ we learn that if the original ideal is to be realised it must be through the surrender of our own work and will to the control of a will higher than ours. Man cannot grow into, he must be made in the image and after the 1 Colloquia Crucis, p. 48. 2 Driver, Sermons on Old Testament , p. 24. 6 SACRIFICE likeness of God. So Christ taught us that He came from our Creator His Father to undo our unmaking of ourselves. We are “lost,” and He had come to “find” us; we are in bondage, and He was seeking to deliver and redeem us ; we are diseased and perishing, and He was attempting to heal and “ save ” us. And this, not by relieving us from the necessary burdens of existence or from the consequences of our wrongdoing by improving the present world or by removing us to a better, but by working in us such a regeneration of character as would amount to a new creation, in which, reconciled with God, we should share the Divine life and enjoy His blessedness. The same clearness characterises His declarations of the method by which this purpose was to be effected. From the very outset He foresaw that His mission would involve Him in persecution, and finally in death upon the cross ; yet straight to the cross as to His proper goal He steadily travelled, conscious that in suffering upon it He would fulfil the very work which He came into the world to do. Instead, therefore, of referring to His crucifixion as a painful neces¬ sity which He must reluctantly endure, He uniformly pointed to it as a seal of His Messiahship. “ His death was something more in His own mind than the inevit¬ able consequence of His fidelity to the truth, and of His antagonism to the corruption of the times. It was His intention to die for men, because His death was neces¬ sary for human redemption.” 1 Therefore, Son of the 1 Dale, The Atonement , The Congregational Union Lecture for 1875, p. lv, Preface. INTRODUCTORY 7 Highest, He had come in the form and after the fashion in which He was manifested; voluntarily shorn of glory, emptied of fulness; not to rule, hut to obey ; not “ to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many.” 1 Christ’s testimony concerning the purpose of His mission appears to be consistent with its character and its close; while if it be discredited or rejected, His whole life, and especially His sufferings and death, re¬ main insoluble enigmas. Our chief difficulties with regard to the Sacrifice of Christ originate in our con¬ ceptions of Divine justice. That the innocent should suffer for the guilty would be a contradiction of the Divine righteousness, as expressed in the law— “ the soul that sinneth it shall die, but the righteous shall live by his righteousness.” 2 How that law is eternal, and it operates in Providence as unchangeably and inexorably as the law of gravitation in nature. The law of gravitation, however, like all natural laws, can only be properly understood in the light of the higher laws of the human or supernatural order, in which man can utilise natural laws to give stability and confirmation to works which he has produced in apparent contra¬ vention of them. In like manner, the law of retribu¬ tion, which governs our lives, must be interpreted by some other facts of the spiritual order to which we belong. For, while the sinner does suffer for his sin, it is manifest that he is not the only—or even the greatest—sufferer. It frequently happens that those 1 Mark x. 45. 2 Ezekiel xviii. 20. 8 SACRIFICE who have never been tempted to commit some special form of sin, and who have suffered no personal damage from its commission, are the most grievously affected by it. The very thought of such a sin may wound a pure and sensitive nature more keenly than any remorse which its perpetrator may experience, and any suffering which its immediate victim may endure. It is such suffering, wholly undeserved, that interprets, and is interpreted by, the sufferings of Christ. The fact is most patent that, notwithstanding His perfect sinless¬ ness, He was involved in an anguish for sin which has amazed every generation. Ho darkness that ever gathered round a sinner could be more profound than that which deepened down upon the well-beloved Son of God. Ho voice out of the misery of retributive punishment ever expressed desolation so utter as that which cried, “ My God, My God, why hast Thou for¬ saken Me.” If the law of retribution is the only law which reveals the justice of God, an insurmountable difficulty confronts us in the passion of Christ because of sin. The theory that He suffered to set us an example of patient endurance, does not solve the diffi¬ culty. Indeed it throws as dark a blot upon the justice of God as the theory which it would condemn ; for why should perfect innocence be afflicted just to teach or help the guilty to bear patiently the penalty of their guilt ? Whatever theories we weave or tear asunder, the fact remains that Christ did suffer more severely because of sin than sinners ever endured in it. And when we duly consider this fact, and think of the blessings that INTRODUCTORY 9 have accrued to humanity from these sufferings, His own teaching concerning their sacrificial significance will he found to he more reasonable than any of the theories which have been devised to explain that teach¬ ing away . 1 The testimony of Christ concerning His mission of redemption by the sacrifice of Himself, not only har¬ monises with the teaching of Holy Scripture, but also satisfies a universal and profound human want. The doctrine of His vicarious sacrifice need not be accepted as true just because it is found in the Bible. It is revealed in the Bible because it is true, and because it corresponds with the older revelation given in the nature which is common to all men. Though the leaves of that older revelation are soiled and defaced, they have not been destroyed; and their contents have been sufficiently deciphered to convince us that they were originally written by the finger of God. It is the accord of Christ’s revelation with universal human necessity and aspiration that stamps its divinity. Bor the real meaning of His vicarious sacrifice we must search deeper than in the testimonies of the doctors and fathers and even the Apostles of the Church. "We shall only discover it in the actual condition of man as related to the essential nature of God. It is because 1 The death of Christ has been jured the doctrine of its atoning described ‘ ‘ as the greatest moral efficacy, have continued to adore act which the world has ever it as the highest example ever seen”(Jowett, “Essay on Satisfac- given of self-immolating love. If, tion and Atonement,” Epistles of however, the idea of the vicarious St. Paul , ii. p. 550). So, indeed, sacrifice be rejected, the death it was, but some who have ab- becomes an act without any moral 10 SACRIFICE the sacrifice of Christ discloses in the being or character of God, facts that are indispensable to the purifying and pacifying of the human conscience, that He proves Himself to be the Saviour of the world and the only Redeemer of man . 1 Therefore, unto the manifestation of this Redeemer in time, “the unspeakable throes of humanity had been tending from the first”; and so we may expect to find, as we look back in the light of the event, indica¬ tions of a long course of preparation for it. All the dispensations of God, in a universe governed by law, submit to and follow a providentially ordered course, so that nothing happens by accident. God’s revelation of Himself, and of His redemptive purpose for man, has its history, which, like that of all things, matures and ripens in time. The words “ evolution ” in science, “ foreordination” in theology, probably suggest after all the same fact, viz., that every event implies a series of previous events, without which it could not have occurred. The manifestation of Christ was in accord with this general law. Miraculous, in the sense that it was unexpected, and inexplicable by experience, it was no violent interruption of providence. It was the fulfilment of a divine purpose at a period when a long course of preparation for it was completed. What significance. Self-immolation is and futile as it is when shown in not valuable—not even beautiful the self-torture and suicide of an —except when it promotes some Indian fakir .”—Colloquia Crucis, high moral and spiritual end not p. 71. otherwise to be attained. “Under 1 Trench, Hulsean Lectures , p. any other aspect it is as perverse 157. INTRODUCTORY 11 occurred in nature antecedently to the creation of man, suggests a possible analogy. The sciences of compara¬ tive anatomy and physiology have instructed us that the human body is the pattern form of the vertebrate division of animal existence, which nature, through fish and reptile and bird, strives upward to reach. So geology has disclosed in the records of the rocks some very ancient prophecies of man. The animal produc¬ tions of nature from the first exhibit typical references to one who is “ The king Of nature, in his person summing all Her attributes, as she throughout her vast Extension symbols his humanity.” 1 As the great prophecies of nature are all fulfilled in man, so we may confidently assert that Christ is the divine archetype towards whose manifestation Provi¬ dence in all previous dispensations was leading. The lines along which Providence was proceeding, and the successive stages in that leading, we may be even less able to trace, than we can trace the stages in the long pro¬ cess during which “ a transmitted organism was progress¬ ively modified, till the Creator, by some law, perhaps undiscoverable, united with it, under certain conditions, an immaterial soul.” But we may be confident that in both spheres—the spiritual or supernatural, and the physical or natural—the continuity of the fulfilment of the Divine purpose was unbroken. The indications, though only very partially detected by our imperfect 1 F. Tennyson, Daphne and other Poems, p. 301. 12 SACRIFICE observation, are now sufficiently suggestive since the reality to whom they pointed has been disclosed, that Christ was indeed sent forth “ in the fulness of time.” 1 This is plainly declared in Scripture, though we have been accustomed till recently to limit its application to the religious history of one people. In the wider horizons to which our vision has been providentially directed, we have learned that the Scripture expressions “ the ends of the world,” 2 the “ dispensation of the ful¬ ness of time ,” 3 have a universal reference ; and that Christ, instead of being only the Eedeemer of the Jewish people, or of the Christian Church, is the Mediator of the whole scheme of the grace of God for all man¬ kind. Humanity is neither “a congeries of nations from which God selects one to be the recipient of His favour, nor an agglomeration of individual atoms cap¬ able of isolating themselves from the rest, and of standing alone .” 4 Humanity is an organic unity, whose lowest member is essential to the well-being of O the highest. What is done in a part is done for the whole ; what is revealed to the Jew is revealed for the Gentile. In the dispensation of redemption the unit is the human race ; and though in that dispensation the divine methods are mysterious, the divine purpose has been clearly announced, and that is the “ gathering together in one of all things in Christ, both which are 1 Green, Prologomena to Ethics, 3 Ephesians i. 10. p. 87 ; Miller, Footprints of the Creator, p. 291 ; Fairbairn, Typo- 4 Bersier, The Oneness of the logy, vol. i. p. 380. Race in its Fall and its Future. 2 1 Corinthians x. 11. London, 1871, p. 48. INTRODUCTORY 13 in heaven, and which are on earth,” the reconciliation unto Himself “ of those who were sometime alienated and enemies in their mind by wicked works in the body of His flesh through death, to present them holy and unblameable and unreprovable in His sight .” 1 This was the mystery so hidden from the ages that the most inspired prophet did not comprehend what he was moved by the Holy Ghost to utter concern¬ ing it. But we, who read the prophecies and pro¬ vidences of ancient times in the light of the Gospel, are now able to discover predictions and types of it in other religions than the Jewish one. We can see how Jesus, when declaring to those who wished to make Him their king, that He had come to be their sacrifice, and to give them life through His death, was “ not without venerable witness in the conscience and traditions of mankind .” 2 We may be able to trace only a few faint indications of this witnessing, but we may confidently affirm the reality of it. As Judaism, not so much in respect of its success, as of its failure to meet the spiritual wants of mankind, was a prophecy of Christ, so heathenism at its best, in respect of its inadequacy to satisfy men’s moral necessities, was a prophecy of Judaism. It is, then, the peculiar glory of Christ that He is related, not simply to Judaism, but to every religion by which man has endeavoured to express his highest hopes and soothe his greatest fears. He is the reality towards whom they all tend, in whom 1 Colossians i. 20 ; Ephesians ii. 16. 2 Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, Nineteenth Century , 1891, p. 671. 14 SACRIFICE they are all fulfilled, and of whom, therefore, not only in their “ guesses at truth,” but in their aberrations from it, which have made philosophy abhor the name of religion, they all unconsciously testify. The subject selected for exposition in this lecture is the prophetic significance of religious rites which may be said to have prevailed in every discovered or discoverable form of religion. Wherever man has been found, and as far back as he can be traced by his relics or language, sacrifice under various forms is a prominent feature of his religion. It is true that the word “ sacrifice ” is not a primitive word, being without equivalent or correspondent in the common dictionary of the Aryan nations . 1 It has also a more limited application now than in very ancient times, for then it covered any religious act, such as the ceremonial observed in lighting or mending the fire on the domestic hearth. Even old Latin writers often understood by it not an offering, but the whole cere¬ monial or lepovpyla of religion . 2 The habitual usage ol the word, however, has for a very long time corre¬ sponded to its etymology, as signifying oblations presented in a sacred place, or upon or before an altar, which involved the slaughter of a victim and the consequent loss of it to the offerer . 3 As thus defined, 1 Muller, Physical Religion , qusecunque in ara cremantur p, 106. (Lactant., lib. vi. cap. nit., quoted 2 Plautus, Amphit. , act iii. by Sykes, Essay on Sacrifice, p. sc. 3, makes rem divinam 7). In Hebrew the word korban facere and sacrificare the same; is the generic name including also Religion of Socrates, p. 197. not only oblations at the altar, 3 “ Sacrificium est vietima, et but sacred gifts of all kinds such INTRODUCTORY 15 sacrifice from time immemorial has prevailed all over the world, in all forms of religion natural to man. It cannot be associated with, only savage notions of life and duty, nor can it be regarded as marking a barbarous stage which as man advances religion will leave behind. As matter of fact no religion with the exception of our own has outgrown or discarded it. The founder of Buddhism vainly endeavoured to wean men from the practice of it in the East, and nowhere in the West did philosophy succeed in dispossessing the heart of belief in its efficacy. In Christianity alone sacrificial slaughter never found a place, and yet sacrifice is still the central thought in the Christian theory of religion, and the leading principle in Christian practice. Everywhere else, save among sections of non-Christian peoples, who rejecting the formal dogmas of our religion, have yet been greatly influenced by its spirit, the most cultured as well as the rudest of nations have believed in and prac¬ tised sacrifice as an acceptable and profitable service . 1 The universal prevalence of sacrifice, the ineradic¬ able belief in its efficacy even when contradicted by the higher reasonings of men , 2 surely indicates some as the materials composing the structure of the tabernacle. Not every gift was a sacrifice, but only such as were offered im¬ mediately to God and consumed in whole or in part in the manner appointed.”—Outram, De Sacri- ficiis, p. 82. 1 Kennicott, Two Disserta¬ tions, p. 161; Maurice, Sacrifice , pp. 45, 61. 2 Sane tantum aberat—unde ritus tam tristis, et a natura deorum alienus in hominum corda veniret, se tam longe pro- pagaret et eorum moribus tam tenaciter adhsereret. ”— Spencer, De Leg. Heb., lib. iii. Diss. ii. c. 4; also Porphyry quoted by Eusebius, Prcep. Evang., lib. iv. c. 10. 16 SACRIFICE demand of nature. A disposition which the most cultured heathen nations were not able to outlive may be described, like man’s belief in Deity and in his own soul, as indigenous to his nature. Beliefs which are instinctive are properly regarded as pointing to some reality which can satisfy them. Like our physical organs they imply a correlate of some kind. The eye implies an element of light, and in like manner man’s instinctive belief in Deity, though by no means to be assumed as a demonstration of the existence of Deity, is a ground of probability so strong that it would be foolish and dangerous to disregard it as a motive or director of conduct. The same reasoning applies to the universal belief in the efficacy of sacrifice. Though all man’s sacri¬ ficial acts have failed to ease his conscience, yea, just because they have failed, the presumption that there must be some Divine reality to satisfy the universal craving is a strong one. No constitutional instinct ever yet betrayed; nature never made a mistake. “ The structure of man,” says Emerson, “ is not an organised lie, nor is any false expectation raised in a universe whose Creator keeps His word with the very least of His creatures.” So when we discover that wherever the sacrifice of Christ is properly presented, material sacrifice ceases in the worship of God, and the disposi¬ tion to offer it is regenerated and transformed into the surrender of ourselves to Christ in thankoffering for our salvation, we have surely not presumptive but conclu¬ sive evidence that the spiritual necessities of man ex¬ pressed by his sacrifices have been divinely provided for. INTRODUCTORY 17 It is in this sense we maintain that there is in sacrifice a typical element, more prophetic and reliable, than some theologians formerly professed to find in the personages and institutions and events described in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament there are many true types of the divine original revealed in the Hew; but it is now generally admitted that some of the analogies formerly adduced were trifling and far-fetched. We have learned to reject them therefore, as “frivolous conceits by which well-meaning apologists brought ridicule on the themes which they endeavoured to vindicate.” We are now seeking for the real types, those which were divinely pre-ordained to be prophetic of Christ, in the actions and beliefs which express the instincts of man as a creature essentially moral and religious. It is allowed by the most trustworthy typolo- gists that the true type and antitype must alike be consti¬ tuent parts of the same general scheme of Divine Provi¬ dence . 1 And surely there can be no truer or clearer types of the redemption which God is accomplishing, than those original necessities of human nature which are satisfied and those instinctive beliefs which are regenerated and fulfilled by the revelation of the Divine sacrifice in Christ. If it be granted or assumed that the disposition to sacrifice is instinctive in humanity, we need not discuss a question formerly keenly debated as to whether sacrifice was a human invention or a Divine institu¬ tion . 2 The proposition was often very improperly 1 Fairbairn, Typology, vol. i. 2 See for comparison of the p. 60. various views Outram, De Sacri- C 18 SACRIFICE stated : for if by a Divine institution was meant an ordinance enjoined by formal command, the question resolved itself “ into a historical problem never likely to obtain a solution .” 1 The Bible itself affords no help towards settling the difficulty when so presented ; but the Bible does enlighten and direct us to the true con¬ clusion when the question is rightly formulated. For we are instructed by the Bible, that whatever is really human is originally Divine, and so if the universality of sacrifice indicates a human necessity or disposition, sacrifice must be regarded as a Divine institution. But not because it was inaugurated by any Divine external command. Man required no such command to begin to sacrifice; the disposition to do so was always within him and would be evoked by the conditions under which he lived and by the events which befel him. He was indeed instructed by a primeval revelation, for although it was not communicated in audible voices or by visible signs, it was legibly inscribed upon the constitution of his being. In this respect sacrifice is akin to other Divine institutions essential to the education of man. The family, social and civil government, indispensable to man’s well-being as defending him from the degrada¬ tion of the brutes and providing for his proper development, are Divine institutions. Yet in the Bible their origin is never ascribed to any positive Divine ficiis, book i. c. 1 ; Warburton, 1 Herzog, Encycl ., ii. p. 1684 ; Divine Legation of Moses, book ix. Smith, Dictionary of the Bible , c 2 ; Deyling, Observat. Sacrce , iii. p. 1077. ii. p. 53 seq. INTRODUCTORY 19 command; they are regarded as matters of course, the inevitable outcome of man’s moral and spiritual instincts. So, like sacrifice, they are represented as being coeval with man, and for this very reason, as being made the subject of much subsequent legislation, in order to discipline them to secure the end which they were originally designed to subserve . 1 And therefore we need not enter minutely into the discussion of another question as to the rationale of sacri¬ fice, seeing that it is really involved in the question as to its origin. We could hope to obtain only an indirect and very partial answer to any inquiry as to what were the feelings, and views, and aims of primitive worshippers in presenting their sacrifices. Of the several competing theories concerning this subject which were formerly in vogue, not one, taken by itself, nor indeed all taken together, though formulated and supported by men of vast learning and great intellectual ability, will account for the whole phenomena. They each explain some of the data in certain stages of religious culture; and so, though distinct from each other, they need not, as covering only a part of the field, be re¬ garded as antagonistic. A more comprehensive survey of the actual state of matters may include them all. The Gift theory propounded by Spencer , 2 and supported by many eminent scholars both on the Continent and in Great Britain, holds good in regard to some aspects of 1 Maurice, Sacrifice , p. 4 ; 2 De Legibus Hebrceorum Ritu- Oehler, Old Test. Theol., vol. i. alibus et earum Rationibus. Post- p. 391. liumous edition. Cambridge, 1726. 20 SACRIFICE sacrifice. In certain phases of religion men have extensively sought to obtain and to keep the friendship of Deity by oblations from the produce of their fields or by offerings made by sacrificial slaughter from their flocks and herds. It is founded, however, upon a sense of the value of property, and of the worth and efficacy of the gift of a part of it, which, as far as can be gathered from the records of mankind, cannot be re- garded as primitive. The conception is rather one which implies a change from an earlier organisation of society, and therefore it is not likely that men began to sacrifice from such a motive or for such an object. The Federal theory, advanced and supported with much ingenuity and learning by Mede and Sykes, founding sacrifice upon the intention to enter into, maintain, or restore covenant relations with Deity, is in the same sense,' and to a similar extent a sound one . 1 From the widely prevailing custom of contracting leagues between nations by sacrificial feasts, from the use of the Greek word crnrovBrj, signifying a treaty between parties ratified by libation ; from the Eoman mode of celebrating marriage ( confarreatio ), in which the eating of selected fruits and salted meal was regarded as rendering the bond indissoluble, and from the very general practice of sharing banquets with the dead, we may safely conclude that in the later ages of Gentile nations sacrifice was practised as a solemn rite of feder¬ ation and communion with the gods. But while this 1 Sykes, Essaij on the Nature , Design, and Origin of Sacrifice. London, 1748. INTRODUCTORY 21 was so, and while the theory illustrates some features even of Jewish sacrifice, we must not infer that sacrifice was originally and universally so employed. The theory does not account for one very prominent class of sacrifices, the “ holocaust ” of which the sacrificer never partook, and it ignores or vainly endeavours to explain away the whole of that important group of sacrifices in which we are chiefly concerned, viz. the piacular or expiatory . 1 Warburton, in the Divine Legation of Moses , 2 has endeavoured with more success to account for sacrifice as a natural device to aid or supplement the defects of language by symbolic action. His theory has been adopted by many others , 3 who think it un¬ necessary to make any account of the imperfections of language. Regarding “ representation by action as gratifying to men who have the gift of eloquence, and as singularly suited to great purposes,” they consider that “ adoration invested in some striking and significa¬ tive forms, and conveyed by the instrumentality of material tokens, would be most in accordance with the strong energies of religious feeling.” This applies of course to other acts of worship than that of adoration, for whether the motive would be to express gratitude, or penitence, or to supplicate a boon, or to deprecate anger, the intention of the worshipper would naturally be indicated not only by 1 Fairbairn, Typology , vol. i. 3 Davison, Inquiry into the p. 252 seq. Origin and Intent of Sacrifice, p. 19; Bahr, Symbolek, book ii. ; 2 Book iv. sec. 4, and book ix. Thuluc, Appendix to Commentary cb. 2. ‘ on Hebrews. 22 SACRIFICE speech, but in symbolic action more expressive than speech . 1 This theory, conceived on the same principle as the two already alluded to, is hut another aspect of the same rationalistic view that sacrifice can be accounted for on purely human or natural grounds . 2 It need not be regarded with hostility, or even with suspicion, provided we understand that sacrifice is a natural expression of a spiritual or supernatural neces¬ sity. Man is distinguished from the world of nature by his religious instinct, that is by his consciousness of not only lateral relations to his fellow-men, his equals, but upward relations to powers and beings superior to himself, and in the higher stages of his religion, to one supreme Being, the Author and Gover¬ nor of his own existence. The feelings and thoughts originating in this Divine relationship cannot all be expressed by speech or even by action. Man’s deepest feelings and highest thoughts are unutterable in words and inexpressible by deeds. Naturally, therefore, and of necessity, he endeavours by actions to supplement his spoken worship, and he makes his approach to Deity with some material offering or symbolic action. Even regarded from the high spiritual standpoint from which we, as heirs of so many centuries of Christian culture, are wont to contemplate things, this cannot appear 1 Cave, Scripture Doctrine of in action instead of words, so that Sacrifice , pp. 31, 41 seq. sacrifice and religious worship 2 “ Nature dictates this symbol were correlative and coeval to all her children ; it being no- ideas.”— Divine Legation , book ix. thing else than a species of worship ch. ii. INTRODUCTORY 23 strange to us. We still present our offerings in the worship of God, and we have high authority for believ¬ ing that, with the sacrifices “ of doing good and com¬ municating,” God, “ who is not in need of anything, “ is well pleased .” 1 Wdien we recall the conceptions and sentiments which in our childhood we entertained of our relations to Deity, we find nothing very far out of the way in the feeling which constrained men in primitive ages to express in more material forms their worship ot Deity. In childhood and youth the mind contemplates the Divine as inseparable from the natural, and regards the spiritual as one with the material and corporeal. Ari d so in primitive religion, yea in all stages of religion, until under the discipline of the Divine Spirit it matured into the religion of Christ, sacrifice has had a place as prominent as that occupied by prayer and praise, with which for very long it has been closely connected. The Bible seems to indicate 2 that in point of time sacrifice preceded these more spiritual modes of wor¬ ship, and this is what we might expect in the Divine education of man. “For that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterwards that which is spiritual .” 3 But that which is spiritual cannot be regarded in this instance as antagonistic to what was natural. It was already contained and en¬ veloped in the natural, and both, though never identi¬ fied, have been so closely correlated as to be regarded as inseparable. Sacrifice in the old religion, like the 1 Heb. ch. xiii. 16 ; Acts xvii. 25. 2 Genesis iv. 26. 3 1 Cor. xv. 46. 24 SACRIFICE sacraments in the new, were ordinances, or rather actions, as essential to worship as prayer and praise. They were not arbitrary or artificial methods of ex¬ pressing religious emotion for which some other inven¬ tion might be substituted ; they sprang from the very fountain of religion and were intimately connected with its essence. Religion in the case of man must be symbolic ; the form may be changed according to his stage of experience, but he cannot outgrow the necessity for it. The feeling in which sacrifice originated, and of which in ancient times it was the symbol, is still the very life and spirit of our religion, the reality in which all that is true in other religions is fulfilled . 1 All these theories as to the origin and rationale of sacrifice are founded upon the idea that the chief, or only constituent of religion is the sense of depend¬ ence and inferiority which obliges man to acknowledge and worship deity. Rear undoubtedly, in the higher form of reverence, and in its lower, as dread of powers in¬ visible and dangerous, is one of the principal elements into which religion may be resolved. But there is another constituent of religion as essential to it as is 1 Sacrifice is not to be regarded as just an “embodied prayer,” but something different from prayer though conjoined with it. ‘ ‘ Instead of corresponding to prayer as symbol to idea, sacrifice ran parallel to and accompanied it.”—Compare Biihr, SymboleJc, book ii. 272 ; Oehler, Old Test. Theol., vol. i. p. 396 ; Outram, De Sacrificiis, book i. p. 238 ; Cave, Scrip. Doctrine of Sacrifice , p. 51 ; Hengstenberg, Commen¬ tary on Ecclesiastes , p. 373 ; Kurtz, Sacrificial Worship of the Old Testament , p. 58 ; Delitzsch, Epistle to the Hebrews , vol. ii. p. 392. INTRODUCTORY 25 the sense of dependence, which has not been suffi¬ ciently taken into consideration, and that is the sense of affinity subsisting between man and the being or beings that he worships. Invisible though these be they are never regarded as wholly unknown. Though in many respects strange they are not conceived of as alien, but as akin to their worshippers. In most of the lower forms of religion this belief is very clearly ex¬ pressed. The relation of the god to the tribe, or to the community, is regarded as one not of concord only but of kith. He is supposed to be interested in all that concerns their fortunes, as actually one of themselves. He is believed to be their common head, in a very literal sense. Renan’s assertion that “ dread is the sole root of religion,” is thus contradicted by the beliefs of even the most degraded peoples. To them in very many instances the god instead of being a tenor is a familiar and friendly power, living not only close to, but among them. It is only in certain stages of religion that the gods are conceived of as far removed from men, and as requiring to be conciliated on account of their power to promote or to mar their happiness. This feeling of affinity, expressed in the quotation from Aratus by St. Paul on Mars Hill , 1 meets us in the very earliest account given in Genesis of the origin of man. In the words, “ let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” we have the most sublime conception of human dignity and destiny that has evei been formulated. According to the author of Genesis 1 Acts xvii. 28. 26 SACRIFICE man is not animated flesh acting automatically like the animals; he is living soul inspired by his Creator and capable of being trained into His likeness. There is in his constitution a Divine element, in virtue of which he is subject to God as the Father of his spirit. This conception of fatherhood, however, is separate from that of Aratus as the heavens are separate from the earth. The Gentile thought was derived from the belief that God exists in the likeness of men. “ He is the superlative of man, who is the positive .” 1 By the author of Genesis this would have been condemned as blasphemy. God was not to be conceived of by him in the likeness of any one; and if man be God’s child, it is not by natural descent as born , but by creation as made in His image. Sonship is a relation not of nature but of grace. The Hebrew prophets while proclaiming Jehovah as the Father of Israel carefully guarded against all possible misconception of the relationship. The surrounding heathen might say to their idol stock, “ thou art my father, to a stone, thou hast brought me forth,” 2 but Israel reverenced Jehovah not as a Father who had begot them, but as the “ Most High who had created them ,” 3 a nation over all other nations, by His Divine intervention. Jehovah is God, and Israel are men the work of His hands . 4 They are His creatures, yet as spiritually related to Him they are capable of knowing, communicating with, and receiving revela- 1 Baring Gould, Origin and 3 Isaiah xliii. 1. Development of Religious Belief , 4 Prof. Robertson Smith, Re- i. 149. 2 Jeremiah ii. 27. ligion of Semites, pp. 42, 43. INTRODUCTORY 27 tions from Him. That is the fundamental dogma of Scripture, that God has made man in affinity with Himself—a kindred being, not only capable of con¬ versing with God, but actually enjoying and profiting by the privilege. We cannot conceive a moment in human history when God was shut off from communi¬ cating with man, or when man was excluded from con¬ verse with God . 1 Religion on its Divine side thus implies revelation , revelation implies personal concern of the Infinite for the finite, paternal relationship and affection and care . 2 On its human side religion, as rooted in man’s sense of affinity with the Author of his being, upon whom he is dependent, represents man’s aspiration and endeavour 1 It is a significant fact that this sense of affinity with duty is thus found not only in the higher philosophic religion of Greece, but in the very lowest forms of religion. Although most grot¬ esquely and hideously expressed, it proves that man can never lose the conviction stamped originally upon his nature that he is not essentially evil. Then when the Gospels are interpreted in the light of the early chapters of Gen¬ esis the Incarnation is found to be not the makeshift which theo¬ logy has sometimes propounded it to be—a Divine expedient to bring the Holy God into contact with a race that had sinned. The Incarnation is grounded upon the perfect fitness of man as made in God’s image to be the utterer of God’s life. The theory of the Scotists commends itself thus as worthy of more consideration than it has received. Found¬ ing their theology upon God, not upon man, beginning not from our sinful selves and so ‘ ‘ measuring God’s straight line by our crooked one, but accept¬ ing the teaching of Scripture that all good proceeds from God who is ever revealing Himself to man, they maintain that the Incarna¬ tion was no afterthought con¬ ceived to meet the necessities of a sinful race. By reason of human sin the method of it may have been modified, but “ etiam si non peccasset homo, deus tarn esset in- carn atus. ’ ’—AY est., Christ. Consum. p. 104; Maurice, Sacr. in trod. p. xli. 2 Hitchcock’s Sermons , p. 83. 28 SACRIFICE to improve his relationship into that close and per¬ petual fellowship with God for which he was created. Yielding to his inward necessities, man naturally and spontaneously will express in his worship his craving for this communion with God. The homage which he renders could have no value apart from its spontaneity. Man is not compelled to worship God on account of the rudeness or wickedness of his nature, but in virtue of his inalienable affinity he finds it impossible to abstain from seeking through worship that fellowship which is the Divine ideal of his destiny. So, though in Scripture sacrifice is found linked to the first step in the degradation of the race, in the general sense of offering it can be conceived of as having a far earlier date in human history than the fact of sin, with which it has had so intimate a connection. Had sin never entered the world, human history would have been one of perpetual ascent toward the supreme holiness by an ever-increasing experience of the Divine life maintained by continuous self-surrender to the Divine will. Giving himself to God untainted by disobedience, involved the offering of all he had and did. So his “ life of fearless in¬ tercourse would have been a continual oblation saintly.” 1 But nowhere in the world, and at no period of human history, and by no member of the race, has the life of fearless intercourse and perfect com¬ munion with God been realised. Everywhere and 1 Cave, Scripture Doctrine of Dei , book xx. chap. 25 ; Oehler, Sacrifice , p. 133; Dale, The Atone- Old Testament Theology , i. p. ment, p. 421 ; Augustine, De Civ. 396. INTRODUCTORY 29 always we are confronted by the confession that fellow¬ ship with God has been broken by human sin. In one form or another this confession is expressed in all the religions of mankind; and it is stamped plainly upon all the categories under which the different varieties of sacrifice have been classified. Theoretically we may divide them into honorific and piacular, and subdivide them under various heads, but practically they all spring from the consciousness that union between man and Diety has been interrupted, and that before fellow¬ ship can be maintained, it must be reknit and restored. So in the history of religion the piacular sacrifices have been of peculiar and prime importance. To them the word sacrifice, answering in its ordinary metaphorical use to the reluctant surrender of an object of value, chiefly applies, and all of them involve the surrender of a life, or of its substitute. All such sacrifices, therefore, clearly indicate how deeply imprinted upon the human conscience is the conviction that man is not what he ought to be, that he is in a state of alienation from God; and yet, at the same time, they testify to man’s earnest desire and endeavour to effect at any cost reconciliation with Him. So instead of regarding sacrifice, and especially piacular sacrifice, as Eenan de¬ scribes it, " as the oldest and most serious error, the one most difficult to eradicate among those bequeathed to us by the state of folly through which humanity passed in its infancy ,” 1 we are forced to consider it as an apt and fitting confession of the existence in humanity of 1 History of the People of Israel, i. p. 43. 30 SACRIFICE a foreign element—sin, which, however introduced, has immensely weakened the whole life of the race, and impeded its advance in good; and also as an earnest appeal and effort, justified by the facts and the results as wisely directed, that this primeval curse should be eliminated and destroyed . 1 We propose to consider some of the most salient or characteristic of the sacrificial rites of mankind, with the view of discovering the beliefs which inspired or suggested them. Our survey will not be confined to the very wide field of the religions which reflect a hio-h degree of civilisation, and which are testified to by great literatures and monuments. It will extend to what of the wastes of humanity have been discovered 1 The remarkable positions taken up by Dr. Priestley (Theological Repository , i. pp. 401 seq., 214) that no nation, Jewish or Christian, ancient or modern, appears to have had the least knowledge, or betrayed the least sense of their want of any expedient of satisfac¬ tion for sin besides repentance and a good life, and that all ancient and modern religions appear to be utterly destitute of anything like a doctrine of proper atonement, has only to be stated to disclose its absurdity. We can hardly conceive it possible for him to have made so bold an assertion had he enjoyed the ad¬ vantage we possess of reading the sacred books of India, China, Persia, Assyria, and Egypt; and yet he was well accpiainted with Greek and Roman literature, the phraseology of which is steeped in ideas of propitiatory atonement. Then the whole Jewish system, as contained in the Old Testa¬ ment and expounded by the rabbin, is based upon belief in atonement. Of course the opinions of the rabbin may be absurd, and the whole Jewish system may be based on error, but there can be no question as to the facts. The very authori¬ ties which he quotes in support of his theories are found, when examined, to be in direct contra¬ diction to them. See Magee, Essays and Dissertations on the Atonement, vol. i. 124 seq., and 254 seq. ; Outram, De Sacrijiciis, p. 261 seq. INTRODUCTORY 31 by patient modern research, in which are found only coarse superstitions and repulsive customs, the outcome of ideas as to the constitution of the natural and spiritual world, which may strike us as most irrational and absurd. We dare not, however, on that account pass them by. No believer in the great Scripture truth of the organic unity of the human race ought to consider any form of religion too low for his interest, or even for his respect. The religious rites of the most degraded peoples are deserving of study. To despise or ignore the very lowest of them would be as unbe¬ coming in a theologian, “ as it would be for a physi¬ ologist to vaunt his ignorance of the lower forms of life.” 1 It is not as matter of curious research into what is so far beneath our present level of faith that we ought to pursue our investigation into the crudities of savage beliefs. We may find it an important practical guide to the study of our religion, and a help by no means to be despised in determining what of our creed is to be considered essential, and what non-essential to the faith. The observation is already trite, that we shall never properly appreciate our religion if we do not study the other religions that have preceded, or that may still profess to compete with it. Certainly we shall never rightly understand the sacrifices of Israel described in the Bible if we are ignorant of the sacrificial customs that prevailed among the surrounding heathen. It is only thus that we can realise the true significance of the election of the seed of Abraham as a people divinely 1 Tylor, Primitive Culture , i. pp. 20, 280. 32 SACRIFICE separated from all nations, and. specially educated to become the religious teachers of all mankind . 1 Further, even savage sacrifices, regarded in the light of the Divine purpose revealed in Scripture and now being fulfilled through the religion of Christ, may be found to exhibit some of the really typical elements of which we are in search. The partial can only be rightly understood in the completed whole, and in the higher is always found the true interpretation of the lower. The intelligent man understands the prayer which the child unconsciously prattles. The Jewish people, though children compared with ourselves, could enunciate clearly truths of religion which enlightened Gentiles could only babble. “ After last comes first,” and “ we find the key to the beginning in the end, not the key to the end in the beginning.” We who live in the fuller light of the Gospel, understand the religions both of the Jews and the Gentiles better than they did themselves. In sacrificing, the worshippers were unable to account distinctly for what they were doing; different reasons for the same sacrifice would be given by different sacrificers, while of the majority it may be truly said that, just as men pray long before they begin to theorise about prayer, so they sacrificed because they felt they must. What gave meaning to their actions lay more or less obscurely in the background of their minds; but we, contemplating them from a higher level, under¬ stand the drift at least of many things which they did in ignorance. TVithout reading into their beliefs oui 1 Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, Introd. p. vi. INTRODUCTORY 33 own convictions, we apprehend somewhat of the truth after which, in less favourable conditions, they could only grope. Then again, we must not forget that the revelation contained in Scripture presupposes and attaches itself to a primitive and fundamental revela¬ tion which from the beginning of the creation God had given in His works and in man’s moral nature . 1 That earlier revelation man, however advanced, has not out¬ grown, and from it, however degraded, he can never wholly fall away. So, at the foundation of the sanguinary and revolting worship of even savage men, there may be found some fragments of Divine ideas, crude and hideously dis¬ torted, which testify of instincts which man can neither wholly lose nor destroy, and which the Creator of man will never disregard. If in his idolatry he was unconsciously seeking after the invisible God, then in his sacrifices he was unintentionally feeling after the Cross of Christ. The analogies which heathen religions present to Christianity are very striking, and the more these religions are studied the more numerous are found to be the parallels in legend and doctrine and precept subsist¬ ing between them. From the earliest days of the Church it has been a favourite part of the tactics of its assailants to endeavour by the production of these parallels to rob the Gospel of its significance as a Divine revelation, seeing so many of its truths had already been discovered by the unassisted efforts of the human mind. We are coming to understand these things better than we did ; we have a clearer and more correct perception of the 1 Romans i. 20 ; Colossians i. 26, ii. 2. D 34 SACRIFICE significance of revelation and inspiration, and we can utilise in defence and confirmation of the faith the very facts which suggested the charges at the first and gave them currency . 1 If the Gospel he truly revelation, we may and ought to find not only types and prophecies of it in the antecedent Jewish economy, but parallels and analogies which are really anticipations and testimonies of it, in every form of religion. From most unexpected quarters witness may be borne to us of the things most firmly believed among us. We may listen to “ voices of the prophets ” 2 other than Hebrew, in heathen sayings that were dark and incomprehensibly, in parables that were perplexing and enigmatic to those who first spake and to those who first heard them. “ Because not unto themselves but unto us they did minister the things that are now declared to us, by those who have preached the Gospel with the Holy Spirit sent from Heaven.” 3 We shall, however, make a great mistake if w T e seek among heathen sacrifices for only resemblances to those described in the Bible, and for indications of beliefs analo¬ gous to those which we hold ourselves. In the contrasts and contradictions presented by these sacrifices, we are more likely to discover the clue which will direct us to the universal element in religion of which we are in search . 4 It is not that which is common to paganism and Judaism which is most truly catholic, but precisely that in which Christianity differs from both. In the very points in 1 Trench, Hulsean Lectures, p. 3 1 Peter i. 12. 151, second edition, 1847. 4 Caird, Introduction to Philo- 2 Acts xiii. 27. sojphy of Religion, pp. 82-83. INTRODUCTORY 35 which the Bible traverses the sacred scriptures of other religions we are likely to find the catholic truth. Applying this principle to the sacrifices of all religions we shall find that while they have much in common, there are certain broadly marked features which distinguish the sacrifices described in the Bible, and these if carefully observed will point us to some very important conclusions. In every religion sacrifice is assumed to be an essential part of worship, and the rites through which it is offered are subject to minute regulations in order to secure its efficacy; but when we compare these regula¬ tions with the legislation contained in the Bible, the fact becomes manifest that in the worship of Israel the sacrificial instinct was put under restraints of which there are few or no traces in the rituals of other- religions. Everywhere else the disposition to sacrifice was not only allowed, but encouraged to develop itself with freedom; but in the religion represented by the Bible it was bridled, and was limited to bounds which it could not pass without sacrilege. Excess of what was prescribed was as criminal as was neglect or refusal to provide what was required. All through the whole system there is an apparent intention to correct the extrava¬ gances to which the religious instinct is prone, and to discipline and educate it to high moral ends. Warburton has correctly remarked that “ Of all customs in use among men, those respecting religion are the most liable to abuse.” “ Sacrifices designed to be eucharistic or propitiatory are imagined to receive their chief value from their numbers and the costliness of the offerings, 36 SACRIFICE and in all sacrifices of an expiatory import, the predominating passion of fear soon superadds strange enormities to the follies of the worshippers .” 1 This statement finds ample illustration in the sacrifices not only of barbarous peoples, but of peoples equal to, and in some respects more advanced in civilisation than the Israelites. In India, China, and Egypt religion comprehended an enormous body of sacrifices with a ritual so comprehensive and minute as to take possession of the whole life of the individual. In the religions of Greece and Eome, hecatombs appear to have been the rule whenever circumstances rendered them possible, or when ambition or self-interest or fear seemed to demand them. Now it is true that upon excep¬ tional occasions, such as the bringing of the ark to Jerusalem , 2 the enthronement of Solomon , 3 and the consecration of the Temple , 4 we do read in the Bible of enormous sacrificial slaughter. We must not forget, however, that on all such occasions the victims repre¬ sented the materials of a great national feast, and that, in any case, they were not required by the demands of the sacrificial code which has come down to us. The requirements of that code, as we have it in the last of its successive revisions, though extensive and extravagant according to our standard, were moderate when compared with what was demanded in the religions of India and Egypt, or in that of Rome in the times of the Csesars . 5 1 Works, ed. 1811, vol. vi. p. 4 1 Kings viii. 63. 281. 2 2 Samuel vi. 13. 5 Clarke, Ten Great Religions, p. 3 2 Chron. i. 6. 319 ; Ivaliscli, Com. Lev., i. p. 308. INTRODUCTORY 37 Thus was it that in the religion of the Bible the world was spared the enormity of legalised human sacrifice, and the fact is remarkable seeing that the custom was elsewhere universal. No other nation than Israel that has left any record of itself can escape the reproach of having not only permitted human sacrifice, but as having stamped it with such approval as is im¬ plied in regulations framed for its being offered . 1 From the Bible it would appear that it must be laid to the charge of individual Israelites. Thus Jephthah, a half heathen outlaw, in a time of political and religious anarchy, in fulfilment of a rash pledge, on a very exceptional occasion did once what was customary among neighbouring nations . 2 It is also recorded as one of the dark blots upon the character of David that he took advantage of the heathen demand of the Gibeonites to “ hang up before Jehovah for an atone¬ ment ” the seven sons of Saul. This, however, he did from no religious conviction, but as an expedient for ridding himself of the surviving and dangerous scions of the preceding dynasty whom he was pledged by the most solemn oath to spare and to protect . 3 In the calamities consequent upon their apostasy moreover, not only individuals but whole sections of the people appear to have fallen away into the abominable practice . 4 It is admitted, however, by one most anxious to prove that the Israelites were addicted to it, that “ not many 1 Magee, Discourses and Dis- 3 1 Sam. xxiv. 22, 23 ; 2 Sam. scrtations, i. 96. xxiv. i. seq. 2 Judges xi. 34-40. 4 Rs. cvi. 37-38 ; Is. lvii. 5. 38 SACRIFICE clear cases are mentioned /’ 1 And the fact is unques¬ tionable that instead of being authorised, the custom was branded with the Divine reprobation by the plain enactments of the law, while the prophets from first to last proclaimed the Divine abhorrence of it in any form as unnatural and impious, and predicted as its inevitable punishment, the sorest disasters . 2 The practice was in direct contradiction to one of the fundamental articles of the faith which separated the Israelites from the surrounding heathen. The heathen conceived of man as an integral part of nature, but according to the Bible idea, man was made in the image of the Creator and Ruler of nature. In heathen sacrifice the victim often represented the god, or was supposed to be in close affinity with him ; in Jewish sacrifice the victim represented the worshipper, from whom, although his substitute, it was essentially distinct. In heathendom 1 Ghillany, Die Menschenopfer der altenHebraer, Nurnberg, 1842, pp. 31, 492, 518. 2 Kalisch, Com. Lev., i. p. 381 seq., specially p. 403 seg\,and Oehler, Herzog Real-Encycl., xvi. p. 621, effectively dispose of the “toll gewordeneKritikein.es Ghillany”; Kurtz, History of the Old Civ., Clarke ed., vol. i. p. 260, as effect¬ ively exposes the pretensions of a similar work. Daumer, Der Feuer- und Molochdienst der Alten Hebraer. Voltaire ( CEuvres , tom. xiii. p. 227, eighth edition, 1756), has charged the Jewish law with sanctioning human sacrifice in Lev. xxvii. 29, and he has main¬ tained that Jephthah sacrificed his daughter in fulfilment of that law. Bryant also, in his observa¬ tions and inquiries into ancient history, has derived the custom from the sacrifice of Abraham. Both conclusions are flatly con¬ tradicted by express prohibitions of the law and the denunciations of the prophets. Warburton, Works, vol. vi. pp. 357, 362 seq., has very ably settled the matter with Voltaire, “whose ignorance of the law of Moses might well have been excused had he forborne to abuse what he did not understand, but to know his Virgil no better was indeed a disgrace.” INTRODUCTORY 39 the god is simply a deification of some power or phase of nature of which he is only an emanation. Instead of ruling nature he is involved in it and subject to its destiny. In heathen sacrifice the victim was offered with the intention of controlling what in the system of nature the sacrificer desired to bend to his will. Now all such conceptions were most rigidly excluded from the monotheistic creed represented by the “ law and the prophets.” In it everything was avoided which could refer even remotely to the deification of nature. In whatever stage we regard it, whatever be the dimness resting upon the idea of God, the worshipper whether he be Abraham or Moses or the last Isaiah is ruled by the thought that he has to do in his worship with the Creator and Governor of nature whose will cannot be forced. And it is the exclusion of such heathen con¬ ceptions from the creed of Israel, and the presence in it of these essentially higher ideas of the nature of Deity and of man which explain the entire absence from the worship of Israel of the slaughter of human life. What among the heathen was the highest form of piety, a service most acceptable and efficacious, was in Israel a detestable and horrid sacrilege to be visited by the extremest penalty. In the same way we can account for the prohibition in the worship of Israel of such sacrifices as were represented by the prostitution of women , 1 the mutila¬ tion of the persons of the priests , 2 and other customs not only permitted but actually demanded in many 1 Herod., i. 181 seq. ; Strabo, 2 Creuzer, Symbol ., ii. 367 xi., xiv. 16. seq. 40 SACRIFICE other religions. Eevolting as they are to us, they were the natural fruit of beliefs prevalent in physio- latry and polytheism. In that phase of religion man’s conception of a god is that of a being or person not immoral, but rather non-moral, like nature from which he emanates. So in mythology, which may he described as the creed of polytheism, the ethical ele¬ ment is not represented at all, and from its worship the moral nature got almost nothing to support it. In the most cultured forms of polytheism, religion was totally dissevered from morality. The wisdom of Greece, represented by the philosophers and poets, was forced to separate ethics from theology, for the religious idea was often seen by them to override the moral sentiment, or almost to expel it from the conduct. Wor¬ ship demanded, as in the instances just referred to, what morality condemned. In the Bible religion this was simply impossible, for the God of the Bible is not a personification of nature, wayward, and immoral, and capricious. He is just and righteous and true, and what He is His w T orshippers feel they ought to he. This fundamental idea of Deity therefore can only he expressed in a religion essentially ethical. Worship alike of prayer or sacrifice can only he acceptable and efficacious when prompted by sincere conviction of the unchanging righteousness of God, and offered for the moral and spiritual end of purifying and changing the worshipper into a nearer likeness to God. So again the sacrifices described in the Bible are distinguished from those of all other religions by an INTRODUCTORY 41 essentially higher intention and motive. In all other religions sacrifice was conceived of as a purely physical means of averting some evil, or of securing some good. Even when not regarded as a means of controlling natural processes, hut as likely to propitiate or deprecate the displeasure of the powers that govern men’s lives, sacrifice was based upon the principle of quid pro quo. Its chief intention was to secure the interest of the sacrificers by lowering the gods to their own narrowness and selfishness, and when the offering was properly rendered there was an end of the matter. But the Law and the Prophets never allowed wor¬ shippers to regard their sacrifice as a method of squaring accounts with Deity. It was an expres¬ sion of homage and a confession of a responsibility of which no offering, however costly, could relieve them. After their sacrifice the responsibility was felt to be greater, for in the sacrifice they surrendered themselves to the Divine Will. Without this sur¬ render the sacrifice was worthless. In no case could they hope to procure God’s favour or avert His anger by any offering or sacrifice, however precious. In no stage of religion as presented in the Bible was sacrifice ever permitted to degenerate into a material substitu¬ tion. The sacrifice to be acceptable must express the entire submission of the offerer, and the value of the sacrifice depended solely upon his sincerity. The most solemn of all heathen sacrifices were the piacular or expiatory, but the word expiate signified in heathendom conceptions very different from those 42 SACRIFICE expressed by it in the Bible. It has been truly observed that the heathen knew of no atonement in the Bible sense, and the Bible allowed none in the heathen sense . 1 In heathendom an expiation was intended as a rule to remove or remedy physical evils, or to appease the wrath of the offended deities. The Bible sanctioned only such as would by repentance secure the removal of moral and spiritual evils and bring the suppliant into conformity with the righteous will of God. Almost universally in heathen religions the sense of sin was very slight. Transgression con¬ sisted in withholding from the gods what was their due, and what man found it was expedient for their interest to render. It was more a mistake than a fault, for if the gods were not supported they could not be serviceable to man. Among the higher forms of polytheistic religion a piacular sacrifice was con¬ ceived as a fine, which once paid made an end of responsibility for transgression. All such ideas are not only foreign to the Bible, they are distinctly contra¬ dicted and condemned by it. The Israelites were instructed that it was their sin against the Holy Jehovah which required covering or atonement, and they were never permitted to imagine that the pay¬ ment of any fine could wipe out a trangression, or that the Divine anger because of it could be appeased by the blood or the fat of thousands of the costliest victims. 1 Kalisch, Com. onLcvit ., vol. i. brews compared with those of p. 316. Compare his chapter other Nations,” vol. i. pp. on “The sacrifices of the He- 202-213. INTRODUCTORY 43 From the descriptions given by classical writers of the Greek and Roman sacrifices, 1 some have inferred that the necessity for a right disposition and for a good intention was as distinctly expressed in their rituals as it was in that of Israel. The hands and the garments of the sacrifices were washed and purified with clean water, while the victim had to be similarly purified along with all the materials required for the solemn function. “ No one of impure hands should be within the place where the holy vessels were.” When the priest was ready to do his office, all profane people were warned by the public crier to depart ( procul este, profani; 6vpa<; ftefi'tfKoi ), and all who re¬ mained were enjoined to take care of their words (favete linguis, eut^yaetre), then, when only the lustrated were present, the priest laying hold of the altar, made earnest supplication, and he that brought the sacrifice repeated the sacred formula after the priest. “ Dictaque verba Protulit, lit mos est.” We must beware, however, of interpreting such a ritual by our own ideas and sentiments. As matter of fact the proclamation made at the beginning was intended to guard against the presence of any sinister influence. The words which the people were warned not to utter, were not wicked words, but such as in accordance with the belief of the times might be 1 Dionys. Halic., lib. vii. ; 219 ; vi. 124 ; Brissonius, Do Lucian, De Sacrificiis; Juvenal, Formulis, p. 9. Sat. vi. 390 ; Yirgil, JEn. iv. 44 SACRIFICE easily construed into an evil omen. To prevent and to drown the hearing of such inopportune utterances, flute-players used to perform during the ceremony. It must be borne in mind that public worship in our Christian sense was unknown even in cultured Greece and Eome. The people who assembled in front of the temple, which, as the shrine or dwelling of the god, they were not permitted to enter, took no share what¬ ever in the service. As a rule their presence at acts of ceremonial worship was quite a matter of indif¬ ference ; they attended only as spectators, as they did at the games in the circus. Upon great public occasions, the priests, in presence of certain state officials, did everything, and upon any other occasion the sacrifice was offered, and the service was per¬ formed by the priest for and on behalf of the offerer, not with him . 1 While thus guarding against too favourable an interpretation of the rituals of ancient heathen worship, we must freely admit that in heathen literature ideas concerning sacrifice akin to those expressed in the Old Testament found frequent utterance. It is to be feared that sufficient justice to heathen religions has not always been done by the expounders of Christianity. Some of them have not realised that in order to prove Christianity to be Divine, we do not require to prove all heathenism to be inhuman. There were “ethics before there were Christian ethics ” ; the innate moral sentiment was sure to assert itself, when educated with 1 Uhlhorn, Christian Charity in the Ancient Church, p. 29. INTRODUCTORY 45 sufficient strength, in testing both religious beliefs and observances. If the system of sacrifice among the Israelites is to be interpreted by the teachings of their psalmists and prophets, it is but fair that heathen systems should be interpreted by the utterances of their poets and philosophers. A large volume could be filled with precepts and maxims culled from heathen literature testifying that the sacrifices of the immoral are of no value, and that an acceptable sacrifice implies that the sacrificers must be pure in heart and upright in mind. Not only did grave sages like Plato , 1 Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, insist that a right moral disposition in the offerer was essential to a proper sacrifice, but play- writers and satirists like Aristophanes Plautus 2 and Persius, and comedians on the stage like Menander publicly testified, “ How vain it was to attempt to propitiate the gods by sacrifices of bulls and kids, by garments of purple, by images of ivory and emerald, instead of by refraining from adultery, theft, murder, and covetousness.” 3 Many similar testimonies almost as precise and as fervent as those of Micah and Asaph to the effect that the Deity delights only in righteous works, and regards as His true sacrifice, constant justice, and purity not of the raiment but of the heart, 1 E.g., Alcib., ii. 13; Legg., iv. 8; ii. 9, 11; Xen., Memor., i. 3 ; Seneca, De Beneficiis, iv. 9 ; Epist., 95 ; Lucian, De Sacrificiis, passim ; Porphyry, De Abstin., ii. 37 ; Cicero, De Nat. Deor., lib. ii. 2 Plautus, Bud., Prolog. 22-25 ; Ovid, Trist. , lib. ii. i. 75,76; Fast. ii. 535 ; Epist., xx. 181 ; Horace, Od., lib. ii., xvii. 32. 3 For many other authorities see Farrer, Paganism and Chris¬ tianity, p. 87 seq. ; Sykes, Essay on Sacrifice, p. 51 seq., p. 82 seq., p. 311 seq. 46 SACRIFICE reach us from the sacred hooks of the great religions of the East. The early Christian apologists would have hailed all such as are now available for us with thankfulness. Erom their writings alone we could obtain the materials for constructing a large Greek or Eoman moral anthology. 1 In defending and confirming the faith, they delighted to employ weapons drawn from the armoury of heathen literature. Out of the mouths of Gentile philosophers and poets they exposed the absurdity of all pagan attempts by sacrificial worship to propitiate Deity. In this respect, they were simply following the example of the writers of the Hebrew Bible, for one of them in sublime catholicity represents no Hebrew but the heathen Balaam as protesting “Wherewith shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before the high God ? shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old ? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil ? shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul ? He hath showed thee, 0 man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God ? ” 2 All this may be thankfully admitted as bearing witness that the essentially moral nature of man can and will survive the oppression of an immoral system of belief or of worship. We must remember, however, 1 Clem., Strom ., 606 ; August., Prcep. Evang., almost passim . De Civ. Dei , xix. 23 ; Eusebius, 2 Micali vi. 6, 7, 8. INTRODUCTORY 47 that these were the sentiments and convictions of the few. The vast majority sacrificed in the belief that the opus operatum was efficacious, that all that required attention was the correct performance of the rite and the exact utterance of the formula. Among the Israelites, on the other hand, the common people were instructed by the priests and the Levites that not the offering but the offerer was of most account in the Divine esteem. This truth from the very first was imbedded in their ritual, and consequently from the first their observance of it exercised a beneficial in¬ fluence upon their spiritual culture. In other religions sacrificial worship hindered rather than helped the development of the moral and spiritual nature. When a heathen man’s conceptions became purer he revolted from his religion because its beliefs were absurd and its rites were contemptible ; but among the Israelites the healthier the moral sentiment became, and the higher grew their ideas of what was befitting a man, the more their worship commended itself to them as Divinely inspired and ordained. For once more, the chief distinction between the biblical and the heathen systems of sacrifice may thus be formulated. The heathen- expressed man’s endeavour to find out and conciliate Deity, the biblical symbolises siiiful man’s surrender in trust to God who had found him out. In whatever stage of development or degra¬ dation we examine other religions we shall find sacrifice practised with the view either of propitiating the gods, or of forcing them to yield to the will of the sacrificer, 48 SACRIFICE or of enabling him to become as powerful, or even more powerful, than they. 1 Sacrifice is rooted in the belief that man can and must work out his own salvation ; so, by the surrender of a part of what belongs to him, he either purchases a greater good, or is able to retain something which, prized as more valuable, he wills not to part with, or he secures exemption from a penalty which he knows he has incurred. Sacrifice thus instead of implying self-surrender, and binding the sacrificer to the will of Deity, is made the minister of man’s selfwill, as binding the gods to serve him. In¬ stead of yielding himself up to God for His service, he endeavours rather to oblige the gods to surrender to him. 2 We are witnesses to ourselves that this is so, for even after we have become subject to Christ, against His plaiijest teaching the tendency in our nature breaks forth in endeavours to make religion minister to our lower interests, and advance our selfish aims. The natural man, who is simply the old heathen man, dies hard in regenerate humanity, and even when he is slain he is long in falling away from the life that is being sanctified. It will be observed that when in the higher forms of heathen religion men have attained to the conviction that the most acceptable offering to Deity is right knowledge and true obedience, it is always conjoined with the belief that man by searching can find out Deity, and does possess in himself all the resources 1 Fairbairn, Studies in the 2 Maurice, Sacrifice, Introd. Philos, of Relig. and Hist., p. 136. xliii. seq. INTRODUCTORY 49 required for perfect obedience. The spirit of cultured heathendom is strongly self-sufficient and self-assertive, and by heathen philosophy these qualities, instead of being condemned, were encouraged and commended as virtuous and praiseworthy. “As it behoves Zeus to know that he is great in himself and in his life, and to speak highly of his own worth, so it behoves good men to do the like, convinced that Zeus is not superior to them .” 1 With still prouder self-reliance, Aristotle 2 held “ that magnanimous is the man who estimates his own worth highly, for he who makes too low an esti¬ mate of it is a fool.” In the same self-assertive spirit Seneca 3 reminded men that philosophy promised to elevate them to equality with the gods. They could only, it was true, rise by virtue, which consisted in “ the worship of God and the love of men ”—colere divina, humana diligere; “ but by the attainment of virtue men begin to be the companions and not the suppliants of the gods. The way, moreover, is safe and pleasant, and one for which nature has equipped you, for if you but hold fast to what she has given you, you will rise to be equal with Deity.” We are not discussing the effect of this proud re¬ liance upon human nature, this confidence in its capacity to fulfil its ends, upon the general character and conduct of men. Cases are conceivable in which it may have served as a powerful incentive to good, and as a strong safeguard against moral debase- 1 Plut De Stoic. Repugn., c. 13. 3 Seneca, Epistles, 31, 90 ; and 2 Ethic. Nicom., vii. iii. 3. Dc Bene/., vii. 3, 4, 6, 10. E 50 SACRIFICE ment ; 1 but it is with the fact of it that we have to do, and with the contrast presented by it to the spirit of the religion of Israel. The wisest among the heathen found no necessity for sacrifice, for their religion con¬ sisted in knowing and being true to themselves. They had in themselves all that was required for their proper guidance and advancement; they were the arbiters of their actions and the masters of their destinies, and if they conducted themselves so as not to lose their own respect they would force the highest gods to respect them. On the other hand, the wise in Israel confessed that man was not sufficient for himself; he neither knew himself, nor was he able to order rightly the way of his life. To the perfect uprightness which might commend him to the Holy One he could not attain, for “ there is not a just man upon earth that doeth good and sinneth not .” 2 “ Every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was evil continually.” 3 This keen sense of uni¬ versal and personal unrighteousness, dominated by the belief that man was originally created not in unrighteous¬ ness, but in the image after the likeness of God, is one of the most characteristic features of the religion of Israel. Israel’s conception of the Divine holiness was purer and loftier, and consequently their sense of human sin¬ fulness was more profound and oppressive, than in the case of any other people. Yet the distance that separated them from God, instead of plunging them into despair, roused spiritual aspiration such as never 1 Farrer, Paganism and Chris - 2 Ecclesiastes vii. 20. tianity, p. 54. 3 Genesis vi. 5. INTRODUCTORY 51 was displayed by any stoic believer in the inherent ability of humanity to realise its ideals. This sense of helplessness and guilt made them long for reconcilia¬ tion, and hope for it as possible, not because they had any faith in themselves, but because they trusted in God, who was showing them the way. So while the heathen philosopher found no necessity for sacrifice in his religion, the Israelite saint felt that he must have a sacrifice to approach God with, because he could not perfectly obey Him. Heathen worship was rooted in man’s confidence in his own ability to gain his end, but the worship of Israel, springing from conscious inability, contrition for sin, and hope in God, was an earnest appeal that God would mercifully undertake for man, and provide a “ covering ” to hide for ever the iniquity which his conscience could not bear. The highest heathen conception of religion was ex¬ pressed by Balaam upon the mountains of Peor. Unto that height the moral consciousness of the best of heathens in individual instances did reach. They came to know what Asaph taught, that God was not altogether a man like themselves, a governor who could be bribed to condone wickedness which was not abandoned but persisted in. It was indeed a very sublime conception, indicating plainly that God in electing Israel had not rejected the Gentiles by with¬ holding from them altogether the light which is the life of men. We must not forget, however, that side by side with the psalm ascribed to Asaph is the fifty-first, one peculiarly representative of the religion of Israel. 52 SACRIFICE The man who produced it was the best type of the human race, for he was only one of unnumbered multi¬ tudes who vainly endeavoured to wash out his sense of sin by lustration, and to pacify his conscience by sacrifice. Despairing of finding any sacrifice of his own which would appease God, unto him it was re¬ vealed that God had provided an acceptable sacrifice in his “ broken spirit and contrite heart.” In lamenting and confessing “ against Thee, Thee only have I sinned,” he was really offering what God had prepared in him, by destroying his self-reliance and humbling his pride that he might trust in the living God. When he realised that he had nothing belonging to him but his sin, he was in a condition in which he was qualified to receive what God alone could create and renew in him, “ the clean heart and the steadfast spirit.” So he found that it was not by doing anything for God, nor by giving anything to God, but by yielding himself up to God, and accepting what God had prepared, that there was restored unto him the assurance of God’s favour and the joy of His salvation . 1 The fifty-first psalm is the divinely-provided com¬ mentary which interprets the system of sacrifice de¬ scribed in the Old Testament. With all its limitations, and notwithstanding all their misuse of it, that system very powerfully convinced Israel of the sinfulness of man, and of his evil condition because of his sinfulness. Then, over and against this conviction it clearly ex¬ hibited the truth that though man has alienated himself 1 Maurice, Sacrifice, p. 94. INTRODUCTORY 53 from, and cannot justify himself before God, God wills to forgive and redeem him, and has initiated, and is making known his process of reconciliation or way of salvation. According to the Bible, sacrifice instead of being man’s endeavour to propitiate God, is God’s divinely revealed method of atoning or covering man’s sin. God and not man is the originator of the accept¬ able sacrifice. The only sacrifice that can atone or cover sin must be devised, prepared, and consummated by God. The foundation of all reconciliation must be sought for in His eternal will and unchangeable pur¬ pose to maintain His order of inflexible holiness, and restore all men to its blessedness. The heathen notion, which alas has too long survived in some theologies, is that God had to be bargained with by man, or by some one acting on man’s behalf, to procure His forgiveness. The truth revealed in Scripture “ bit by bit,” as men were able to receive it, is that God’s forgiveness and plenteous redemption are set forth in the sacrifice of Christ as His own sovereign act of grace, for which He is to be everlastingly adored as the Author and Finisher of our faith. Consequently what we learn from the Gospel is not that sacrifice is worthless, but rather that its worth is superlative, as absolutely indispensable in true religion. The dogma to be received and confessed is not that obedience is better than sacrifice, but that true obedience is impossible unless rooted in sacrifice. The sacrifice, however, which bears this fruit of true obedi¬ ence is neither procured nor offered by man, it is originated and set forth and completed by God. Be- 54 SACRIFICE liind and beneath our “ full purpose of and endeavour after new obedience/’ our repentance must spring from a work of God done for us, to which we can add no¬ thing and from which we can take nothing away. That work is the atonement revealed in the Lamb “ slain from the foundation of the world,” which so far from being exhibited in the Bible as the pro¬ curing cause of God’s good will, is revealed as the method which from pure good will He seeks to save from misery a sinful race, and reconcile them to Him¬ self. The contrasts which we have been considering be¬ tween the sacrifices described in the Old Testament, and those of all other religions, surely indicate a special dispensation in the case of one people, whereby their religious instinct was divinely disciplined and informed by enlarging disclosures of truth as ages passed. The end of this Divine education was to prepare them to receive and to declare the revelation of the mystery in which all men are concerned. In specially training the people of Israel for this mission the Gentiles were not overlooked. If Jehovah sought to “ consecrate ” Israel, it was for the sake of the Gentiles that they also might “ be sanctified through the truth.” We shall endeavour in the next two lectures to indicate in the sacrifices of the great heathen world, from its lowest to its highest grades, some foreshadowings or preparations for the revelation of the sacrifice of God. We hope to show that while the highest heathen minds were pro¬ videntially led to reach out after the Divine revelation, INTRODUCTORY 55 there was divinely maintained in the most degraded sections of heathen humanity the capacity to receive it. Coarse and absurd as were their superstitions, and corrupt as were the rites by which they expressed them, they served to furnish ideas, sentiments, a phraseology which formed an intellectual and spiritual mould, rude indeed and defiled and broken, in which the revelation when it was presented to them could be received as readily as it was by the most cultured of mankind. We do not maintain that heathendom was expecting its Messiah; nor do we maintain that the Israelites under their sacrificial system were taught to look forward to the sacrifice which would completely abro¬ gate it. The Israelites in all probability considered sufficient the measure of revelation accorded to them, and whatever they may have expected, they certainly did not expect the revelation which was ultimately oiven. But we maintain that the economy of the Law and the Prophets was a preparation without which the revelation recorded in the New Testament would not have been possible; and we also maintain that all other religions, if correctly observed, will show that however far men have swerved from the truth, they have not been allowed to fall out of the scope of God’s redemptive purpose. At whatever point of de¬ velopment or degradation men confront us, they confess to necessities and beliefs which only the Gospel which fulfils them can interpret. The design of all great movements in Providence is only apparent when the end is reached. And the sacrifice of Christ, 56 SACRIFICE although, as has been truly observed , 1 it was not a sacri¬ fice after any Jewish or Gentile form known to us, does yet so interpret and satisfy all that mankind every¬ where sought to obtain by their peculiar and solemn rites, that we can truly say that what Jew and Gentile were unconsciously feeling after was the Divine re- demption secured through His blood. 1 Jowett, Epistle of St. Paul , ii. 562. LECTURE II SACRIFICE IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM The contrasts which separate the savage from the civilised man are numerous and very emphatic. His ways are not our ways, his thoughts are not our thoughts. His gods are devils in our esteem, while “ no spiritual being in his mythology possesses the characteristics of Satan.” His religion is expressed in very revolting orgies and ferocious rites, involving the immolation of human victims, and tortures inflicted upon himself. Strangest of all, his worship in some cases is directed only to powers that are malevolent, for he reasons that it would be wasted upon the friendly and is only required to buy off the hostile . 1 Yet in spite of contradictions which seem to imply only antipodal relations to him, we are compelled, as soon as he con¬ fronts us in his wretchedness, to admit his claim to essential brotherhood with us. For, after all, the terms “savage,” “barbarian,” “civilised,”applied to different sec¬ tions of mankind, are not absolute but relative. They 1 Bancroft, Native Races of the Origin of Civ., p. 202,4th eel.; Tylor Pacific , vol. ii. p. 1 ; Lubbock, Prim. Cult., vol. ii. pp* 296-7. 58 SACRIFICE designate only broad and shifting stages of human history. On the surface of the highest civilisation are found resem¬ blances to barbarism which are as striking as its contrasts, and we have only to pierce it but very slightly to dis¬ cover unmistakable traces of not very ancient savagery. The attention which has been increasingly directed to those suggestive resemblances indicates an entirely new departure in the study of religion. Following the lead given long ago by Clement and Eusebius , 1 Outram and Spencer 2 became the pioneers of the science of Comparative Religion. Their range of re¬ search was limited to the classical literature of Greece and Rome, and the writings of the Jewish Rabbin; but now the recovery of the great literatures and monuments Egypt and of the East has not only enlarged the field of research, it has also enabled us to verify or correct at first hand what their authorities only learned from hearsay. In addition the intellectual horizon includes peoples who have left behind them neither literature nor monuments, and it is maintained by some prominent expounders of the new science, that every inquiry into religion should either start from the beliefs and rites of such peoples, or should be constantly controlled and checked by reference to them . 3 The aim is to discover what are called primitive beliefs, and it is assumed that these are more likely to be found in the unwritten traditions of barbarous peoples than in the oldest litera- 1 Stromata; Prcep. Evangelii. 3 Frazer, The Golden Bough, 2 Op. cit. supra; also Fonta- pref. p. viii. nelle, Origin of Fables. IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 59 ture extant. The coarse superstition of the savage is thus for scientific purposes as valuable as the religion of the most civilised of ancient nations. Yea, one volume of folk-lore and custom gathered from the most abject aboriginal tribes may outweigh in respect of materials a whole library of sacred books of the East. While neither supporting nor controverting the theory that the crude conceptions of the savage repre¬ sent the germs out of which during innumerable ages of struggle our highest religious beliefs have been de¬ veloped, we thankfully avail ourselves of such light as Mannhardt , 1 Bancroft, Tylor, Lubbock, M‘Lennan, Frazer, and many others have thrown upon the sacrifice of peoples found in the lowest strata of humanity. Our most correct knowledge of what man is must be derived not merely from contemplation of the height to which he has risen, but also of the depth from which he has sprung, or into which he has fallen. Nothing which man in the lowest stage of existence has thought or felt about religion can be useless or unimportant for us to know. If we accept the unity of the human race as a clearly established fact, if we believe that all over the world, in spite of much external diversity, the life in every human being indicates a common fountain, mani¬ fests the same ancestral taint and points forward to a common destiny, then there is not a feature even of savage humanity without significance for us, nor is 1 Mannhardt, DerBaum-Kultus und Feld-Kulte, 1877 ; Mytholo- der Germanen und Hirer Naclibar- gische Forschungen, 1884. stdmme, 1875 ; Antike Wald- 60 SACRIFICE there a savage custom, however revolting, from which some lesson may not he drawn. If only we have suffi¬ cient patience to consider, and sufficient sympathy to interpret them, we shall find that while the rites are rude and most disgusting, the beliefs which inspired them, and the intention which they expressed, may he regarded as crude and embryonic types of the Faith which all over the world is being accepted as the true ground of human hope, the true source of human comfort. It is a significant fact that what has been called “ the abstruse metaphysical doctrine of the Atonement ” has only to be properly presented to savage peoples to be readily apprehended and heartily believed. The history of missions powerfully instructs us that the secret of the success of Christianity is the revelation of the Cross of its Founder. Even in grades of humanity as low as those represented by hordes herding like animals, having no fixed habitations, but only cover¬ ings of bark and leaves, and holes in the earth when these materials fail them, the story of the Divine sacri¬ fice has only to be told to produce an effect like that of a new creation. Intelligence has been evoked, the moral sense, so feeble as to seem extinct, has been quickened, the brute in the nature sinks, and the man, conscious that he is not what he ought to be, rises and flees to the Divine mercy. What some anthropologists assert the savage never manifests, the sense of sin, missionaries everywhere assure us the savage experi¬ ences when confronted by that supreme expression of IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 61 love given in the substitution of the Divine man for the sinner . 1 These are truths which mankind are capable of receiving only at certain stages of intellectual develop¬ ment. “ The soil of ideas is the same,” 2 but like the soil it has to be cultivated before the germs of certain truths can sprout in it. There is a long series represented in the development of the earth’s capacity to produce at first only the microscopic growths found upon the summits of our oldest mountains, and then ages after the rich grass or grain covering its plains. In like manner there is a great and prolonged travail of intellectual culture represented by many stages, between man’s earliest recorded ex¬ planations of natural phenomena and those of our latest science. Now the marvel is that while the minds of even civilised men have to be educated to receive and believe certain scientific truths, this so-called abstruse dogma of the sacrifice of God for man commends itself to the most degraded members of the human race, and proves among them, as it does among the most highly cultured, “ the power of God unto salvation. This is a fact in religion of no mean significance, and however it is to be explained we seem justified in finding in it a manifest adaptation of the truth disclosed to man’s elemental necessities as a moral and spiritual creature. It is so difficult to ascertain the beliefs of savages, that it is no wonder some observers have concluded that they have no religion at all. This conclusion is as erroneous as the other one, that they have no moral 1 History of Moravian Missions, 2 Miiller, Physical Religion, p. pp. 198, 281, 373, 440. 211. 62 SACRIFICE standard, and are even devoid of the moral sentiment. Though not expressed in formal precepts, savages have a very binding standard in an uncodified consensus of public opinion. A savage, far from being free to do as he pleases, is governed by a most complicated set of customs, which form in some cases the most despotic of tyrannies. He has a strong sense of law, thus under¬ stood, though his sense of right may be so feeble as to regard theft and murder virtues if practised against strangers. The fact that he regards them as tokens of « v ir ” in the individual, is itself an evidence of the moral sentiment either imperfectly developed or greatly corrupted . 1 And so it is in regard to religion. The very rudest savage practises periodically certain rites, which, when properly examined, are found to be rooted in religious beliefs. His religion, however, is a mystery, in which the stranger and the uninitiated have neither lot nor part. Their presence when he practises it would be profanity ; and the divulgence of its secrets is con¬ sidered a sacrilege to be avoided, even as it would be punished by his own death. It is difficult, theiefore, in many cases to ascertain the real intention of his ceremonies; and the difficulty is increased by the fact that he has no organised system of belief. His mental condition is chaotic, his thoughts are confused and corrupt, broken together without order or any attempt at classification. There are great differences in the degree of intellectual capacity among savages, but there i Quatrefages, L'Espece Hu - 482; Tylor, Primitive Culture, maine, 10th edition, 1890, p. vol. i. p. 380. IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 63 are several conceptions common to all, which, as regu¬ lating their relations and the daily business of life, may be regarded as their unformulated creed. The religion of the savage is best described by the word Animism. It is founded upon the very realistic opinion that in everything complex there is a spirit, which forms its unity . 1 Any object which strikes his ignorant imagination forcibly enough, induces the belief that it is as living and conscious as he is himself. He conceives of himself and of it as doubles, having within them miniature selves of more subtle and less tangible materials, moving and inspiring all their actions. Thus, all things in the world are to him personal beings, moved and directed as he is, not by soul, in our sense of the word as immaterial and immortal, but by this double inner self, incorporate in them. It is his way of explaining his personal activity, and the inactivity of death, which to him is the result of the inner self departing or being willed or stolen away. As to where the inner self goes after death, he does not generally know, and is not curious to inquire, for to him the only life worth living is the life that now is, and his vigilant endeavour is to save and keep it, by preventing the inner self from leaving or from being extracted from his body by an enemy . 2 And his enemies are innumerable, being represented 1 Renan, History of the People ii. p. 138 ; Journal of Anthropol. of Israel, i. p. 35. Instit. , viii. p. 282 ; Relations of 2 Burton, Abeokuta, i. p, 204 ; the Jesuits in Canada, 1639, p. Williams, Fiji and Fijians , i. p. 43 ; Rinks, Tales and Traditions 242 ; Mariner, Tonga Islands, of the Eskimo. 64 SACRIFICE not only by the visible and tangible, but by such invisible and intangible forces as the stormy wind and the thunder, and the ghostly shadows that haunt him in nightmare. The events in his dreams are considered by him to be as real as those of his waking hours . 1 Everything strange to him is regarded as sinister in its intent, every un¬ known face is that of an enemy, or of one who is bent more upon injuring than helping him. He is thus living in a world all the more dangerous that the distinction drawn by us between the natural and supernatural is hardly conceivable by him. And yet he can affoid to move about in it with considerable confidence, for all the powers or beings by which he is suirounded, even when hostile, are believed to occupy relations of toler¬ able equality to himself. Some may be confessed to be stronger or more ferocious than himself, but they all act upon impulses and from motives like his own, and all are as liable as he is to be influenced by fear, and hope, and self-interest. His relations to them are so conceived that he imagines he can not only match, but even manipulate them to his own advantage. If they do not yield to his persuasions, or promises, or coaxings, he can protect himself against their ill-will, and even compel them to do or to grant what he wishes . 2 This he believes he can do by the power of his fetish. Now Fetishism, though generally referred to as a very low form of religion, can hardly be called a religion. 1 Lubbock, Origin of Civilisa- p. 31 ; Keary, “Early Religious Hon and Primitive, Condition of Development,” Nineteenth Cent. Man, 4tb edition, p. 214 seq. Mag., August 18/8. 2 Frazer, The Golden Bough , i. IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 65 Lubbock 1 lias properly described it as essentially “ anti- religious,” for though recognising a ritual of sacrifice, the savage practises it not as worship to express homage to a superior, but as sorcery to control or coerce him. The fetish, though it may be a likeness or substitute of the object which he fears, is the reverse of an idol. It is not an object of reverence commanding a worshipper, but a means devised to capture an invisible power, and to keep it under control. The savage employs it just as he uses some rude imitation which he has made of his enemy, or when, unequal to that effort, just as he uses some part of his enemy which he has been able to pro¬ cure. Armed with a few of his hairs, a bit of his nails, a little of his saliva, or a crumb of his food ,' 2 he believes that he has his enemy thoroughly at his command ; for what he does to these things is so felt by his enemy that, when they are injured he is wounded, and when they are destroyed he cannot survive. The ritual of fetishism, therefore, is not religious either in character or intent, but purely magical. Supported by it the savage can confront even the play of the mighty forces of nature without much concern. Unlike his civilised brother, who, the more he knows and learns to utilise the laws of nature, is the more impressed by his helplessness, he, with a very limited range of thought and imagination, believes that he can influence the course of nature to an almost limitless extent. 1 Loc. cit. p. 343. Inhabitants, pp. 86, 167 ; Turner, Nineteen Years in Polynesia , p. 2 Taylor, New Zealand and its 90. F 66 SACRIFICE Just as he may overpower his foes in flesh and blood by force, or circumvent them by cunning, so he fancies that by spells and charms he can reduce and keep under his control the forces which we consider untameable. He has traditions of an ancestor who caught and wrestled with the sun till he forced him to reveal his name, and so lamed him as to make him ever after move through the sky at a more moderate pace. He has heard of another hero who shut up the sun in a cave for weeks ; and so it is easy for him to believe that by certain rites he can delay or hasten the close of day, cause the rain to fall, and rouse or silence the storm. In like manner he can defend himself against the ills which we consider the inevitable entail or heritage of human life. Sickness and death in the savage conception are not natural events, but the work of an enemy; but by the medicine of his wise man sickness can be extracted or expelled from the body ; and when death has become the lot of a kinsman, the foe who caused it can similarly be found out and destroyed . 1 In practising fetishism and shamanism—which latter is just a higher form of fetishism designed to influence and compel gods not identified with the powers of nature, but supposed to be superior to man and to be 1 Williams, Polynesian Re¬ searches, vol. ii. p. 228 : Short- land, Traditions of the New Zea¬ landers, p. 117 ; Bonwick, Daily Life of the Tasmanians, p. 178 ; Dubois, Description of the People of India , p. 347 ; De Brosses, Da Culte des dieux fetiches; Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, vol. ii. p. 384 ; Carr, Australian Races, vol. iii. p. 145 ; Astley, Collection of Voyages, vol. ii. p. 217 ; Lubbock, Origin of Civilisa¬ tion, p. 328 ; Frazer, Golden Bough, i. pp. 24, 25. IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 67 living in a higher world of their own—savage and barbarous peoples act in self-defence against powers believed to be dangerous, or likely to be used for their advantage . 1 The real religion, however, of a savage is the outcome of another belief, and is expressed by different rites. It is rooted in the peculiar con¬ ceptions which he has formed of his relations to the animal and vegetable kingdoms of nature. He is simply confused with a world of being from which we are separated by an abyss. All things animate and even inanimate, occupying as he thinks a common level of life and passion, are related to him as superiors, inferiors, or equals. He is distinguished from them not by his nature but only by his personality, and he treats them accordingly ; those which he dreads because of their ferocity he propitiates, and he conciliates those which he must use for his sustenance. In felling a tree, or in slaying an animal he believes he exposes himself to the vengeance of its kindred just as if he had slain a man. So in all such cases he apologises for the act, entreats his victims not to be angry, and by various devices tries to appease them, and make com¬ pensation to their kin for their loss. Zoolatry is thus almost universal among savages, and instead of the fear of man being upon the animal, the fear of the animal is too much upon the man . 2 1 Siberia and the Polar Sea, p. 123 ; Graali, Voyage to Green¬ land , p. 123 ; Williams, Fiji and the Fijians , vol. i. p. 224 ; Myers, The Greek Oracles, j) p. 7, 8. 2 In cutting up animals for cooking, some savage tribes are very careful to lay aside the eyes, ears, lungs, and other special organs. Some tribes so 68 SACRIFICE In addition to the creatures which have to be propitiated or conciliated when slain for the sake of their flesh or skin, there are particular animals which are never slain, and never molested because held to be sacred as kindred. They are considered to be related to the savage horde not “ as a patron saint was adopted by a mediaeval knight ” 1 but in the most literal of senses. The blood in the veins of both is supposed to be identical; they believe that they are united by physi¬ cal descent from it, or with it from a common ancestor. In some instances that human ancestor is supposed to live in the animal in disguise, and so not only the ancient doctrine of transmigration, but the modern theory of man s evolution from the animals, is believed and em¬ ployed by the lowest savages to account for their origin . 2 This phase of zoolatry, designated Totemism, pre¬ vailed among the North American Indians, and has been found in various parts of the world. Indeed traces or survivals of it are discoverable in the folk-lore and customs of the most civilised nations. The problem of widely separated as the North American Indian and the Arabs will thus not eat of the “ sinew of the thigh.” In other cases not a bone of the animal must be broken ; and in others again, when the carcase has been dis¬ membered and the flesh has been consumed, the bones are carefully arranged in anatomical order, and buried so that the creature may find a resurrection in the under world. Brunton, Myths of the New World, p. 279 ; Peti- tot, Indian Traditions of N. W. Canada, p. 32; Hodgson, Letters from North America, vol. i. p. 244 ; Frazer, The Golden Lough, ii. p. 124, note p. 132 ; Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 360, note. 1 Bancroft, Nat. Races, vol. iii. p. 128. 2 Schoolcraft, Archceol., vol. v. p. 215 ; Folk Lore Record, vol. ii. p. 22. IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 69 its origin is admitted to be still unsolved. The practice of naming a man and his family after a particular animal instead of accounting for the superstition may have been originated by it. Herbert Spencer , 1 who finds its origin in a “ misinterpretation of nicknames of particular animals first applied to individuals, and afterwards confounded with their ancestors already reverenced, “ attributes to verbal misunderstandings far more influence than in spite of the so-called com¬ parative mythology, they ever seem to have exercised.” 2 The hypothesis which founds it in the desire to claim descent from the animals which are superior to man in strength, or cunning, or longevity/ is contradicted by the fact that frequently the totem is a creature inferior to man as, for example, the turtle, the beaver, and even the mouse. One of the cleverest guesses is that lately advanced by Mr. Frazer , 4 who accounts for it by the endeavour to guard the double or inner self by externalising and hiding it in some natural object. According to this superstition, traces of which survive in many of our own nursery tales, so closely connected is the man with the creature in which his life is supposed to be hid, that he will pant when it is chased, faint when it faints, and die if it be killed. And yet as long as it is uninjured he is believed to be invulnerable . 5 This explanation throws 260, 334. 4 The Golden Bough , ii. pp. 279, 335. 5 Anthrop. Institute Rev., xv. p. 416, and xviii. p. 56. 1 Principles of Sociology, vol. i. p. 367. 2 Frazer, Art. in Ency. Brit., vol. xxiii. pp. 467-476. 3 Lubbock, loc. cit. pp. 206, 70 SACRIFICE some light upon the yearly “ dances ” by which savage youths of both sexes are matriculated into the rights and responsibilities of clanship. Circumcision, the “ savage rite of confirmation,” is a prominent feature in these ceremonies, and through the operation the individual is admitted into the life of the tribe and hence of its totem, just as in the ancient mysteries candidates through severe exercise were initiated into communion with the god. The object of the whole function is said to be the extraction of the “ double ” and its transference to the totem. As it proceeds the youth is supposed to die, being really thrown into a deathlike trance, and his recovery, accounted as a resurrection, is attributed to fresh life infused into him from his totem. With good right therefore does he call himself ever after by its name, seeing he believes that he has died to his own old life, and lives only by the life which he has with it and from it . 1 Whatever be the explanation, Totemism is a phase of religion. The totem is regarded as so sacred on account of the mysterious connection existing between it and the savage clan that no member dare kill it, or eat of its flesh, or wear its skim 2 If a god is conceived of apart from the totem, the animal is regarded as the living nexus between the god and the clan, and is treated not only with affection but reverence as more essential to the general welfare than any other kinsman. Rela- 1 Chalmers, Pioneering in Nero 2 Casalis, The Basulos, p. 211; Guinea, p. 85 ; Bentley, Life on Livingstone, Travels in South the Congo, p. 78 ; Catlin, North Africa, p. 13 ; Dalton, Ethnolog. American Indians, i.- p. 36 scq. Description of Bengal, p. 254. IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 71 tionship is determined by the totem, tor the individual is born of its stock, and from it kinship is reckoned. All so related to the totem are mutually obliged to fight for and defend and avenge each other, while outside of that circle of kinship no obligation is acknowledged or even felt. “The sanctity of a kins¬ man’s life and that of the totem are not two things but one; for ultimately the only thing that is sacred is the blood, which is identified with the common tribal life, and whoever partakes in that life is sacred in the esti¬ mation of all the clan.” 1 Among our Aryan ancestors archaic worship was that of the family, and the earliest traceable sacrifice was the domestic meal; but savages have no family, the wife never eats with her lord, who feeds just when he can. Savages, however, are said to feast together as a clan upon certain occasions, and to these feasts only kinsmen are admitted. They are sacrificial in their import, for all slaughter of animals unless of those killed in hunting is serious, and a domestic animal can only be slaughtered with the consent of the clan, and for its use. According to the savage creed, feasting seals friendship, and maintains full and strong for the common benefit the life of all. If at such a feast the god was supposed to be present, it was not to ratify any compact between kinsmen, but as a kinsman to share with them what was provided, to renew mutual i Prof. Robertson Smith, Kin- Worship of Plants and Animals; ship and Marriage in Early Fortnightly Review , October and Arabia, p. 186 seq .; Religion of the November 1869, and lebruaiy Semites , pp. 82, 271 ; M‘Lennan, 1870. SACRIFICE obligations and promote solid fellowship . 1 So the savage idea of sacrifice, though involving an act of homage, is far removed from that of tribute rendered as tax, or from that of fine paid to appease wrath, or of bribe offered to secure goodwill. Rooted in confidence in the goodwill of the god as one with the clan and really interested in its welfare, the feast, no matter how revolting it may appear to us, is an act of com¬ munion, a sacrament rather than a sacrifice. It would indeed be illegitimate to connect their coarse conception of physical union with their totem with the idea of spiritual communion with Deity which inspires our loftiest act of Christian worship ; but surely it is interesting to find in the very lowest strata of humanity the sense that through special exercises and acts, man, in virtue of one sphere of his nature, can hold intercourse with power believed to be divine. It is also worthy of note that such religion as does exist, instead of expressing abject terror of the gods, is inspired by trust in their kindly intent, and by desire to promote good fellowship with them. The materials for an ordinary clan feast would, generally speaking, be such as could be offered to the totem, for upon no occasion could a savage eat of that which he could not present to it. Whatever the totem was supposed to affect would be acceptable, and S23ecially acceptable would be the totem of a hostile or alien tribe. If the totem were carnivorous, flesh and blood would be shared with it; if the clan were cannibal, 1 Religion of the Semites, p. 294. IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 73 they would feast with the god upon a human victim when such could be procured by the capture of an enemy or of a stranger. Not even cannibals, however, will eat the flesh of a kinsman whose life is the same as their own, and for the same reason the life of the sacred animal was strictly protected not merely by law but by religion. . It was not only a crime which would surely be visited by the vengeance of man, but also a sacrilege which the god would severely punish by misfor¬ tune and fearful disaster. This belief, as far as zoolatry has left any traces of itself, appears to have been universal. Injury or slaughter inflicted upon the sacred animal was regarded as not only a criminal invasion of the sanctity of kinship, but also as an assault upon one on whose life and strength the health and prosperity of the whole clan depended. So unpardonable, therefore, was the atrocity that leprosy, madness, and dreadful death were considered its just, yea its natural penalty . 1 1 Herodotus, ii. 47 ; Plutarch, Be Superstition c. 10 ; and Isis et Osiris , 8 ; iElian, Nat. Anirn., x. 16 ; Turner, Samoa, p. 17 seq ., p. 50 seq. ; Mariner, Tonga Islands, i. 434, ii. 82, 222 seq. ; M‘Kenzie, The Orange River, p. 135 ; Frazer, Golden Bough, ii. p. 51 ; Art. “Totemism,” Ency. Brit., vol. xxiii. p. 468 ; Tylor, Prim. Cult., ii. p. 213 seq. In this belief Mr. Frazer and Professor Robertson Smith find the explanation of tabooed animals or creatures regarded as unclean. They suggest that a savage conception of sanctity and uncleanness may not have been differentiated. The savage regards it dangerous to eat, or touch, or look at what he considers very sacred, just as if it was “un¬ canny.” In Isaiah lxv. 3-4, and lxvi. 3, 17, the eaters of the abominable sacrifices in the gar¬ dens are represented as saying: “Stand off, for we will sanctify them,” in the heathen sense of injuring, not in the Bible sense of purifying. The savage’s idea of uncleanness was as far removed from the biblical idea of it as was his idea of holiness. His ideas of both are said to have met in his 74 SACRIFICE • Yet although it was most sacred, as instinct with their own life and that of the god, there were occasions of public calamity when it must he slain in order to preserve them from destruction. It is to be observed that on all occasions, when under the pressure of necessity, it must give up its life for its clan, the savage made a sacrifice of its slaughter. It was slain with the greatest publicity, for as far as was possible every kinsman was held as a consenting party and made a partaker of the act, so that the responsibility for it was equally and universally distributed. The life was taken with the greatest precaution so as to clear the actual slayer of the charge of murder. Devices were resorted to, survivals of which are found in the altar rites of ancient Greece, by which the animal was made to appear a willing victim freely sur¬ rendering its life. In some cases the slayer was attacked; the axe which he had used was tried, con¬ demned, and cast away ; while over the victim as great lamentation was made as for a slain kinsman and chief . 1 conception of taboo, which, applied to animals, meant that they were sacrosanct rather than polluted. So originally the pig may have been forbidden to the Egyptians, as the bear was to the Iroquois, and the deer to the Khonds of India, because it was sacred. It was spared from slaughter and defended from in¬ jury because supposed to be the visible and essential bond be¬ tween the clan and the god on whose life the prosperity of the clan depended. — Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes , ii. p. 49 ; Camp¬ bell, Wild Tribes of Khondistan, p. 26 ; Frazer, The Golden Bough, ii. 51 seq. ; Art. “Taboo,” Ency. Brit., xxiii. pp. 15-18 ; Robert¬ son Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 272. 1 Porphyry, De Abstin., ii. 29 seq. ; Pausanias, i. 24, 4, and i. IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 75 In addition to these exceptional occasions, when the animal, although sacred, was sacrificed for the common good, on the ground that necessity knows no law, there were periodical occasions when it was sacrificed just because it was sacred, and therefore the only proper victim. It had to yield its flesh and blood for its clan when in perfect health and strength, and entirely free from blemish or fault, because it thus embodied at its very best the life which was to be given lor them. The whole aim of savage totemistic observance was to secure the healthy maintenance of the life-bond between the god and the clan. On this account the life which was so precious to them must be kept full and strong in the sacred animal. Their care of it was similar to the attention which the Egyptians lavished upon their sacred bulls; for by neither people was the sacred animal allowed to grow old, or to become feeble, or to die a natural death. Should that catastrophe occur, the con¬ sequences would be unspeakably evil, and so both peoples found a ready mode of averting it by the sacrifice of the animal before it showed the slightest symptom of decay. An opportunity was thus afforded of transferring its life into a more vigorous successor. If the victim was slam in a condition of disease or of declining strength, the life transferred would be correspondingly enfeebled, and so by killing it when free from every blemish, and from the slightest symptom of decline, they secured the 28, 10 ; Varro, Be Re Rustica , ii. The Golden Bough, ii. p. 39 seq. ; 5, 4 ; Robertson Smith, Religion Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, of the Semites, p. 286 seq. ; Frazer, ii. p. 232. 76 SACRIFICE transference of its life at the very best for revival in another and stronger embodiment . 1 The Egyptians maintained their sacred bulls in more than royal state and luxury for over twenty years, and then drowned them with great solemnity ; but some barbarous peoples sacrificed their sacred animals annu¬ ally, at periods marked by the lowering of the temper¬ ature and the fading and death of vegetation. The vastness of the scale upon which this yearly decay occurs, together with man’s intimate dependence upon nature for subsistence, has always and everywhere affected powerfully the untutored mind. In sucli climatic conditions life is low, and mortality increases among ill-fed, scantily-clad, and rudely sheltered peoples. Their own lives and the life of all things seem to be imperilled, and the danger to nature and man must be averted at any cost. To this end the life that is most precious because most sacred, must be sacrificed ; and more than sacrificed. Believing that they and the victim 1 Probably this superstition ac¬ counts for tlie custom, to us so unnatural, of killing beloved parents and honoured chiefs and ministers of religion. Turner {Samoa, p. 335) tells us a Poly¬ nesian chief counted it a disgrace not to be buried alive ; and that peoples, not savage like the Poly¬ nesian, but civilised like the East Indians, killed their kings and their priests in the fulness of their strength, has been abundantly proved by the many instances cited in the Golden Bough, vol. i. p. 214 seq., and ii. p. 220 seq. In some cases they had to commit suicide, when the limit of their supposed usefulness was reached ; in others they were allowed to retain office only as long as they could defend their own life against violent as¬ sault. The reason in all such cases is found in the belief that the divine life was in them for the sake of those whom they ruled and served, and so it was essential that it should never be allowed to deteriorate. IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM M “■* / / had a life in common, they sought to obtain the incor¬ poration with their own of the life which was slain on their behalf in the most realistic of ways. The sacred victim must not only give its life for them, it must give itself to them. They must eat of the flesh and drink of the blood of their sacrifice in order to having its life re¬ newed in themselves. Such sacrifices were wholly con¬ sumed by the sacrifices, and after a most disgusting fashion. In the oldest form of Arab sacrifice, described by Prof. Robertson Smith , 1 the sacred animal was bound upon a rude altar of stone, and when the slaughterer had led the worshipper round it in procession to the chanting of spells, he inflicted the first wound, and “ while the last words of the wild chant were upon the lips of the others, he hastened to drink the warm gushing blood. Forthwith all proceeded to hack the still living animal with their knives, and to devour the quivering flesh in such haste that in the short interval between the rise of the day-star, which marked the commencement of the rite, and the melting away of its rays in the sun¬ rise, the entire body, skin, and entrails were consumed.” Similar sacrifices—for example, that of a cow buffalo by the people of Todas, that of the lamb by the negro tribe of Morus, and notably that of the bear in Japan, described by Mrs. Gordon Cumming and by Miss Bird—present the same horrible features . 2 Yet when 1 Religion of the Semites, pp. 301, 319. - Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, 1885, pp. 269, 275 seq. ; Reed, Japan, vol. i. p. 446 ; Mar¬ shall, Travels among the Todas, p. 129 seq. ; Felkins, “ Notes on the Madi or Moru Tribe of Central Africa,” Proceed. Royal Society, Edin., vol. vii. 1882, p. 78 SACRIFICE we master the revulsion excited by the record of such rites, and endeavour to inquire into their intention, we find that, though self-interest was the all-prevailing motive in them, the orgies were not attributable to cruel self-gratification. The desire to secure the life-powers of the sacred animal in all their strength, accounts for all that is revolting. Savages, who have to endure much physical suffering, make light of inflicting it ; but their purpose in devouring the living flesh and warm blood of the victim was not to cause pam. They believed that thus they would recruit their own physical vigour from the source which they considered the most sacred. For the same reason, when they performed such a sacrifice, they were careful to consume the whole car¬ case so that none of its efficacy might be lost. What on any occasion they could not wholly eat, was scrupu¬ lously buried or destroyed; for, should an enemy get possession of a hair of the victim, or the least frag¬ ment of its bones, he could by sorcery work through it upon all of them the most deadly mischief, and ren¬ der futile their most earnest endeavour to transfer to themselves the “ vir” of their sacrifice . 1 336 scq. ; Golden Bough, ii. 100 s eq. 1 The belief is widespread ana deep rooted among barbarous peoples that the peculiar quality of an animal is transferred to the eater of it. The North American Indians loved venison because it made them swift; the South American Indians eschewed heavy meat because it made them slug¬ gish. The eating of hares and timorous creatures was supposed to make men faint-hearted, while the flesh and blood of lions, tigers, and wolves gave courage and vig¬ our to the fearful and feeble. Cannibal savages everywhere, and some peoples not savages, have complimented their dead enemies IX ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 79 With their annual sacrifices, intended to reinforce the divine life in a savage clan, there was often asso¬ ciated the annual cleansing of the kraal and the expul¬ sion of evils from the land. Weakness, sickness, and death being always attributed to sorcery or to the interference of malignant beings, a special endeavour was made upon such occasions to exorcise and banish them. All over the savage world the new year was inaugurated by ceremonies designed to secure this end. They were generally preceded or followed by a period of license, though among some North American tribes by devouring tlieir hearts ; yea, some tribes have eaten the ashes of their forefathers, to whom they paid Divine honours, in order to become possessed of their virtues. — Bancroft, Nat. Races of the Pacific , iii. 316 ; Dalton, Ethno¬ logy of Bengal, p. 33 ; Adair’s History of the A merican Indians , p. 133 ; St. John, Life in the Forests of the Far East, i. pp. 186, 206 ; Ellis, Polynesian Researches , i. 358 ; Callaway, Nursery Tales and Traditions, and History of the Zulus, p. 163, note; Buchanan. The Shire Highlands, p. 138 ; Frazer, The Golden Bough, i. p. 166, and ii. 85 seq. The same beliefs which inspired the savage to devour his living sacrifice, accounts for all customs by which men seek to unite them¬ selves with one another, or with a god. The blood covenant with the living, in which two persons become one by mingling or drink¬ ing each other’s blood ; the mourner’s covenant with the dead, sealed by the shedding of his own blood upon the corpse, are trace¬ able to it. In like manner, tattoo¬ ing among savages at puberty, like the stigmata of the Syrian priests, is a symbol and pledge that a life bond has been estab¬ lished between the totem or god and the worshipper. But where- ever there was laceration needed, the wounding had almost no value, though the blood set free and its application had much. The sav¬ age revered it as the life; and in sacrificing the sacred animal, it was not its death that was sup¬ posed to do good, but the life which he desired to appropriate. —Reville, Hihbert Lecture, 1884, p. 219 ; Robertson Smith, Re¬ ligion of the Semites, pp. 303, 306, 316 ; Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, p. 213 seq.; Spener, Be Leg. Heb., ii. 14 ; Trumbull, The Blood Covenant, p. 7 seq. 80 SACRIFICE they were introduced by scrupulous cleansing of the wigwam and all its furniture, and by purification of the body, not only externally, but also internally by the use of cathartics. In such ceremonies the sacred animal was sacrificed with special solemnity, and upon it was laid the accumulated misfortunes and troubles ot the whole tribe. The custom, however, was not universally asso¬ ciated with the death of a victim. Some South Sea Islanders, and some tribes in Borneo, used to pack the evils that afflicted them in a prao and send them out to sea ; and some aboriginal tribes in India still inclose them in a jar, which they consign to the river. In a great many instances reported from all quarters, how¬ ever, a victim was demanded. By some tribes a miser¬ able human being was actually slaughtered ; by others the human victim was bound to a stake along with the animal one, and when it was slain he was driven away into the jungle or desert, as one whom no one dare lodge or feed or even converse with, because lie had become accursed on account of the load of evil which he was supposed to bear away . 1 In all these cases, pathetic travesties of solemnities described in the Old Testament, the sacrifice though piacular was performed without any moral intention. It was not offered to procure forgiveness for offences then confessed, or to reconcile the offerers with an i Bancroft, Native Races , etc., iii. 168 ; Frazer, Totemism, p. 48 ; The Golden Bough, ii. pp. 48, 203, 206 ; Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 386 , Crowtlier, The Gospel on the Banks of the Niger, pp. 343-345 ; Allge- vneine Missions - Zeitschrift, xii. (1885), pp. 476, 478. IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 81 alienated god. It is a misuse of language to call it tlie “ savage day of atonement,” 1 for of the expiatory rites described in the Old Testament the savage had no con¬ ception, and such ideas as he formed of his own could not possibly have intruded into the ceremonials de¬ scribed in the Old Testament. His sacrifices proceeded from no sense of wrong-doing or wrong-being in our sense of the word. He simply desired to defend him¬ self by purging his land of the ills to which human life is liable. When the sacred animal died to give its life for and to him, it was understood to do so in the most realistic sense. So if he had evil to expel from his village it was only such evil as is represented by trouble or disease or death, or by the hostile powers which brought them upon him, and he sought to expel them by no other means than magic and sorcery. It is surely, however, a fact of great and solemn import, that in the very lowest strata or debris of humanity, there are found ideas and sentiments suggesting analogies to the lofty spiritual truths of our religion. The customs are horrible, but the beliefs upon which they rest, if they have been correctly inter¬ preted for us, constitute a powerful appeal to our sympathetic consideration. In reading such expositions of savage religious rites as we have referred to, we are always haunted by the fear that the interpreter has unconsciously put into them not a little of what he professes to have found. It is very difficult to guard against the subreptio vilis , and to keep ourselves from Religion of the Semites, pp. 389, 392. G 1 82 SACRIFICE reading into them our own beliefs. We do well, how¬ ever, to deal generously with the very lowest religions, and to interpret them more by their reach than by their actual grasp. In any case there have been brought to light by these researches materials which can surely be utilised by the Christian missionary in repairing the desolations and in rebuilding the ruined shrines of humanity. In their most corrupted or least developed form they indicate capacity for appropriating and assimilating the regenerating truths of our religion. For example, the savage’s concept of himself as double is either a lingering trace in his nature of the truth ot the existence of the soul which has been imprinted upon the constitution of all men, or it is a prophetic feeling after it. His confession that he is not sufficient to pre¬ serve or keep alive his own soul, and his endeavour to find an external security for it, suggest surely our own daily confession, and also the blessed sacrament, through which in infancy, our life was committed to the protec¬ tion and worship of the Holy Trinity. It seems almost blasphemous to associate his coarse and childish super¬ stition with our sublime belief in spiritual oneness w ith Christ, with whom in God “ our life is hid.” 1 And yet St. Paul might have employed it to teach the savage to trust for salvation in One whom he knew to be able “ to keep the deposit which he had committed to His care. Then, the savage’s belief in the unity of all the mem¬ bers of his clan with one another and with the god is an “ unconscious prophecy,” though monstrously expressed, i Coloss. iii. 3. 2 2 Timothy i. 12. IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 83 of one of the first truths proclaimed in our Bible, and which lies at the root and is the inspiration of Chris¬ tianity. It proves that the consecration of kinship is one of those thoughts which live imperishable even in sections of humanity so degraded that the family, man’s oldest and most divine institution, does not seem to exist among them. It was not in his private capacity, but as one ol the clan, that he was admitted to the feast of the god, and by the act of partaking he bound himself by the closest obligations of brotherhood to every member of it. Christianity is the only religion which aims at the consecration of the family and the sanctification of the community. The worship of God as our heavenly Father involves confession that we have all men for our brethren, and therefore that “ no man livetli unto himself.” Christianity certainly is far from having realised its ideal—the universal kinship of men in communion with Christ—but it alone of all religions lias the potential promise of ultimate success, for the essential nexus between humanity and the Creator is revealed in its Author even “ Christ who is our life,’ 1 who came that through His death “ we might have life, and have it more abundantly.” 2 So, as we contemplate those dreadful sacraments in flesh and blood, those horrible sacrifices performed with mingled lamentation and rejoicing—lamentation over a kinsman who had died for his kin, and subse¬ quent rejoicing for life renewed in them through his 2 John x. 10. 1 Coloss. iii. 4. 84 SACRIFICE death—can we help thinking of the Divine reality on which our faith is based. The truth of God dying loi men in order to give to them eternal life is foreshadowed in forms most materialistic and monstrous, far removed from the moral and spiritual ideas which the Christian dogma of the Divine sacrifice derives from a profound sense of human sinfulness and Divine holiness. Let it be remembered that the Divine reality never enteied the mind of any man, even the purest and loftiest to conceive. The purest symbolism of Levitical sacrifice no more resembles the reality of which it was appointed a type, than the savage’s attempted picture or model resembles the man whom he seeks to portray. In regard to symbolism it is only by degree that the highest differs from the lowest. And if the Jew was trained by his symbolic religion to receive the reality which fulfilled it, in the savage in like manner has been preserved the capacity to recognise and embrace the truth which abolishes his revolting rites. A savage could recognise in a statue sculptured by Phidias the ideal which his own undeveloped imagination and skill were too rude and poor to suggest. So when the reve¬ lation of Christ, who gave Himself for a race He was not ashamed to call His brethren, dawns upon his soul, the savage will at once spring up from his debased and de¬ basing zoolatry to adore Him as the God of his salvation. The customs which thus far we have been considering are those of peoples without a history, for history implies a past, and into the past of the savage we cannot IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 85 penetrate. When discovered in his native haunts he is found to be just what he must have been for many pre¬ vious ages. For how long he has come and gone “ count¬ ing the winters by the moons and the sleeps, hunting or hunted, feasting or fasting,” 1 we can only speculate. Living like the beasts and the birds in respect of lack of restraint, he has to submit to their unprogressiveness; for he scoops out his cave, and builds his wigwam precisely as the birds have woven their nests, and the beasts have dug their dens since their creation. Where law in our sense of the word is unknown, real freedom and advance are impossible. So the savage wherever and whenever he is discovered confronts us as a creature who has only a present; for alas, judging from the corrosive and destruc¬ tive effect of our civilisation upon him, we cannot predict for him much of a future. The savage, however, is not the type of heathenism, he represents its residuum or degradation. Above his condition there is an ascending series, in which through barbarism and the rude beginnings of culture, we reach a high degree of civilisation. And, as throwing important light upon the relations subsisting between the sacrificial rites of savagery and those of the highest heathen religions, what has been preserved to us of the sacred customs of the Aborigines of America, especially of those who attained to the civilisation represented by Mexico and Peru, will be found worthy of study. Before the advent of the Europeans the vast continents of North and South America were densely 1 Bancroft, Nat. Places, vol. i. p. 155. 86 SACRIFICE inhabited by many types of humanity, reflecting on their lowest extreme—in the Shoshone cave-dwellers—modes of life almost brutal. Only one of the many varieties among them, the Eskimo, has been clearly identified with any people in the old world, though several tribes of them buried their dead with suttee rites similar to those practised among the ancient Aryans. The great majority of them are grouped under the designation Bed Skins, and their condition is described as savage or barbarous. One stock of them, however, quite distinct from either Bed Skins or Eskimo, attained in Central America a degree of civilisation which might have instructed Europe of that era. The birthplace of this people was believed by themselves to be the Isthmus; their oldest ruins are found at Palenque, and the centre of their widest influence was Yucatan. There, cut ofi from the world by the sea, and by the profoundest savagery around them, they prospered in a rich maize growing land. Migrating northward, and eventually surging southward again, they made for themselves a kind of history, divided into the Toltec, Chichemec, and latterly the Aztec period, in which the Spaniards invaded them. It is said that the Aztec period repre¬ sented deterioration and relapse from the higher civilisation attained by the Toltecs several centuries before, but what was its origin, and what were the successive stages in its development there is little hope of discovering at a date so remote from even their own traditionally historic epoch . 1 1 Bancroft, Nat. Races, vol. i. pp. 42, 126 ; ii. p. 84 scq.; iii. 310. IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 87 The discovery of this people was sudden, and the wonder occasioned by it was very great, but alas, over the rising of this strange world, the eclipse fell very speedily. Mexico and Peru simply withered away under the touch of their rapacious invaders, and yet the condition of things which met the gaze of the destroyers lasted sufficiently long for them to depict it. The Mexicans had no written records, but only some rude paintings and hieroglyphs; and the only chronicles found among the Peruvians were tallies or thongs, with a peculiar system of knots. In the narratives of the Spaniards we have only traditions of these peoples, and yet, as the customs and ceremonies which they described were actually observed by them, we learn from them something concerning ancient religion which we would not have known so well had we only the monuments and literatures of the Old World to examine. There, in the sixteenth century of our era, were actually wit¬ nessed phases of nature worship which Asia and Egypt and Europe of the historic period had long outgrown. In the Old World, nations, on account of their proximity and mutual relations, corrected each other s extrava¬ gances, supplemented each other’s defects, and helped each other’s progress. The more monstrous manifesta¬ tions of physiolatry which at one period were common to all of them were sooner or later modified so as to survive only in symbol. In the Americas there was no such check and no such stimulus. There was no civil¬ isation around the Mexicans to compete with them. If their own had a higher and better past, then, as in the 88 SACRIFICE case of the Aryans in their descent into India, the memory of it did not suffice to check deterioration through contact with only inferior tribes. In any case, we have in the Aztec religion the reality of nature worship when left untrammelled and uninfluenced by any higher cult. In Mexico the Spaniards were confronted with poly¬ theism, not in the higher forms which it assumed in the historic periods of the Old World, but in the lower phases reflected in survivals of the prehistoric ages. The polytheism of the Aztec was superior to the animism of the savage, for it was the worship not of individual physical objects, but of the most general and imposing physical phenomena. No particular animal or tree was conceived of as divine, but the life of nature in general, which seemed to have annually a birth and death and resurrection, was so regarded. Particular elements like the wind and the rain, parti¬ cular objects like the sun, which had power over earth to fertilise it, over the animals to make them multiply, and over men themselves to further or hinder their happiness, were addressed and worshipped as dominant deities. In this stage of religious thought “ there is a general tendency to clothe all such abstractions in con¬ crete forms, and that generally in the form of the thinker .” 1 Yet though the conception of the god is not zoomorphic like that of the savage, but anthropo¬ morphic, his essential character remains unaffected, so that, though conceived of in the form of a man, 1 Reville, Hibbert Lectures , 1885, pp. 40, 248. IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 89 lie is no more judged according to the standard of man than is the capricious power of nature which he personifies. Where men personify and deify the natural forces by which they are surrounded, their creations, though superior to themselves as regards longevity and power, are inferior to them in character, and quite upon a level with them in respect of predilections and dislikes. In regard to appetites and inclinations, these gods are supposed to conform closely to their worshippers. They are therefore- addressed by them in epithets of praise and compli¬ ment, and they are honoured with such gifts as are acceptable to themselves or are required for their own maintenance. So since the pleasure of eating choice food takes foremost rank in the estimation of unedu¬ cated humanity, it was natural that food and drink oblations should be so frequent and important in poly¬ theistic rites . 1 And in like manner, considering the strength of the sexual appetite, we need not wonder at the almost universal dedication of women to the gods, reserved alive for “brides of the sun,” as in Peru, or as in Mexico sent regularly to them by immolation. Such sacrifices may be described as ordinary or honorific; the extraordinary or piacular sacrifices ol polytheism are clearly related to those of animism. In polytheism certain animals which could not be eaten for food, or even used upon ordinary occasions to furnish the table of the god, were upon certain occa¬ sions sacrificed to particular gods, and partaken of by 1 Monier Williams, Religious Life and Thought in India, p. 6. 90 SACRIFICE the sacrifices. Each god had a favourite animal dedi¬ cated to him, and he was often designated by an epithet indicating his predilection for it . 1 These epithets, such as “ goat eater,” “ dog eater,” “ cannibal,” and the symbols of sacred animals found associated with par¬ ticular gods, are supposed to indicate something more than the belief that the special animal was an acceptable victim. The favourite bird or beast is alleged to cor¬ respond to the stage in which the god was believed to be incorporate in that bird or beast. It is sacrificed to him in polytheism, but in animism he, in the form of that creature, is sacrificed himself, not in spite, but because of his divinity, to the end that his tribal kin might continue vigorous, and that nature might be maintained perennially in her productive power . 2 Here perhaps we discover the origin of human sacri¬ fice which has left horrid traces of itself in the most cultured forms of polytheism. Wherever the spirit of vegetation has been personified and deified we may be prepared to find human sacrifices offered to it. Of the sacredness of life in general, and of human life in particular, savage and barbarous peoples have not our estimate. A man is protected simply because he is a kinsman ; if he is a stranger his life will be of far less account than that of some animal. In the rudest stages of polytheism human victims were regularly slaughtered to promote the growth and ripening of the 1 Dollinger’s Heidenthum und Apollo, o\f/o(pdyos at Elis, Atlien- Judenthum, p. 530. seus, 346 ; Artemis, Kcarpocpdyos 2 Hera, designated as alyocpdyos in Samos. See Golden Bough, i. at Sparta, Pausanias, iii. 15, 9 ; 328-9 note. IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 91 crops. Conceiving of the life of the maize as that of a person passing' through the whole course of existence between seedtime and harvest, the Mexicans sacrificed newborn babes when it was sown, children when it sprouted, youths when it eared, and old men when it was fully ripe. In Egypt, in very ancient times, red- haired men, representing the red ripening grain, were burned in harvest, and their ashes were scattered with winnowing fans over the fields. Indeed, from all parts of the barbarous world evidence in abundance could be cited that human victims were thus periodically sacrificed to the spirit of the crop in order to secure its fertility. 1 In some of these instances the ritual is significant of an intention other than that of sacrificing to the spirit of vegetation. As late as 1837 the Pawnees, following a very ancient and uninterrupted custom, were found sacrificing a Sioux girl who had been most carefully tended for months, and kept in ignorance of her doom. On the fatal day, after being gaily attired, she was conducted by the chief round the villages, and presented with a gift from each wigwam. Then, after being tortured by roasting over a fire, she was shot by many arrows. Her heart was torn out and eaten, and her warm flesh, cut in small pieces from the bones, was taken in baskets to the corn gardens, where the blood was squeezed out of them over the mounds in which the grain was being planted. A similar sacrifice of a 1 Bastian, Culterlandcrdes alten Travels , translated by Markham. Amerika, ii. 639 ; De Leon’s Hakluyt Society, 1864, p. 203. 92 SACRIFICE young man in the fields at seedtime, designated “ the boiling of the corn,” prevailed in South Africa; while in India the Khonds are described as having offered to the earth goddess by even crueller rites a youth who had previously been most delicately nourished and treated with reverence. In all these cases the treat¬ ment of the victims previous to the sacrifice, the homage paid to them, the blessing expected from them as they were being carried to their torture, and the in¬ trinsic power which their flesh and blood was believed to exercise directly over the growth of the crops, indicate that they were sacrificed because they were believed to be in a peculiar sense divine. There was manifestly a confusion of the victim with the god, and the sacrifice was theanthropic in the thought of the sacrificer. 1 For human sacrifice another origin must be sought than in the cannibalism of the worshipper. It was offered periodically, and in some cases constantly, by some nations to whom cannibalism was an abomination, and by others who were neither savage in their habits nor cruel in their character. The Mexicans were full of tenderness and consideration for the poor, the sick, and the aged, for whose benefit they maintained asylums. During the horrors of famine, when their capital was besieged, though the streets were found by their conquerors literally strewn with corpses, not a token was discovered that the Mexicans in their 1 Schoolcraft, Personal Me- Cape, p. 58; Campbell, Wild rnoirs , p. 614 ; James, Expedition Tribes of Khondistan, p. 112 ; to the Rocky Mountains, ii. p. 80; Macpherson, Memorials of Service Arbousset, Tour to the N.E. of the in India, p. 113 seq. IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 93 terrible straits had resorted to human flesh for their sustenance. And yet, not only was human sacrifice among them simply frightful in its amount, but they were also in religion cannibals. Upon solemn occasions unless they partook of the flesh of the victim, the sacrifice would have been considered incomplete. The prevalence among them of the horrid custom must therefore have been due to the belief in its peculiarly sacramental efficacy. They sacrificed and partook of the human victim with the same intention which made the savage seek communion in the flesh and blood of his sacred animal for the renewal of his own life, or for the revival of the life of nature. 1 There is a wide gap between human sacrifice offered in this belief and for this purpose, and such sacrifices as are described in the Tlictd and JEneid as offered to propitiate offended gods. In the phase of humanity reflected in the epics of Homer and Yirgil, man’s esti¬ mate of himself is very considerably superior to that of the savage, and he manifests a stronger sense of re¬ sponsibility. His religious ideas have been so affected by his moral development that he will only resort to human sacrifice upon solemn and critical occasions. In all serious emergencies man is regarded as the proper victim, for he is the most precious gift the sacrificer can offer, being one in whom he may be said to give himself. In this gap—and it is a wide one—the Mexican religion is found as a specimen of polytheism 1 Helps, Spanish Conquest in Conquest of Mexico , ii. p. 278 America , ii. p. 522 ; Prescott, seq. 94 SACRIFICE superior to, yet having much in common with, the animism of savages. Its axiom that human sacrifices alone were efficacious was not founded upon the belief that man was man’s dearest offering, hut upon the belief that the offering was in a sense divine. The crods were not conceived of as in the likeness of the beast, they were regarded as so superior to man that magnificent altars were required for their worship, and a vast and complicated hierarchy was maintained for serving at them. The animistic confusion of victim with god, however, still continued, for these were re¬ garded as co-substantial, so that the worshipper in assimilating part of his sacrifice believed that he was uniting himself with the god. The Mexican victims were thus supposed to be in¬ carnations of the gods, or rather by the peculiar tieat- ment and reverence accorded to them for a year previous to the sacrifice they were transubstantiated into them. They were selected from the bravest and handsomest captives, they were clothed in raiment similar to that with which the idol was decked, and not only were they delicately nurtured, they were even vener¬ ated and worshipped. In great sacrifices the fatal day was chosen by themselves, on the understanding that the longer it was delayed the less would they find favour in the abode of the gods. When at last it came, they were taken to the summit of the pyramid, which served more for altar than temple, and fixed not upon the sacrificial stone, as were the victims in ordinary sacrifices, but upon the strong shoulders of a priest. IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 95 With one sharp stroke of the obsidian knife, the slaughterer laid open the breast, tore out the quivering heart as the epitome of the victim, threw it into the “ eagle’s cup,” a vessel filled with burning resin before the idol statue, and then the still living body was cast down to be devoured at the great altar’s base by the very worshippers who had just left off adoring him. All through the great festivals of their sacred year this ceremony with only a variation of horrors was observed. The victims were sometimes slaughtered in multitudes, and they often consisted of beautiful women and tender little children. At times they were tortured with an ingenuity of cruelty beyond all that a Redskin could inflict, but they were always up to the fatal moment reverenced as if they were divine. For one sacrifice the victim was called “ the wise lord of heaven,” and in not a few of them, in consequence of the same belief, the victims were flayed and the priests clothed them¬ selves or the idol with their skins. 1 The motive in all 1 Sahagun, Hist, de Nuev. Esp ., book ii. cli. 21 ; Torquemada, Monarquia Indiana, vol. i. book i. ; Diego Daran, Hist, of the In¬ dians of New Spain, vol. i. cli. xx.; Bancroft, Nat. Races of the Pacific, vol. iii. pp. 297 seq., 354 seq. ; Prescott, Conquest of Mexico, vol. i. p. 65 seq. Though the male victims were always captives taken in war, it was considered a point of honour thus to suffer. It was held more desirable to be sacrificed on the altar than to be slain in battle, for it secured a speedy passage into the society of the gods. As indicating the estimation in which a sacrificial death was held, self- immolation was not unfrequent. The devotee was ushered into a vault filled with the corpses of those who had preceded him, and there he was left to die, offering his body in living sacrifice to please the gods he hoped thereby to join. — Desire Charnay, Ancient Cities of the New World, pp. 63, 66 ; Stephens, Travels in Central America; Travels in Yucatan. 96 SACRIFICE these atrocities, even when the most exquisite tortures were rigorously prescribed in the ritual, was not a ciuel one. It was to secure union with the god in the life of the theanthropic victim. The torture was due to the belief of the savage that he profited by the bravery with which his captive endured it. Suffering courage¬ ously borne by the immolated indicated spirit, and it was the best of the victim which the worshipper sought to appropriate. The point, however, to be kept in view is the conception which inspired the whole system of Mexican sacrifice, that the victim was more than human. The modifications traceable in some of them even more clearly exhibit this belief. For example, in the spring sacrifice to Quetzalcoatl an image of the idol and equal to it in size, made of edible plants and honey, was sacri¬ ficed and divided among the worshippers, to be eaten by them. A similar ceremonial marked the early autumn festival of Uitzilopochtli, and it was even more promin¬ ent in the great festival of Tezcatlipoca at the winter solstice. Upon this occasion the function was inaugur¬ ated by numerous purifications, blood-lettings, and penances of the worshippers, and also by much burning of incense and by many sacrifices of fowls and of human victims by the priests. At its climax the priest shot an arrow at an image of the idol, which had been com¬ posed of various seeds of the earth, kneaded with the blood of sacrificed children. The heart was immediately cut out and eaten by the king—the god’s vicegerent on earth—and the body was quartered for each division of the city, and so subdivided that as many as possible IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 97 might personally participate in the sacrament of Teo- quatl, “ the god who is eaten.” It was just the old savage rite, though in another form. The god was sacrificed that he might impart himself to the worship¬ pers and gain a new resurrection for nature. In seed and blood he gave his body to be eaten by his people at the season when nature was apparently dying, in order that his life, which, though taken, was not extinguished, might be secured in another and stronger manifestation on the return of spring. 1 It seems strange that while the sacrificial rites of the Mexicans were so revolting, their religion on its practical side should have been considerably influenced by moral ideas. Its supreme god “ Teotl,” the sun, of which Tezcatlipoca in winter, Quetzalcoatl in spring, Uitzilopochtli in summer were manifestations—supreme in a polytheistic sense — was revered as the austere guardian of law and equity, and as god of providence to whom prayers were addressed in times of strait and peril. His favour was also entreated for governors when they were appointed that they might rule well, and that they might be removed should they ever abuse their power. Walking invisibly abroad everywhere among the people, he was supposed to be fully conversant with all that was going on in the world, and to be swift in movement and strong in power to punish wrong. His priests had authority to receive confessions, appoint penances, and grant absolution for offences repented of. The Mexicans thus evidently believed that righteousness in public 1 Bancroft, Nat. Races , iii. p. 312 seq. H 98 SACRIFICE and virtue in private life were required to secure the favour of the gods. Indeed, if Sahagun, one of their first missionaries and greatest friends, is to be credited, they expressed their religion in prayers, con¬ fessions, thanksgivings, and pious exhortations almost biblical in character. It is generally agreed, however, that consciously or without connivance, a consider¬ able amount of adaptation to Christian conceptions has coloured and even shaped his narratives. He read the originals through Christian spectacles, and translated them into what he thought they ought to be. His formulas of confession and absolution, suggesting par¬ allels to the sublime contents of the Hebrew psalms and prophecies, could not possibly consist with religious ceremonies and social habits that were simply horrible and disgusting. 1 For the essential characteristic of the religion was that of a low physical cult, and its creed, even as described by the Spanish fathers, appears to have been unworthy of being called a system. It was a conglomerate of confused fragments of many diverse superstitions, the result of alliance with or con¬ quest of many different peoples. The sun, though domi¬ nant in it, was never regarded in Mexican polytheism as it was latterly in the polytheism of Europe or Asia. Mexican theology at its highest may seem to touch the Zeus of the Homeric or Hesiodic mythology, but to the Platonic conception of “ 0eo?,” the conception expressed 1 For some of these banquets a with delicate sauce and seasoning, slave was killed, and the flesh —Prescott, Conquest of Mexico , elaborately dressed was served vol. i. p. 130. IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 99 by “ Teotl,” which it very slightly resembles in pronun¬ ciation, it did not even approach . 1 The civilisation of Peru, which, as far as it can be traced, arose also perfectly independent of foreign influence, was so inspired by another solar religion as hardly to be conceivable without it. Under more favourable conditions, though probably ignorant of each other’s existence , 2 the Peruvians simultaneously de¬ veloped what the Mexicans never attained to—a great and well consolidated empire. It was dominated by the most complete theocracy which the world has ever seen; for the power of the divine Inca, like that of the sun, his divine father, penetrated in surveillance and admin¬ istration the poorest home, and was felt by the humblest individual in the land. This most searching of des¬ potisms was humanely exercised by a succession of Incas in the interest of their subjects, with the result of securing for them a marvellous degree of material prosperity. While resembling Mexican civilisation in its extent and height, the Peruvian differed widely from it in its nature and aims. The Mexicans sought to enlarge and secure dominion by military force, signalis¬ ing every victory by the sacrifice of thousands, and by crushing the survivors into vassalage. The Peruvian wars, on the other hand, were all religious, undertaken to reduce neighbouring tribes into obedience to the 1 Kingsborough, Mexican An - Races, vol. iii. pp. 220, 237 seq. tiquities, vol. v. pp. 132 seq., 144 2 Prescott, History of the seq.; Tylor, Primitive Culture , Conquest of Peru , vol. i. p. vol. ii. p. 311 ; Bancroft, Native 152. 100 SACRIFICE sovereignty of the sun; and once the vanquished loyally submitted and conformed to their faith and their laws, they were watched with paternal solicitude. Between the characteristic features of the two religions there was very little resemblance, for the rites of the Incas were pure and simple compared with the revolting cannibal orgies which always outraged humanity in the Mexican ceremonies . 1 Though based upon zoolatry, for several animals were venerated as divine, or as divinely connected, and although fetish figures of wood and stone, always ugly and grotesque, were supposed to embody spirits, and to guard every tribe and every town, the worship of the Incas appears in some points to have touched that of the ancient Aryans. The sun, whose light was the life of men, was sovereign lord of heaven and earth. As derived from him, the worship of the elements, specially of fire, held a prominent place in its complicated system. The symbols of fire, as in India, were stones believed to be indwelt by it, seeing it could be struck out from them, while the nuggets of gold found everywhere in the sides of the mountains, were called “ the tears of the sun.” Peruvian differed from old Aryan worship in respect that the sacred hearth was not in the home but in the Temple of the Sun, who, unlike Agni, had his idol in a human face raying forth from a golden disk beams of burning splendour. In the worship of the sun the belief prevailed, as in ancient Iran, that fire became polluted, or lost its efficacy, by too long contact with man; and 1 Prescott, History of the Con- Humboldt, Travels, pp. 108, 294 ; quest of Peru , i. pp. 39 seq. ,108 seq.; Reville, Hibbert Lecture , p. 153 seq. IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 101 so it had to be renewed every year by a miracle wrought by the chief priest, who cleverly caught it from the sun in a concave mirror, or who, if the day was cloudy and the weather unfavourable, was always able to produce it by friction of the fire sticks. The worship of Inti, the sun, consisted of offerings of flowers, fruits, vegetables, perfumes, and libations in golden cups, part of which was always sprinkled toward the sun. Bloody sacrifices were represented at the capital by the daily offering of a llama, and of small birds and conies. Before setting out on a war¬ like expedition, a black llama which had previously been kept starving—that the heart of the foe might faint in his fainting—was sacrificed ; and to secure the good health of the Inca, black dogs had frequently to yield up their lives. All the portions of the sacrifices which were devoted to the gods were consumed by fire for transmission to their ethereal abodes; and as the offerings were generally of edible materials, the inten¬ tion of the offerer was manifestly to feed or to please the gods. The eyes of the victim were turned towards the sun, and its blood, after slaughter, was smeared on the idol and the door of his temple; and what of the carcase was not offered to the idol by burning, was divided among the worshippers and eaten raw. It pre¬ sented thus very strong resemblances and affinities to the savage rites, though inspired by purer and higher ideas. The custom of human sacrifice, though not encouraged but rather restrained by the Incas, had even under them its place in the ritual. When an Inca was 102 SACRIFICE ill, one of his sons was offered up to the sun as his substitute. At certain festivals an infant was immo¬ lated ; and when a new Inca was enthroned, children were sacrificed to the powers of the under world. Wives, especially queens, had to be buried alive on the death of their husbands; for, though the sacrifice was not compulsory, public opinion was too severe and pronounced for any faithful widow to escape her fate. As civilisation, however, advanced, the custom in Peru, as everywhere else, appears to have been modified, and little statues of human beings still found in the graves of the dead became the substitute of the living victims formerly buried with them. The sacred year was of course regulated by the sun, and every month had its appropriate festivals, while four more solemn ones commemorated the great periods of the sun’s progress. At one of these the land was purged from its evils, but by rites far less savage than those already described. Blood of sacrifice was, in¬ deed, required for them, but it was the blood of an animal victim, or it was drawn from the veins of chil¬ dren who were not slain. It was mixed with flour, so as to produce cakes, which were solemnly eaten by the people, who, before doing so, rubbed with them their own bodies and the doors of their houses. At sundown the Inca, clad in precious armour and followed by four relatives with lance in hand, traversed the city at full speed, amid the cheers of the people. Surrendering their lances at its outskirt to others, who continued the charge upon the retreating hosts of evils, the chase was IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 103 maintained by successive changes of pursuers till the limits of the ancient state of Cuzeo were reached. There the lances were fixed in the ground as talismanic securities against the return of the troubles that vexed them. At the harvest festival an idol constructed of grain was first adored and then partaken of, and a num¬ ber of sacrificial rites were performed at home by each householder. At the festival of Power, when the god of thunder was worshipped, the young Incas and nobles, after severe testing by fasting and exercise, were in¬ vested with the insignia of manhood; and by partaking with him of the sacred bread which had been prepared by the Peruvian vestals or brides of the sun, they were received into indissoluble union with him . 1 The most magnificent of all their festivals, to which from all quarters the Peruvian nobles flocked, was that of Eayana, the annual imperial celebration of the sun’s return. Of nine days devoted to its observance, three were spent in preparatory fasting. On the great day the function began at dawn, when the Inca in royal procession went forth to greet the sun with song and dance, adoring it the moment it appeared by flinging fer¬ vent kisses toward it. The Inca then presented from a huge golden vase, a libation of maize and maguey, which, after tasting himself, he dispensed among his royal kindred. Proceeding • to the great temple, into which he and his suite alone were admitted, they spent a little time in worship. Then the black llama, or upon rare 1 Markham, Rites and Laws of the Incas; Marmontel, Les Incas , vol. i. chaps, i.-iv. 104 SACRIFICE occasions—such as a coronation, a royal birth, or a great victory—a child or beautiful maiden was sacrificed. From the entrails of the sacrifice the priest professed to read the augury of the coming year. The sacred fire was then rekindled, and by it burnt offerings were consumed. Thereafter a vast number of llamas from “ the flocks of the sun ”—that is, flocks fed at the public expense—were slaughtered and distributed to the people as the banquet of Inti. The sacred cake, prepared by the nuns, the brides of the sun, was thus also placed upon the board. Then followed another libation, after which the cake was distributed, and on this occasion the Inca communicated with not only his suite, but with the whole body of the worshippers, and the protracted ceremonial of the day ended in the dancing and revelry which gave the festival its name . 1 The coincidence of this distribution of consecrated bread and maize among the worshippers in this great ceremony with the Holy Sacrament of the Church, very powerfully impressed and astonished the Spanish missionaries. They were also sorely exercised by some striking resemblances to the sacrament of baptism, and to other Christian ordinances, which they found in the Peruvian religious institutions. It seemed to them that this caricature of their divine faith had been de¬ vised by the devil for the deluding of the heathen. Soon after birth, for example, every child was intro¬ duced into the community by immersion in water, to exorcise any malign influences to which he was sup- 1 Prescott, History of the Conquest of Peru, vol. i. p. 100 sef IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 105 posed to be subject, and to defend him against evil spirits. A name was also given to him in this ceremony, but it was regarded as only provisional; for his definitive name was bestowed when, at the age of ten or twelve, he was confirmed, and commended to his guardian spirit by the oblation of his hair and of the parings of his nails to the sun. In order to be continued ever after in the enjoyment of the rights of citizenship, he was required to make regular confession to the priest, and to receive his absolution. The peculiar sanctity attached to virginity, and the responsibilities and im¬ munities with which the Peruvian nuns were invested, also surprised and puzzled the missionaries. The analo¬ gies, however, were only external, for the intention of the Peruvian rites was directly opposed to that of the Christian ordinances, and, indeed, they could hardly be said to have any religious significance in the proper sense of the word. They were not means of grace, ordinances to be observed for the saving of the soul, but just so many legislative provisions, designed to bring every home and every private person within the net of imperial administration. The chief end and aim of the whole Peruvian ceremonial was not to promote any moral purpose, but to consolidate and rivet the governing power of the Inca upon every individual in the state. Blasphemy against the sun, malediction of or rebellion against “ his child,” yea, any violation of the law, was branded as sacrilege, and was miserably punished by death. For all law emanated from the Inca, who was divine, not in virtue of his office 106 SACRIFICE and royal commission, but in respect of his nature. So the priest was more a policeman than a minister of religion, and in “ receiving confession and granting ab¬ solution, he was exercising on behalf of the state for political ends the very same function which the officers of the Inquisition exercised in the interests of the Church.” Though the resemblances were only external and were essentially opposed to the verities which inspired the ordinances of the Christian religion, they were naturally most confounding to intruders, who, Christian only in name, were really as besotted in superstition as the pagans whom they so easily crushed. We can only speculate now what would have been the fate of these religions had Christianity been presented to the Mexican and the Peruvian as it was first presented in the person and teaching of St. Paul by the polytheists of Western Asia. There was indeed a vast deal to cleanse out from the temple of religion, yea, nearly the whole edifice had to be pulled down, but St. Paul would have found in the foundations solid materials to be used in rearing “ the habitation of God through the Spirit .” 1 He who could adapt himself—though not his gospel—to the Lycaonians, who would have worshipped him as a god , 2 and to the Athenians , 3 whose own poet he quoted, would surely have addressed some sympathetic entreaty even to Mexicans, to turn from their horrible sacrifices to the true sacrifice by which was divinely secured to them participation in the Divine life. He would as surely have earnestly invited the Peruvians to 1 Ephesians ii. 22. 2 Acts xiv. 11. 3 Acts xvii. 28. IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM 107 forsake their sacrament for the true sacrament of com¬ munion with the Sun of Righteousness, in which the least of “ the children of light ” 1 are equal with the greatest in the only royal priesthood in the spiritual universe. The Peruvians were nearer the truth than the Mexicans in that instead of laying hold of the gods and sacrificing them for their own advantage, they offered their human sacrifices as substitutes for themselves to the gods, with some feeling of their dependence upon them and some gratitude for life and all its blessings. It is true that their gods were only prominent physical phenomena or forces, and that they had no suspicion that there was any divine personal power behind or above to control them ; 2 but such as they were, they 1 1 Thessalonians v. 5. 2 Garcilaso has laboured hard to convince us that at least his royal ancestors the Incas were not nature worshippers like the people they governed, but monotheistic philosophers. It is from him that Prof. M. Muller in Physical Re¬ ligion, pp. 183-4, gets his reference to the scepticism professed in high places in reference to the popular creed and religion. There may be nothing improbable in his traditions of individual unbelief in the general superstition, indeed it would be as natural in the unique civilisation of Peru, as it was among Romans in the times of Augustus, but his conclusion, though firmly and for long believed in, that the Incas attained to the conception of a supreme Creator and Governor, has not stood the test of critical investigation. It is another of the many instances in which the interpreter translates his own conception into the origi¬ nal ; it is akin to the belief that behind all variety of manifesta¬ tions the North American Indian worshipped “the Great Spirit.” “ Inmost instances,” says Dr. Brin- ton (Myths of the New World, p. 52 seq.), “ the phrase is of modern origin and has been put into the mouth of the Indians by mission¬ aries, and applied only to the white man’s God. Of monothe¬ ism, in the Semitic, or even the dim pantheistic sense of the Brahmin, there was not a single instance in the American con¬ tinents.” 108 SACRIFICE IN ANIMISM AND LOWER POLYTHEISM were convinced that man could only reach and become one with them through sacrifice. Now in regard to all these things he would have felt warranted in saying to them, “ Whom now ye ignorantly worship, Him declare 1 unto you.” And we feel certain that although his revelation that God had established communion with man through sacrifice would have surprised them as that which never entered the mind of man to conceive, it would not have confounded them. Apprehending man’s essential religious instinct and apprehended by it, the Gospel would have borne fruit unto holiness in them, as it has done in all the world. LECTURE III SACRIFICE IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM We have to consider in this lecture the sacrificial rites of religions which are represented not by rude monu¬ mental relics, but by literatures which, already great in volume and rich in materials, are increasing yearly to the astonishment of Christendom from which they were long hidden. In them have been preserved the history, philosophy, and theology of peoples, some of whom like the Egyptians were enjoying, two thousand years before the birth of Moses, a material civilisation in many respects not inferior to that of Europe in the sixteenth century. In the case of none of them does their history reach back to the savage or barbarous beginning from which it is asserted they emerged. The earliest Egyptian monuments that have been discovered depict the same civilisation and religion as are portrayed on the latest. The most ancient Indian books represent a condition of society first patriarchal, then national, and monarchic. The origin of nations, like the origin of life, is indeed “ as much a puzzle to our clearest science” as it was to bewildered thinkers several 110 SACRIFICE thousand years ago. All that we know is that nations must have existed long anterior to their oldest docu¬ ments and earliest monuments. Into the mystery of the past so represented, we are able to penetrate only a very little distance. But by carefully examining old customs, traditions, and the language in which they have been recorded, we get light sufficient to discover that civilisation preserves in it many witnesses of anterior barbarism. We know now that Yule, Beltane, and Lammas recall the festivals of a solar cult, and that in the mimic honours which we pay to Father Christmas and the Harvest Maiden, we are playfully commemorating sacrifices which may once have been offered in our land in terrible earnestness. If this be the case in Christendom, we may expect to find abundant vestiges of savagery in the beliefs and rites of heathendom. Indeed it is often only by means of such survivals that we are able to interpret and account for many peculiarities of heathen religion. We must beware, however, of always regarding these resemblances as survivals of a savage stage of religion. They may be accretions which a purer form of religion incorporated in its decline. In none of these literatures, as far as they have been examined, is the history of religious thought described as always one of progress. The traditional belief very generally expressed in them is on the contrary that of declension from a purer primitive faith to lower ideas and grosser rites. It is averred upon good authority that the sublimer phases of the religion of Egypt, the purest and most delicate IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 111 notions of morality, are the most archaic. 1 The same observation applies to the ancient religions of China, India, and Persia, and the fact is highly signi- ficant; for it seems to indicate that “ what is true and pure in religion is not evolved out of what is gross and false by a process of elimination, but rather proceeds from separate sources of thought.” The pure has its spring in man’s essential religion, the fundamental revelation given in human conscience ; and the gross is the outcome of his mythology, that is of his fancies and reasonings concerning natural phenomena. The conclusion which is claimed to be legitimately drawn from an examination of the religion of Egypt, may yet be established in regard to all religions that have left a record of themselves ; namely that the idea of mono¬ theism, if not propounded, is suggested and implied from the first, while at the same time polytheism progresses without interruption. “Mythology, therefore, instead of having produced any forms of religion may have to be regarded as having early mixed with and corrupted every one of them.” 2 If so, it furnishes a telling comment upon the testimony of St. Paul, whose theory of evolution appears to have been one not of ascent but of declension through .polytheism into animism, through idolatry into zoolatry, through stages of belief in which “ the glory of the uncorruptible God was changed into an image made like to corruptible 1 Rouge, “Conferences sur la xx. p. 327. religion des anc. Egypt, ” Annales 2 Renouf, Hilbert Lecture, 1879, dc la philosophic chretienne, vol. pp. 92, 250. V 112 SACRIFICE man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things.” 1 Great diversity of opinion prevails as to the antiquity of these sacred literatures, and still greater as to the relative antiquity of their several contents. This is notably the case in regard to the Yedas ; “the bundles of fragments ” representing the relics of the primitive Avesta; and the so-called Sacred Books of Chaldsea. 2 In the present state of our knowledge, therefore, we ought to be very chary of employing quotations from any of them in support of any theory as to the origin and growth of religious conceptions. The criticism which has been so long and so keenly directed upon 1 Romans i. 23. 2 Bergaigne, in Religion Ve- clique , and Barth, in Religions of India, maintain that instead of reflecting a primitive condition of religion, the Vedas are the expressions of an advanced and highly differentiated system of thought. M. Muller, in Physical Religion , admits that the hymns in even the Rig Veda are not of equal antiquity, and shows how some ancient hymns have been modified to suit the exigencies of a much more developed ritual. The questions as to what hymns are old, and what old hymns have been subsequently modified are still being discussed. The primitive Avesta was supposed to consist of twenty-one books, and only one of these is believed to be preserved entire. The parts of the original Avesta were said to he thirty in number, and yet only eighteen are extant. The portions which survive represent the relics of a liturgical collection, more a manual for the priests than a prayer-book for the people (Dar- mesteter, “ Introd. to Zend- avesta,” Sacred Books of the East , vol. iv. p. 30 seq.). In regard to the Chaldsean remains, the best scholars cannot tell what of them may he ancient and what of them may be late. “ They have to build up a fabric out of broken and half-deciphered texts, out of stray allusions and obscure refer¬ ences, out of fragments of monu¬ ments, many of which are late and still more of uncertain date ” (Sayce, Hilbert Lecture , 1887, pp. 4, 316). IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 113 the Bible must be applied to all these sacred books before their testimony can be accepted against it. Meanwhile, they are valuable as reflecting at a remote period in human history the religious concep¬ tions of peoples separated by what would be then deemed impassable barriers of time and space. They originated independently, though eventually in some instances they may have influenced each others development. The remarkable similarity in their fundamental ideas indicates that all over the world men will think the same solemn thoughts about religion and express them in similar rites and institutions. Even “ the differing forms Of this diversity, are but the strands Of the one cable anchored in the deeps Of fathomless antiquity.” 1 We have not yet learned from them how to wind the scattered threads into the primal unity, or to use them as a clue to penetrate the mystery which enwraps the cradle of our race; but examination of any of them— just as we have them—or comparison of the best of them with the Bible just as we have it, will convince us, that man left to interpret for himself the primeval revelation given in his own constitution and in the material world around him, by the light of reason and experience only, will inevitably wander wildly from the truth. And yet the study of these books will instruct us that every honest endeavour of man to attain to truth marks a Divine discipline whereby the human 1 Frederic Tennyson, Daphne and other Poems, p. 170. I 114 SACRIFICE race was prepared to appropriate tlie revelation of “ the things of the Spirit of God, which the natural man of himself neither receives nor knows.” 1 In all these literatures religion is presented upon a much higher level than any we have yet considered. The religious sentiment stimulated by the increasing wonders of nature is found in them to have de¬ veloped consciousness of some greater being behind the many forms of its existence. Men may call that being by very different names — Tien, Dyaus, Ahura Mazda, Nutar Nutra—but they are endeavour¬ ing to syllable the same reality behind all pheno¬ mena, the one behind the many, the Theos behind the polytheoi of their formulated creed. In all of them sacrifice is set forth as an essential part of worship. The necessity for it is everywhere proclaimed even in cases where praise and prayer made by the heart are said to be more acceptable “ than gifts oi butter and honey, and offerings of oxen and cows.” 2 Indeed it seems to have risen in the estimation of men, just as they gained in knowledge of themselves and of their surroundings. Reverence for the unknown Force felt to be behind all the manifestations of it in nature, and acknowledged to be beyond the control of men, incited their endeavour to secure its protection and goodwill. And yet though they felt dependence upon its hidden strength, and had to reckon with it at every step which they took, men did not in any of these religions express their dependence upon and confess 2 Rig Fed., i. 109 ; viii. 24, 20. 1 1 Cor. ii. 10-16. IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 115 their accountability to it as we do. Their religion was inspired not by self-abnegation, but by self-assertion. It was the religion of self-interest, observed because it was profitable. It was rooted in the belief that after all the invisible powers were as amenable as men are to persuasion and flattery, and that even when re¬ luctant to oblige, they were as likely as men are to be constrained by the barter of sacrifices to bestow the coveted equivalent. So, in all these religions, sacrifice confronts us, not as a means of grace, but a scheme for self-defence and self-advancement. The intention of the sacrificer was just that of the savage, though he expressed it in rites more refined, and sought to influence gods of a higher type. 1 The immense importance attached to it was due to belief in its intrinsic efficacy, not as an act of devotion, but as a magical performance. Upon the lips of the Babylonian priest was the power of the terrible “ sabba,” which even the gods must obey, 2 and the Brahman could manipulate sacrifice as a cosmic force sufficient “ to make the sun rise and set, and the rivers run this way or that.” Belief in the intrinsic efficacy of sacrifice dominates all forms of polytheism, even those of the higher type. By means of it man could not only procure all the blessings which constitute prosperity here and happiness hereafter, but also obtain power over other worlds than this, and over beings not 1 Bergaigne, LaRelig. Vecl., i. 2 Sayce, Hibbert Lecture., pp. p. 123 ; Lang, Myth, Ritual, and 319, 335. Religion , i. p. 225. 116 SACRIFICE only visible but invisible. In India and Babylonia the sods were believed to have attained to heaven by sacri- fice; and by it they were held to have called into being and still to have power to modify the existing order of things. Taken as a whole, sacrifice was con¬ ceived of as an organism to be created, in which every piece must grow into its proper place, and in which all the separate parts should harmonise so that nothing was defective and nothing was in excess. “ It was an invisible and universal force, but like electricity it required an expert operator to elicit and utilise it.” 1 If any part of the ritual was vitiated the whole sacrifice was lost, and since mistakes were unavoidable in a long and extremely complicated function, a particular priest was generally in attendance to make good any mistake of a propitiatory offering. Belief in the efficacy of sacrifice as that to which all powers visible and invisible must give way, was thus intimately associated with belief in the mediatorial offices of the priest. In polytheism the priest and his rites take the place of the sorcerer and his medicine in animism. What is magic in the sorcerer is divina¬ tion in the sacrificing priest. In all acts of worship his services were indispensable. He alone could indicate the kind of sacrifice required, perform its rites, and tell from the signs accompanying the offering whether it would be accepted or rejected. Naturally therefore in India, China, Assyria, and Egypt the priesthood became supreme in the state. The sovereign 1 Haug, Aitareya Brahmana, i. p. 73 seq. IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 117 in several cases was pontifex maximus, discharging, like Solomon, for those whom he ruled many of the 1 unctions of the priest, but this always because he was the representative or descendant of the priesthood. Belief in the dogma of opus operatum was universal. The sacrifice was held to be effectual, not because of the value of the victim, but because it was performed by the proper functionaries in a perfect manner. Provided the rites were celebrated according to rule, the intention was ol very little importance, while no matter how pure and earnest was the motive, the slightest mistake in reciting the formula, or the mis¬ placing of a bit of wood, would spoil and render it useless. It is indeed true, that in China and Persia, much depended upon the motive and the spirit of reverence that prompted the sacrifice. The offering to be acceptable must in China express a real harmony of spirit between the worshipper and the worshipped; and in Persia good deeds, and words, and thoughts must be combined with it, for its efficacy was limited to the good. But even in cases where sacrifice could not be made a substitute for righteous disposition, ceremonial was considered essential. Piety and reverence culminated in the ritual, and instead of being 7 O lost in, they were nourished by it. In all of them sacrifice was a magical and potent spell, which only a priest could practise. 1 1 The Li Ki, books xx. xxi. Yasts and Sirozahs in Sacred xxii. in Sacred Books of the East , Books of the East, vols. xxiii. and vols. xxvii. and xxviii. ; The xxxi. 118 SACRIFICE In none of tlie higher religions, with the exception perhaps of that of Borne, in which the slaughter of men and animals for augury was carried to a frightful extent, was sacrifice marked by the ghastly rites which shocked the discoverers and destroyers of Mexico. In every one of them at one period or other human sacri¬ fice did prevail, and in some of them it maintained its hold with incredible tenacity. It was a tribute freely rendered by the Greeks down to the time of Pausanias. In the Boman Empire it was only abolished in the reign of Hadrian by imperial edicts enforced by the severest penalties. It continued in the heathen regions of Europe till beyond the Middle Ages ; it has only been suppressed in India of our day by the strong hand of British rule, and it is said to be reappearing in the Black Bepublic. Indeed, so closely is it connected with the essence of polytheistic religions, that it seems to vanish only with polytheism itself. 1 1 Herod., lib. vii. 114, 197 ; Eusebius, Prcepar. Evangel ., lib. iv. 16, 17 ; Plutarch, Themist., 13 ; Pausanias, viii. 2 ; Grote, Greece, i. cli. vi. ; Maurice, Indian Antiq., pp. 965, 984 ; Mallet, Northern Antiq., i. pp. 132-142 ; Jortin, Eccles. Hist., v. p. 233. In spite of the vigilance of the officials in every district of India, the tendency of the superstitious people and self-seeking priests towards forbidden rites is ever showing itself. The Government of the North-Western Provinces is at present investigating the circumstances under which a human being has been offered in sacrifice to the black goddess, Kali, in a village near Benares, in the very heart of a dense population long under our rule. The village priests incited a Brahman family to give up their son, a boy of sixteen. Before a large crowd the lad was led forth to the temple, and after invoca¬ tion to the hideous idol, the chief priest cut the victim’s throat and sprinkled the warm blood over Kali herself. The crime is said to have created a sensation in the district. The barbarity of hook-swing- IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 119 Iii religions where it is not actually exhibited, it is always plainly traceable in symbols and substitutes for it. In the Indian Books man is mentioned first among offerings that are acceptable, and the very period is indicated when animals took the place of human victims. 1 In Egypt a very impressive reminiscence of it was preserved in the fact that every animal found by the priests to be fit for sacrifice was certified by the Sphragistae with a seal bearing the image of a man whose arms were bound behind bis back, and across whose throat a sword was drawn. 2 While, however, the custom was universal, reforms which abolished or left it behind are indicated in all religions. These were due to the gradual refining of the moral senti¬ ment under the natural expansion of the human intellect. As civilisation advanced and society became 'more humane, the tendency grew in strength to con¬ sider that what excited disgust and horror in men should not be offered to the gods unless on peculiarly solemn and critical occasions. So the offerings came ing has recently revived in several villages. It was put down by the police in 1867, up to which year it formed a part of every annual festival, and was often preceded by the ordeal of walking through the fire. In the latest case, which occurred within ten miles of Calcutta, a missionary stopped the orgie and examined the back of the drugged victim, when he found that the hook had passed through and lacerated the two great muscles, although the man had been eased by the support of a waist - band also. The villagers resented his inter¬ ference. — The Scotsman, 6tli Sept. 1893. 1 Wilson, jR ig Ved., i. 24, ii. 8 ; Haug, Aitareya Brahmana, i. 8, 9, and viii. 15, 16 ; vol. ii. pp. 90, 91, and 467. 2 Wilkinson, Ancient Egypt, vol. iii. p. 407. 120 SACRIFICE to be generally sucli animals as were valuable on account of the care expended upon rearing them, or the skill and danger involved in the endeavour to hunt and capture them. On certain occasions the victim was an animal supposed to be greatly affected by the god, while on others a peculiarly acceptable sacrifice was that of a creature abominable in itself, but supposed to be acceptable, because, as in Persia, by the slaughter its pollution was ended, or because, as in Egypt, the soul of a fellow-man who had been doomed by migration to expiate his wickedness in it, was liberated from his punishment. In India, China, and Persia animal sacrifices were not practised with any great extravagance. They marked only the rites peculiar to the principal seasons and to the crowning festival of the sacred year. In almost all the sacrifices the suffering caused by the slaughterer was reduced to a minimum. The sacred knife was never regarded as an instrument of cruelty, for instead of wounding and slaying it was supposed to heal and give life to the victim. Torture in animal sacrifice was unknown, though in the case of human sacrifice in the solar cults of Asia and of Europe the torment of the hapless victim seems to have been as essential to the rites as it was to those of Mexico. Polytheism everywhere represents a conglomerate of pure beliefs and most degraded practices. In modern India we have a fair specimen of the religious condition of ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Greece. There and then, as to-day in India, the loftiest philosophical speculation was combined with grossest sensuality, and IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 121 basest orgiastic idolatry of the demons of destruction and lust. Yet however shameful and revolting was the spectacle to be witnessed at their shrines, slaughter of animals, unless on special and peculiar occasions, when hecatombs were deemed appropriate or necessary, was never excessive. 1 The reason of this will probably be found in two beliefs almost universal in polytheism. The belief in transmigration must have powerfully affected men’s conceptions of their relation to the lower animals, and another belief, very prevalent in India and Egypt, that the Divine impersonal soul has infused itself into everything, must have gone far to make even the lowest creatures inviolable by the religious. Yot only were the animals everywhere defended from viol¬ ence, they were considered sacred and accounted as proper objects of worship. In Persia, the dog and the cow, though not worshipped, were regarded as very holy. Injury done to a dog was punished more severely than was the slaying of a man, and the most efficacious of all holy elements for religious purification was sup¬ posed to be the excrement of the cow. 2 Parallel beliefs as to the sanctity of certain animals were common among 1 Wheeler, Hist, of India , i. p. 129 ; iii. pp. 218, 221 ; John¬ son, Oriental Relig., ii. p. 305 ; Syecl Ameer Ali, Spirit of Islam, p. 8. 2 In India every part of a cow is supposed to be inhabited by a god, every hair is inviolable, its dung plastered upon any place cleanses from pollution, while the ashes of burnt cow-dung sprinkled upon a sinner will convert him into a saint.—Monier Williams, Religious Thought in India , p. 318 ; Darmesteter, Introduction to the Vendidad, p. xcviii., Sacred Books of the East, vol. iv. 122 SACRIFICE Greeks and Romans, though only in India and Egypt was the belief in their divinity acknowledged. In these cases the superstition was probably rooted in the totem- ism of prehistoric ages, but educated Egyptians of the latest ages defended it as the consequence of their belief in the all-pervading creative energy of the hidden Nutar Nutra, the god who was in everything and in whom everything moved. 1 In India it produced the latest development of Hindooism, Vaishnavism—de¬ votion to a personal god who has shown his sympathy with mortals, and his activity for the welfare of all living things, by his frequent avatars in forms ranging from those of the reptile and the fish, up to those of Krishna and Buddha—and who will yet, like the coming redeemer of every religion, in a final avatar, appear for the uprooting of evil. 2 We can readily understand how such beliefs must have greatly fostered tender respect for all forms of animal life. And although in one aspect it is childish and degrading, in another it may remind us, as Michelet has observed, that Christians have never “ sufficiently emphasised their duties to that 1 Records of the Past, vol. ii. pp. 129, 132; Bunsen’s Egypt, i. p. 364. 2 In spite of its hideous idolatry Vaishnavism has more in common with Christianity than any other form of unchristian faith, for the simple reason that it has bor¬ rowed from it. In its devotion to a personal god it is said to satisfy the yearnings of the heart for a religion of faith and love, but that faith and worship must not be understood in our sense of the words. The religion as ex¬ hibited in the Bhagavad-gita and the Bliakti Sutra is a religion of works, presenting in its use of rosaries and bodily exercises re¬ semblances to the corrupt Chris¬ tianity of the Middle Ages.— See M oilier Williams, Religious Thought in India, pp. 97, 334. IN’ HIGHER POLYTHEISM 123 immense caste which, beneath all human castes, that is the poor brute world, appeals to them to be delivered and lifted up.” 1 Though not accepting the conclusion which Mr. Lecky has drawn from a survey of a growth of con¬ sideration for animals as an element of public morals, 2 “that the Mohammedans and Brahmans have in this sphere considerably surpassed the Christians; ” believ¬ ing rather that recent legislation for the prevention of cruelty to animals 3 was more urgently required in India than in Great Britain, we may yet thankfully accept this touching reminder from polytheism of our obligations as Christians to realise and cherish sym¬ pathy with nature in her humblest living forms. 4 Another feature as remarkable as this reverence for animals, which may explain the economical employment of them in sacrifice, is the torture which in many reli¬ gions the worshippers inflicted upon themselves. It was 1 The Bird, p. 148 ; Bible de Vhumanite, pp. 59, 75. 2 Hist, of European Morals, etc., vol. ii. p. 188. 3 Act xi., 1890, of the Legis¬ lative Council of India. 4 The case against Hindooism is fairly stated by Mr. John Lock- wood Kipling in the introduction to his interesting volume on Beast and Man in India, a Popu¬ lar Sketch of Indian Animals in their Relation with the People. Macmillan, 1891. Here is a sen¬ tence : ‘ ‘ The Hindu worships the cow, and as a rule is reluctant to take the life of any animal except in sacrifice. But that does not preserve the ox, the horse, and the ass from being unmercifully beaten, over-driven, over-laden, under-fed, and worked with sores under their harness ; nor does it save them from abandonment to starvation when unfit for work, and to a lingering death which is made a long torture by birds of prey, whose beaks, powerless to kill outright, inflict undeserved torment. And the same code which exalts the Brahman and the cow, thrusts the dog, the ass, the buffalo, the pig, and the low- caste man beyond the pale of merciful regard.”—p. 4. 124 SACRIFICE natural that the idea of the intrinsic or magical efficacy of sacrifice should react upon the importance attached to asceticism in all its manifestations. Men transferred to themselves the sufferings which they spared their victims. The sacrificial propensity, which they re¬ strained in relation to the animals, they stimulated to almost unbounded license in self-mutilation and even in suicide. Belief in the supernatural efficacy of self- torture, prevalent in higher pagan religions, was wide¬ spread all over the savage world. The North American Indian in order to become a sorcerer, the Celt to become a seer, willingly submitted to austerities as appalling as Gotama endured to become a Buddha. The Mexican priests flagellated themselves, and the Syrian priests gashed themselves with knives from the conviction that such sufferings had an all-prevailing power with the gods. It is remarkable that, according to the Indian beliefs, the powers wielded by the arch-demons were acquired by the practice of religious austerities, so that where men employed them against evil powers they were availing themselves of their weapons. When endured for the higher end of attaining to illumination and equality with the gods, we must beware of at¬ taching to those self-immolations any moral significance. The sufferers had no idea of the blessing which may accrue from suffering patiently endured, as Divinely appointed or sanctioned. The tragic poets of Greece, it is true, were deeply imbued with the feeling that great suffering so purifies and refines the noble, as to exalt them after death to the rank of gods ; but the worth of IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 125 self-inflicted suffering in any religion “was not esti¬ mated in a spiritual but in a purely ‘ spiritualist ’ sense, and so considered it was great indeed .” 1 The ends or objects which sacrifice in all these religions was supposed to promote or secure, varied according to the prevailing belief in Deity, and the pre¬ vailing estimate of life’s highest good. In all pagan religions two forms of belief co-existed, an esoteric, as distinguished from the popular creed. Side by side with the grossest superstition and idolatry are found conceptions that are truly ethical and religious. The specimens of Babylonian hymns and Egyptian prayers which have been preserved, and which are now trans¬ lated in the Records of the Past, suggest in depth of penitence and height of aspiration a comparison with the Hebrew psalter; yet these very prayers and hymns were employed in most degraded idolatrous worship. These contradictions and incongruities in heathen re¬ ligion have hitherto defied reconciliation, but their existence is undeniable. While the masses everywhere craved for very concrete conceptions of the objects of their faith, and for very palpable methods of communi¬ cating with them, there was always a thoughtful class, represented by the priests as frequently as by the philosophers, who strove after a more impersonal re¬ ligion, of which the popular beliefs and rites were only symbols. The unlearned multitude practised sacrifice 1 Monier Williams, Religious Lecture , p. 100 ; JEschylus, Eu- Thought in India, p. 231; Spencer, menides, 737; Miiller’s Bisser- Be Leg. Heb., ii. 13, 2 ; Selden, tation on the Eumenides, p. Be Biis Syriis ; Reville, Hibbert 197. 126 SACRIFICE as the great preservative against malevolent demons, or as the sure means of obtaining from benevolent powers material benefits. The learned few, believing in sacrifice as some mysterious cosmic force, the great maintainer of the energies of the universe, sought by means of it to rise to actual and equal fellowship with the many gods above them, and in some cases to union with the Absolute Being from which they and all things sprang. From the Brahmanas we gather that the whole in¬ tricate ceremonial in whose meshes an ordinary Hindoo was involved from before his birth till long after his death—as not his own but the property of the priests —was to pile up through their offices with him and for him such an amount of merit as would secure prosperity here, and make it safe for him to face the mystery here¬ after. A thoughtful and philosophical Brahman again sought through all these services an escape from the inherited curse of transmigration, for by the last offer¬ ing of himself, completed in the burning of his body on the funeral pyre, he was in the way of being finally absorbed into universal Brahm. The earliest religious rites performed for or upon him—for they began before he saw the light—were intended to purify, and to prepare him for being regenerated through a second birth, marked by his investiture with the sacred cord. According to Manu , 1 the first birth of an Aryan was from the natural mother, a second occurred in the bind¬ ing upon him of the holy thread, and even after that the 1 Manu, ii. 169, in Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxv. IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 127 twice-born man could be regenerated through the initia¬ tion of a very solemn sacrifice. We need not dwell upon the elaborate system of oblations, which from the time when as a young householder he consecrated his own hearth, he had to render to the sacred fire daily ; at new and full moon; at the beginning of the seasons ; and at the summer and winter solstices—on which latter occasions he presented with great solemnity his animal sacrifices. For the aim in all these ordinary rites —smarta karman —in the more important of which he was assisted by the priests, was to secure that his merits would considerably exceed his demerits in the reckoning of his responsibilities of each period . 1 We may refer, however, more fully to the most solemn ordinance of personal and domestic religion which, if he could afford it, he was expected to observe, the very ancient and solemn Soma sacrifice. For such srauta 1 To the holy fire “Agui-a- dliana” every householder for thirty years, or, according to some authorities, for all his life, had to offer daily the “Agni liotra ishta,” an oblation of rice, barley, milk, and ghee. At new and full moon he observed the “ Darsa purnamasana ” cere¬ monial, in which, if he could afford it, he was expected to in¬ vite the offices of four priests. These, with the proper sacrificial instruments, prominent among which was a sword to fend off the demons, elaborated in great detail the function with the result of procuring much merit to the householder, and no small profit to themselves. Every four months he had to offer the “Katur- masaya ” oblations, in memorial of the generative and productive powers of nature ; and at the summer and winter solstices there were special festivals on a grander scale, distinguished by the offer- ing of animal victims.—Sata- patha Brahmana, p. xlviii. ; Sacred Books of the East, vol. xi.; also Satapatha Brahmana, Kand. i. ii. ; Adhyaya, v. ; Sacred Books of the East, vol. xii. pp. 52, 383 ; Mann, iv. 26 ; Sacred Books of the East, vol. XXV. 128 SACRIFICE karman, the simplest of which lasted five days—though some of them were protracted much longer—the services of at least sixteen priests and eleven sacrificers were required. The victims in early times consisted of various kinds of animals, including the horse, the animal mentioned next to man as most fit for sacrifice , 1 but latterly only goats came to be employed . 2 These were immolated by a priest, who had gold on his finger, for gold was supposed to confer life, so that the victim might not be injured but blessed by the sacrifice. Though actually strangled, it was described in the ritual as “ quieted,” and that with the approval of its kin. The knife was invoked not to harm it, and when its eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth, and other “ open¬ ings of its vital airs,” had been cleansed by water sprinkled with a bunch of sacred grass, it was supposed to be revivified, healed, and soothed, and to pass up through the fire as living. Only parts of it, however, were offered through the fire, the other portions were eaten by the priests, and its blood, contrary to almost universal usage, save that of Egypt , 3 was poured out upon the ground, as the 1 Rig Ved., Mand, i. 162-3; Ramayaana, i. 13. 2 Just as tlie liorse became the substitute for man, the ox was substituted for the horse, and the sheep for the ox, till latterly the goat, in which animal the “medha,” the part fit for being sacrificed, remained longer than in other animals, came to be re¬ garded as pre-eminently the pro¬ per victim. 3 There it was allowed to flow upon the ground, or over the altar if the victim was placed upon it. It was not regarded as sacrosanct, for it seems to have been used in the kitchens for cooking.—Wil¬ kinson, Ancient Egypt , vol. ii. p. 458. IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 129 portion of the evil spirits, and was trodden upon to drive them away . 1 These sacrifices, however, were only preparatory to the solemn libation and sacrament of the Soma. This plant—the Dionysus of India and Iran—the juice of which was the wine of the early Aryans, was supposed to possess the mystic power both of gladdening the gods, and of conferring enlightenment and immortality upon men. Soma was the king of all healing herbs, the “ holy driver away of death,” who brought down with him from heaven all plants whose leaves or fruits are for the healing of the nations . 2 According to the Iranian belief, the earthly yellow or golden soma or homa, comprised all the medicinal and curative powers of the vegetable kingdom, and the heavenly or white homa was the elixir of life, by drinking which at the resurrection all the good will become immortal. So the heavenly homa was invoked and adored, and the earthly soma, the “ plant of renown,” was treated as divine even when being gathered and utilised for sac- rifice. With much apology at the appointed season the plant was cut by one who in cutting was not to think of the plant, but of an enemy, or if not of an enemy, then of a straw, for thus not soma but some¬ thing evil was slain . 3 On the fifth day of the cere- 1 Satapatlia Bralmiana, 4, iii., 489 ; also Sacred Books of the East, Kanda, 7, Adhyaya, 30, Sacred vol. xxvi. p. xxiv. introd. Books of the East, vol. xxvi. pp. 3 Satapatlia Bralmiana, iii., 181-199. Kanda, 9, Adliyaya, 4, Brail - 2 For description, see Haug, mana, 1-28, in Sacred Books Aitareya Brahmana, vol. ii. p. of the East, vol. xxvi.; Rig K 130 SACRIFICE monial, at morning, mid-day, and evening celebra¬ tions, libations of juice prepared from it were poured into the fire, while part was imbibed by the priests and part by the institutors of the sacrifice, who by the antecedent sacrifice had been initiated or regener¬ ated into persons duly qualified to partake of it. The ceremony thus became the very highest action of the Indian religion, and its intention was unmistakable. The soma was the representative or substitute of a god, the victim previously offered was the substitute of the offerer. In the sacrifice of the animal he rendered himself, and as the sacrifice ascended through the fire, he was himself borne upwards to the society of the gods, with whom he partook of the divine nectar, and became thereby a sharer in their illumination and im¬ mortality. The ritual of this very ancient soma sacrifice, which probably originated in the childlike desire to maintain friendship with familiar gods, which inspired the blood¬ less sacrifices of the earliest Yedic times , 1 marks, as described in the Brahmanas, higher conceptions of man’s relations to deity. The gods of the Brahmanas are not familiar deities ; the distance between them and man is felt to be greater, and yet the desire for union and equal fellowship is deeper. The gulf that separated them could only be bridged by a sacrifice, in which, in substitute, the votary offered himself. We Veda , 97, 17 ; The Horn Yast, xx. 4, in vol. iv. pp. 219-223. ix.32, in Sacred Books of the East, 1 Hang, Essays on the Parsis , vol. xxxi. pp. 231-234; andFarg. p. 241. IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 131 must not conclude, however, that this substitution carried with it any idea of the innocent taking the place of the guilty. That idea never took hold of the Indian conscience. The Indian conception of sin was that of personal demerit, not that of conscious offence against a righteous power. The highest gods rever¬ enced by men were manifestations of the same spirit that animated themselves, and the Indian rejected any hope of finding deliverance from evil and entrance into heaven in any other way than by working out his own salvation. Even in the self-torture and immola¬ tion to which we have referred, there was no idea of penance. There was nothing akin to the motive which led a Syrian to seek reconciliation with an offended neighbour or god by shedding his blood in his presence, and which made the designation of “ethkash- shaf ” over a wide region of Western Asia the equivalent for “ making supplication .” 1 The whole intention of the self-immolator and the offerer of the soma sacrifice was to pile up, by these painful or costly processes, such an amount of merit as would enable him to climb up into the world of the devas, and thereafter to secure his own deliverance from the circle of endless chano-e . 2 O 1 Religion of the Semites , p. 303. 2 Mr. Scott, in Foregleams of Christianity, p. 7, quoting M. Alf. Maury’s La Religion des Aryans en croyances et legendes de VAntiquite, notes a correspond¬ ence between the Indian myth and the Christian Gospel. Soma, identified with Agui below and with Indra above, in a combus¬ tible substance that has sprung from the earth, through the oper¬ ation of the air, has acquired new properties through the pro¬ cess of crushing. The myth, according to him, is suggestive of a suffering victim, born of an earthly mother through the oper¬ ation of the Divine Spirit, and 132 SACRIFICE The same observation applies to the costly and elaborate funeral ceremonies, and to the extraordinary offices comprehended under the designation “ shraddha,” —the equivalent to a mass for the dead,—which occupied so prominent a place in the Brahman religion. All over the world, and in all religions, at a certain level of belief, death was accompanied by sacrificial rites intended to provide the dead with sufficient equipment and retinue for his journey to, and for his career in the world of shades. The original sacrifices of wives and slaves and animals have everywhere been commuted. Yet, as late as 1781, in Germany, at the burial of a knight of the Teutonic order, his horse was actually sacrificed and was cast into his grave; and still the pathetic spectacle of an officer’s fully-accoutred steed led in the mournful procession at his funeral, reminds us of the grim heathen rite which survived so long in Christendom. 1 In India, suttee, the burn¬ becoming a victorious Saviour and medium of inspiration—tlie Sun of Righteousness. It may be legitimate for us to construe the old belief into an allegory of our faith, but only because we are wise after the event. The an¬ cient Greeks in their worship of Dionysus emerging from his suf¬ ferings inflicted by adverse powers (ra Alovvctov with renovated glory to liberate the mind from its intoxication and bewil¬ derment (see Muller’s Dissertations on the Eumenides, p. 226) is another suggestive ‘ ‘ correspond¬ ence ” ; but is only suggestive to us “on whom the ends of the world have come.” We can utilise the old form to express the newly re¬ vealed truth, but the idea origin- ally inspiring the form was anti- christian. 1 Kemble, Horce Feralis , p. 66; Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. i. p. 428. Little images of stone, clay, and wood were substituted for the wives and slaves and animals in Japan. The once costly offer¬ ings of clothes and ornaments in India have come to be repre- IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 133 ing of the widow with the corpse of her husband— a custom neither Yedic nor Brahmanic, hut incorpor¬ ated from the aboriginal tribes—prevailed until our day. It is now happily abolished, but reverence for the dead, and a sense of obligation to help them, continue to be expressed in very prolonged and costly sacrificial rites and exercises, which had their origin in immemorial antiquity. According to Manu, 1 the intention of a shraddha, which only begins when the proper funeral solemnities have been completed, is first to provide the man who has gone out of sight in the flame of his pyre with an ethereal body. When this has been accomplished through adequate oblations of rice and flour, and sufficient libations of water, the next object of those who “are alive and remain ” is to deliver the departed from Yama, and from the penalties of the hell called Put. Yama was the Indian original of Pluto and Minos, before whose judgment-seat all the dead over whom he has sented by a woollen thread and some tiny cakes. In China, paper imitations of men and horses, clothes and money, yea of houses, with paper keys to open and shut them, are despatched by fire to the dead for their use. The many articles of domestic and personal utility, and the trifles which, all oyer the world, are found in old graves, may be accounted for by the same belief. Till very recently the coin for Charon’s toll, and the cake to quiet Cerberus, were placed in the coffin of Irish and Celtic peasants; and the lights which are fre¬ quently kept burning around it, like the fires which in more ancient times were kindled at the grave, were all intended to aid the pro¬ gress of the deceased in his mysterious pilgrimage.—School¬ craft, Indian Transactions , vol. iv. p. 55 ; Longfellow, Hiawatha , part xix. ; Davis, The Chinese , vol. i. p. 276 ; Colebrooke’s Essays, vol. i. 161 seq. 1 Manu, ix. 1381, Sacred Books of the East , vol. xxv. 134 SACRIFICE power are confronted with the records of their past, and judged according to their deeds. Over the devotees of Siva, Yishnu, Brahma, and specially over those whose dying has been protected by ceremonies performed by properly rewarded priests, he is believed to have no power. 1 All others when tried and judged by him, are led by his messengers each to their own place in one of the numerous Indian heavens or hells. It is a prospect which even good men may well face with the utmost dread ; but faith in the efficacy of the Brahman rites, in the merit of their own donations to the priests, and in the value of the services rendered for them by their relatives after death, enables them to meet it not only with composure, but even with confident hope. If only sufficiently abundant merit be accumulated by and for them, they will surely be delivered from the pains of hell (put), and attain to beatification as pitris— glorified ancestors—in the realms of the gods. 2 1 Vishnu Purana, iii. 7. 2 The Brahmans, if properly fee’d, granted what was akin to absolution before death and after it, and in some instances they appear to have become surety for the dead. It is recorded that when a rajah of Tanjore died, his bones, burned to powder, were mixed with boiled rice and eaten by twelve Brahmans, who took upon themselves to answer for all his demerits. From the Punjab it has been reported that a Brah¬ man, paid for the purpose, ate rice out of a dead man’s hand as his surety, and then he aban¬ doned the territory as one who had lost caste by the transaction. A strange reminiscence of this belief survived in Wales, where at funerals poor and abject people were hired for a loaf of bread, a bowl of beer, and a silver coin, to take upon themselves the sins of the deceased.—Dubois, Mceurs du Peuple dc Vlnde , vol. ii. p. 32; Richardson, Punjab Notes and Queries, vol. i. 674 ; Aubrey, Re¬ mains of Gentilism and Judaism. Folk Lore Society Publications, 1881, p. 35. IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 135 Even after the deceased had become a pitri or glorified ancestor, the shraddha is believed to be an important means of ministering to his welfare; for by the essence of the offerings of his posterity his progress is supposed to be accelerated through future blessed births till he attains to final union with the absolute. We find the same belief in all pagan religions ; in some cases it was expressed in peculiarly solemn rites which, in forms more refined, reappeared early in perverted Christianity. In India it supplies a striking illustration of the inconsistencies of religious belief. Eor, according to one of the oldest and most unbending of Indian dogmas—that of Karma—a man lives by his own righteousness only, suffers for his own iniquity, and works out his own salvation apart from any help which may be accorded by others. Yet from immemorial ages the orthodox and pious have only been able to face the great ordeal of death, when sustained by the hope that they will profit after it, by merit accumulated for them by their surviving relatives, through such simple and easy methods as the offering of little cakes to themselves, and that of feeding and feeing the priests who are their representatives on earth. 1 It is an incon¬ sistency far more pathetic than ludicrous, for it indicates that man’s religious instincts are stronger than his metaphysics. The help rendered by the pious survivors counts of course for merit to themselves, but it is an 1 “He who gives water and while the gift of a house will shoes to a Brahman will find water secure him a palace in it.”— to refresh him and shoes to wear Ward, The Hindoos, vol. ii. p. in his journey to the next world, 284. 136 SACRIFICE outcome of the essential belief, which no degradation, even that of savagery, can obliterate, and which the Gospel has formulated with unmistakable precision, that though every man must “ bear his own burden,” no man “ liveth unto himself,” for he can only “ work out his own salvation ” by working for the redemption of others. The religion of India is said to contain all the ideas which are expressed in the rites of other pagan religions, but in other religions some of these ideas are more clearly elucidated. In some cases, moreover, they are applied with the result of producing divergences almost amounting to contradictions to the Indian beliefs. No more striking illustration of this can be found than in the religion of Iran, whose sacred Avesta, the more it is ex¬ amined and compared with the Vedas, clearly indicates that both are traceable to a common source. Though flow¬ ing originally from the same fountain of thought, those literatures represent developments so independent that the same words express quite different conceptions, and the same sacrificial rites are employed to gain quite opposite ends. The devas of the Vedas are the demons of the Avesta. The Asuras of the Brahmanas are enemies of devas and of men—though in the Vedas, they are only ethereal in contradistinction to corporeal beings—yet Ahura in the Avesta is the sacred name of deity. 1 This difference was the result, not of any “ religious revolution in prehistoric times,” 2 nor of any violent 1 Haug, Essays on the Parsis, pp. 139, 276, 284. 2 Syed Ameer Ali, Life and Teaching of Mohammed, p. 7. IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 137 reaction against primitive beliefs. It was rather the out¬ come of slow movements which by imperceptible degrees led the minds of men who were living under healthier physical and intellectual conditions, farther and farther apart from the thoughts of their kindred not so favourably influenced. 1 In the Vedas there are said to be germs of monotheism in the unseen force felt to be behind all forces; and germs also of dualism, in the conflict between the powers malevolent and benevolent to man. As the Aryans descended into India and degenerated through admixture with the lower races into Hindoos, the metaphysical spirit gained hold of them, and both of these original notions grew gradually weaker, till finally they disappeared under its resolving power in a coarse pantheism on the higher side, and in its lower in a confusion of good and evil approaching to animism. The Iranians on the other hand, living a practical life in a much healthier climate, clung per¬ sistently to both notions, and went on developing and applying them. And so, it came to pass that out of the “ Asuras,” the spiritual beings conceived of by their ancestors to be superior to man, one came to be worshipped as supreme over all the others, who became his messengers or heavenly host. All but one, and that one, and all things living that cleave to him, became the enemy of the Supreme. For him, and for his wicked works, Ahura is not' responsible, seeing he did not 1 Mills, Introd. to the Gathas, Contemporary Review , Oct. 1879, p. xxii. seq., Sacred Books of the p.283; Muller, Origin and Growth East, vol. xxxi. ; Darmesteter, of Religion, p. 249. 138 SACRIFICE create him ; but not having the power at once to destroy him, he endeavours to do so by unceasingly warring against him. The history of the world is the history of that war in heaven and earth, which must continue till darkness, death, and evil are extinguished, and light and life and good shall stand forth triumphant in a resurrec¬ tion which will restore all things. This conception of a conflict between gods and demons almost faded in India from the thought of a people who dreamed that both were fleeting emanations of the same indifferent being. In Persia it was intensified in the thought of a people who had a great deal of actual fighting to do, till being was conceived of as infinite light, the source not of all that is, but of all that thinks and knows. Deity was infinite intelligence communicating at man’s request the divine word or law for the conquest and ultimate extermination of ignorance, impurity, and death. This is an idea of religion very different from that of the Hindoo, whose highest aim was to extricate himself altogether from the universe. The orthodox Iranian on the contrary sought by ranging himself on the side of the good deity Ahura-mazdha, to contract and destroy as much as he could of the dominion of Ahriman (Angra Manya), the evil power. It involved quite another doctrine of sacrifice, as being effectual not in the first instance at least to obtain a man’s deliverance, but as service rendered to the good deity. It was not so much an act of worship, as a real assist¬ ance to Aliura’s hosts, who though ethereal needed the IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 139 sustenance of material offerings and the encouragement of human praise. When unaided by sacrifices, and by prayers or spells believed to be as potent as sacrifices, they became weak and fled helpless before their foes ; but when “ the holy meat and flesh, and the most holy homa,” were offered to but not in the fire, and when the spells of pious men were projected between earth and heaven, the armies of light prevailed to displace the hosts of darkness, and overthrow “ the murderers of the good, the fiends who hate and torment them for their faith.” 1 In the Avesta as in the Brahmanas, sacrifice is regarded as a mighty power, but the Avesta demands what the Brahmanas never suggest, that to be effica¬ cious, it must express the righteous disposition and pure intention of the sacrificer. The ceremonial was indeed grossly superstitious, and was founded upon very childish myths, but these came to be infused with moral ideas which the Indian wholly lacked. The* inter¬ pretation of the myths was gradually refined, tending more and more towards pure theism, and even mono¬ theism ; and the development of the rites, unlike that of the Brahmanas, which issued in the gross magic of the Tantras, was in the direction of purer and more ethical conceptions of religion. A Persian, unlike a Brahman, could never hope to climb into heaven just by his sacrifices. Even when offered with pure intention 1 Darmesteter, Ormuzd und 9, 43, Sacred Books of the East , Ahriman, p. 87 ; Vendidad, Farg. vol. iv. ; Yasna, lxi., in Sacred v. 25, note 3, and Farg. xix. Books of the East, vol. xxxi. 140 SACRIFICE they were efficacious only in limiting the power of Ahriman and in extending the dominion of Ahura. In sacrificing to help the dead on their mysterious and dangerous journey, in honouring them as “ fravashis ” at the yearly festival Afrinagan, their principal object was to defend the kingdom of Ahura from the baleful impurity of death. Whatever personal benefit it secured to the worshippers was all expressed in the renunciation of Ahriman and all his works. It was reckoned as only one of the ways by which the kingdom of Ahura could be advanced. By carefully defending himself from the defiling power of death and by destroying the Ahrimanian creatures, he was helping on the cause of good, as truly as when offering sacrifice. For all these, if he had done righteously and lived purely, he would be recompensed in the resurrection; but if he had done wrong, no sacrifice could save him from the penalty of his evil. Wicked actions as in Buddlra’s creed, could not be undone, but must work out their full retribution. The great defect of the religion, however, was that wickedness did not consist in injustice, or cruelty, or im¬ purity in our sense of the words, but in sacrilege. The worst crimes were defilement by contact with death, dese¬ cration of the holy fire, and the slaying or even injuring of any of the holy creatures. Of a remission of such offences, save through personal endurance of the penalties attached to them here and hereafter, the Avesta knew nothing. No sacrifice, no offering could expiate them, or turn aside the sweep of the inexorable law. The criminal had to IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 141 suffer first the very cruel death awarded to him and then proceed to endure terrible torments in another world. It would appear that if, truly penitent, he made a becoming confession according to a formula called the Patet, his soul was saved, so that though he suffered the full penalty here, he was exempted from any in the hereafter. It is averred that this is an idea which at a late period of its history, Persian religion borrowed from a purer faith. 1 It probably did, and yet it is interesting to find that at a very early period Iranian religion had its idea of the unpardonable sin, the sacrilege or anaperetha that was inexpiable by death through any torture here, or by any conceivable torment in the world to come. 2 The highest act of Brahmanic worship was com¬ munion in the soma sacrifice, but in the religion of China, the religion of a very practical people, this idea of communion in sacrifice received a far clearer and purer embodiment. In the books of the Li Ki 3 are contained treatises on “ Ki Pa,” the Law of Sacrifice, “Ki I,” the Meaning of Sacrifice, and “Ki Thung,” the Origin of Sacrifice, which indicate conceptions superior to those of any other pre-christian religion, the Hebrew of course being excepted. The doctrines which are set forth and the rites which are described in these treatises are said to be very ancient. The worship was unmistakably that of polytheism, for it was addressed to the sun and moon, and to such forces 1 Spiegel, Introd. to the Khurd- Farg. i. 13, 17, Farg. vii. 23, in avesta , translated by Bleeck. Sacred Books of the East, vol. iv. 2 Yendidad, Farg. iii. 20, seq., 3 Sacred Books of the East, vols. ix. 49 note, Farg. iv. 20, 24, 28, xxvii. and xxviii. 142 SACRIFICE of nature as contributed to promote human comfort ; but the tendency toward the conception of the One Abso¬ lute Sovereign power was manifest. If the sun was addressed, it was because he was supposed to be the abode of the one heavenly spirit, and of the spirits of the departed fathers. Confucius, in the 19th chapter of the “ Doctrine of the Mean,” 1 records that in all their worship the object of the ancients was to reverence “ Shangti ”—the equivalent of “ El Elion ” of the patri¬ archs. The intention of ancient sacrificial worship was purely eucharistic, the principal sacrifices, which seem to have been offered with great religious earnestness, were expressive of the gratitude of the whole nation for benefits divinely bestowed. So sacrifice is described as “ not a thing coming to man from without,” but as “having its birth in the heart which, when deeply moved, expresses itself in ceremonies.” Hence “ only men of ability and virtue can exhibit the idea of sacrifice.” “ Bringing into exercise all sincerity and good faith, with all right-heartedness and reverence, they offer the proper things, and accompany them with the proper rites.” “ Intelligently he offered his sacri¬ fices without seeking anything in return for them.” “ Such was the spirit in sacrificing.” 2 The most interesting of the sacrificial rites described in these books, were those performed in the ancestral temple in honour of the dead. In three ways was a 1 Sacred Books of the East, vol. seq., Sacred Books of the East, xvii. p. 36. vol. xxviii. 2 Li Ki, bk. xxii. 1, 2, 3, IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 143 “ filial son’s service rendered to his parents : by nourish¬ ing them when alive, by mourning for them when they died, and when the mourning is over by sacrificing to them.” After death, offerings of cakes and meat were placed beside the corpse, and at the burial similar obla¬ tions were presented at the grave. “ Not that the dead were supposed to partake of them, but from the oldest ages they have always been so offered, and all to cause men not to revolt from the dead.” When his tablet was erected in the ancestral temple, so that “ the living might be able to think of the dead as not far away,” a sacrifice of repose like a Eomisli requiem mass was celebrated for him. 1 The Egyptians periodically feasted with the departed, and Greeks and Romans once a year visited and illuminated and presented libations and oblations at the tombs of the dead; 2 but in ancient China the dead were honoured with greater solemnity. Annually, in a royal function in which the principal celebrant was the emperor, as the representative of the whole nation, the Chinese observed their sacrifice and sacrament of memorial and communion. It was preceded by purifications, fastings, vigils, during which mourners dwelt upon the recollections of the dead, and brooded over their words, and works, and ways, so that when they entered the temple they seemed to see them in their accustomed places. With fragrant libations offered to attract them, their presence was affectionately in- 1 Li ICi, ii. 8, 9. Tac., Hist., ii. 95 ; Ovid, Fasti, ii. 56-70 ; Cicero, Phil., i. 6; Ad 2 JEneid, v. 77, and ix. 215 ; Attic., viii. 14. 144 SACRIFICE yoked. Then a red bull, fastened to a stone pillar, after the hairs about the ears had been inspected to make sure that they were of the proper colour, was slain by the emperor with a knife which had small bells attached to the handle. The fat from the viscera, the blood, and some of the hair were burned with incense and fragrant wood, and afterwards portions of the flesh, both raw and boiled, were offered to the invisible guests. After they had feasted, and “when their happiness and dignity had been made complete,” the living relatives received their portions. Particular respect was paid to the aged, whose cups were often filled to the wish which was warmly expressed, that their old age would be blessed and their happiness be for ever complete. In some descriptions of the cere¬ mony, the departed were personated by surviving relatives who received the homage paid to them, and with the assistance of the priest pronounced upon the living the benediction of the dead. 1 This great family sacramental reunion, in which the living reverenced the dead and the dead blessed the living, was rooted in one of the deepest and strongest of human sentiments. They were not the only people who sought not from curiosity by necromancy, but reverently by the rites of religion, to hold communion with the departed. Instead of speedily forgetting them, they cherished their memory, and endeavoured to culti¬ vate their favour and to obtain their blessing. It must 1 Shi King, bk. iii. ode 4, p. 300; Li Ki, bk. xxi. 17 ; Sacred Books of the East , vol. iii. Mencius, bk. vi. ch. v. IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 145 not be dismissed by us as only a superstition, whose sur¬ vival among ourselves is affection’s offering of flowers at the graves of our beloved. It was the expression of a spiritual instinct which, like the craving of the Brahman for union with the Divine, and the aspiration of the Iranian to be found on the side of Ahura and against his enemies, is of the essence of universal religion. As such it has been assumed and purified and satisfied by Christianity. It was the natural man’s conception of the Communion of Saints, which the Saviour has corrected and realised, in the institution— not of the Church’s festival of All Saints—but of the Sacrament of the Supper. In that ordinance we hold communion with Christ Himself, and with all who having died in Him are now alive with Him for ever¬ more. Thus, knit together as God’s elect in one com¬ munion and fellowship in the mystical body of His Son Christ our Lord, we obtain grace “ so to follow the blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those unspeakable joys prepared for them that unfeignedly love Him.” 1 In China this ancestral sacrifice was productive of much good. They were a thoughtful and provident people, who saw that such observances tended to promote loyalty, wise govern¬ ment, and social order. Many quotations might be cited from the ritual which clearly declare their noble intention, and the history of China shows how effec¬ tually by means of them great multitudes of people were welded together ; and it must be confessed that in 1 Collect for All Saints’ Day. L 146 SACRIFICE respect of industry, filial reverence, and piety the Chinese will compare favourably with many communi¬ ties in Christendom not pervaded by a very lively faith in the blessed verity of the Communion of Saints. 1 It is because of the deep universal concern as to what of human life lies beyond death that the worship of another great religion is so interesting. It is reflected in the relics of a people quite distinct, as far as can be traced, from the Aryan branch of the human family, and representing probably the oldest civilisation in the world. At the very earliest monumental epoch, the religion of Egypt is stated to have been completely systematised. 2 Though the character of that religion is still a subject of great perplexity and considerable obscurity, there is a general consensus of opinion that on its popular side it was a multitudinous polytheism, whose rites were grossly idolatrous, and in many instances flagrantly indecent and immoral. 3 This mani¬ fold variety of gods and of modes of worship was due to the many distinct communities in which they originated, each having its own peculiar ideas and customs. By 1 Li Ki, xxi. 13. 2 Lenormant, Manual d'His- toire de V Orient, vol. i. p. 521. 3 Indications of savage notions are frequent, as in the periodical processions of the sacred animals or images through the streets and along their water-courses to re¬ ceive, like the procession of the Host, the adoration of the people, and to bestow blessing by their passage. Also, at the sacrifice of the sacred ram at Mendes, when the statue of the goddess was clad in its skin, and the votaries made loud lamentations, and beat them¬ selves as they did in mourning for a dead relative. The Egyptians however did not cut themselves in mourning or in worship as did the Syrians, but smote themselves upon their breasts. (Strabo, xxii. 551; Herod., ii. 122, 171; Wil¬ kinson, Ancient Egypt, iii. 381.) IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 147 and by as the people consolidated, these local groups ol gods were combined or arranged into a hierarchy, in which were classed first the “ great gods ,” then next to them the powers or “ the mighty ones ,” and then “ the genii” their ministers. The same hierarchy was pre¬ sented in the local triads worshipped in particular cities ; for one member of these had a decided pre¬ eminence over the second, who was generally, though not always, a goddess, and in relation to her the third occupied a lower footing. The triad of Thebes consisted of father, mother, and son, and these were worshipped at Philse, as Osiris, Isis, and Horus. 1 Latterly the worship of Isis became national, and when imported into Rome she —as merciful mediator with the stern Osiris holding her son in her arms—was as devoutly worshipped in the Augustan era as is the Madonna in Italy to-day. It is averred that these triads were sometimes represented as three gods in one, as for example, in a porcelain idol worn as a charm, in which were combined the body of Pfcha, the supreme nature god, the hawk’s wings of Horus, and the ram’s head of Kneph. Osiris, Isis, and Horus had for their symbol the triangle, so when we realise that the central belief in Egyptian mythology was the killing of Osiris by Typhon, the old serpent, and his resurrection after burial by Isis to be king and judge of the dead, we shall find ourselves confronted with pathetic suggestions as to the source of the corruptions which were afterwards to paganise Christian 1 Herodotus, ii. 25 ; Bunsen, linson, History of Ancient Egypt, Egypt, vol. i. pp. 364, 409 ; Raw- vol. i. p. 403. 148 SACRIFICE worship, and also of the conceptions which influenced the formulation of the Christian creed. It is no longer a surprise to learn that the doctrine of the Trinity was first crystallised in the theology of the Egyptian fathers of the church, or that one form of the doctrine of the Atonement which represented the devil as compelled to surrender the souls of sinners over whom he had acquired a right—in compensation for his mistake in killing the innocent Son of God—should have so early originated and so long held its place in our Christian theology. 1 But it is not by its popular mythology and gross physiolatry that Egyptian religion is to be judged. Those who take the lowest view of it admit that in its highest conceptions, the many gods of the people were only attributes of One from whom all variety proceeds, and whose name it would be sacrilege to utter. Though aiming so high, it was never clear in its view, for it was “ full of the contradictions of a people unable logically to elaborate their religious conceptions.” 2 In some respects it is described as dualistic like the Persian, in others pantheistic like the Brahman creed; and yet taken as a whole it represented thought at quite an opposite pole from the Indian belief. Instead of absolute Being, it worshipped endless variety of form. Deity, instead of being perfectly excarnated, was con¬ tinually incarnating itself in everything. Body from which the Brahman sought to escape was not allowed 1 Clarke, T'en Great Religions, 2 Rawlinson , History of Ancient p. 255. Egypt, vol. i. p. 316. IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 149 by the Egyptian to perish. India contemplating eternity forgot time, and had no history; but to Egypt every moment was sacred, and “men were so occupied in recording the present upon their monuments, that thou -x they have thereby recorded a mighty past, they have given us no era from which by dating backward or forward, we can fix their chronology.” 1 The gods, by the intelligent, were conceived to be upon the side of justice, and to them prayers, praise, and sacrifice were acceptable only as the worship of upright hearts. Many of the ethical precepts in the hymns resemble the maxims of the Book of Proverbs. They praise “ wisdom,” tell us that “ a man’s heart rules a man,” that “ the life of the wicked is what the wise know to be death,” that “ our secrets are all known to Him who made our inner nature,” and that “ to Him having died we must give a strict account of all the deeds done in the body.” This last belief was the central one in their esoteric theology, and they marked their deep sense of its importance by their costly sepulchres and by their impressive burial rites. The dwellings of the living were considered to be simply “ inns,” upon the erection and adornment of which little cost and skill were expended, but upon the construction of their “ everlasting habitations ” (pa-t’eten ) 2 no possible expenditure and magnificence were deemed excessive. The living were treated with respect, but the dead as exalted to quasi divinity by their liberation from the 1 Clarke, Ten Great Religions , p. 226. 2 Diodorus, i. 51. 150 SACRIFICE body, were entreated to help them in difficulties and protect them in danger; while in turn they sought to assist them in their progress through the other world, and especially in the terrible ordeal which after death awaited them in the halls of Amenti, by the observance of a ritual such as no religion ever knew. It is not in the ritual of the Book of the Dead, but in the high beliefs which are suggested rather than expressed in it, that we find the true reaching forth of Egyptian religion toward the revelation of the Gospel. The details of the ceremonies, the very first purpose of which is to restore to the dead man the use of all the members of his body, are as childish as are those of the Indian shraddha. Its rules also as to the employment of amulets and of magical charms to protect the soul against its ghostly foes, and help it over its difficulties, are only equalled by the notions of savages. But side by side with these absurdities are expressed convictions of the continuity of life after death, and of the operation of the law of retribution, which may fully be held to compensate for a vast amount of gross superstition. The soul of the dead had to pass two ordeals. First, he had to submit to a trial and judgment on earth by his fellow-men, in which he had to be acquitted, or be with¬ out an accuser, before his mourning relatives could be authorised to convey his mummy to the place prepared for it. Even if he survived this test, his soul, led by Horus, past Cerberus the guardian of the gates, was brought to where the infallible scales were erected within the halls of judgment. Into one of these scales were IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 151 placed, not as in Persia and India, his good actions, to be weighed against the bad, but his heart, as repre¬ senting the entire moral character, to be weighed against an image of truth. If he was found wanting, he was condemned by Osiris to return to earth in the form of an unclean animal, to undergo a cycle of transmigra¬ tion proportioned to his misdeeds, and designed to lead him to repentance. In due season he had to return to judgment, and if, after many trials, he was found reprobate, he was doomed as a castaway to absolute annihilation. If, on the contrary, he was on the first or any subsequent occasion justified, Horus, taking in his hand “ the tablet of Thoth ,” 1 directed him into the ways that lead to felicity in the heaven of Osiris. Hot that as acquitted in judgment he was qualified to enjoy that blessedness, but he was then alio wed to embark in the “ boat of the sun ” in which by good spirits he was conducted to the “ pools of peace.” There freed in a baptism of fire from all infirmities and impurities, he was permitted to enjoy the delights of the kingdom of Osiris for three thousand years. At the close of that period he re-entered his body, lived once more a human life with the same issue, and the process having been reiterated till a certain mythic cycle was completed, he was finally, as perfectly blessed, resolved or absorbed into the Divine Essence . 2 While this was in outline the belief of the initiated 1 Compare “the white stone” History, vol. i. p. 317; Birch, Egypt and the “new name” of Rev. ii. 20. from Earliest Times, Introd. 2 Wilkinson, Ancient Egypt, p. x.; Bunsen, Egypt, vol. v. p. vol. iii. pp. 454, 463 ; Rawlinson, 263. 152 SACRIFICE Egyptian regarding the future and final destiny of man, the belief of the masses appears to have been that un¬ less in very exceptional cases, the “ metensomatosis” or transmigration of the soul through “ the circle of neces- sity, 1 —that is, through the whole range of animal ex¬ istence—till at last he re-entered his own body, was the tate of every man. Instead of being retributive in its purpose, it was a condition of progress. It was not a degradation, but an education in which the soul by passing through all the lower organisations, gathered up all their varied lives till, as Tennyson suggests,— “ All experience past became, Consolidate in mind and frame.” 2 1 Herodotus, ii. 82, 123. 2 It is interesting to find the same suggestion in another of our nineteenth century poet seers. Browning says, in “Prince Hohen- stiel Schwangau,” “ I like the thought He should have lodged me once F the hole, the cave, the hut, the tenement, The mansion, and the palace ; made me learn The feel o’ the first, before I found myself Loftier in the last. ” One of his best interpreters remarks that this way upward from the lowest stage through every other to the highest, so far from lowering us to the brute level is the only way for us to attain to the true highest, the all-complete. “On this supposition,” says he, “we are able to account— ‘ * for many a thrill Of kinship I confess to with the power Called Nature ; animate, inanimate, In part or in the whole, there’s something there Manlike that somehow meets The man in me.” —Prof. Henry Jones, Browning as a Philosophical and Beligious Teacher , p. 213. IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 153 It was in any view a probationary and purificatory experience, necessary for entrance into “Aalu.” Its duration was said to occupy two Sothic periods of three thousand years, though Plato in Phcedo mentions ten thousand years, unless in the case of those who have “ philosophised sincerely and who have loved the beautiful.” These in the third period of a thou¬ sand years, proceed to their pristine abode, as we see them depicted in the symbol of the human-headed hawk, carrying two wings in its talons and flying towards the solar splendour. It is supposed, however, that this fcv/cXos avar itce? keople weie instructed in all the truth that had been revealed. Jehovah did not “ speak to them in secret, in a dark place” in the earth, and what the prophets heard in the chambers they were instructed to proclaim from the housetops . 2 Yet, through the poets and philosophers of Greece began to be proclaimed truths concerning Witness the case of Socrates, Vit. Devnonax , lib. ii. and for later instances see Lucian, 2 Euseb., Prcep. PJvang., i. c. 6. M 162 SACRIFICE the moral government of the world—the retributive discipline which orders every man’s way for good—and concerning the necessity for some purification, in addi¬ tion to repentance and supplication, to obtain deliverance from an inherited curse—with such a power and dis¬ tinctness as to give them rank next to Hebrew prophets and psalmists as TraiSaycoyol els Xpicrrov. The early fathers, who loved to cite the testimony of “ souls naturally Christian,” had a more correct apprehension of this fact than many modern expounders of the faith. And though we can obtain from Greek authors only frag¬ mentary glimpses of the truths of the Divine holiness, of human guilt because of alienation, and of reconciliation by sacrifice, we may profitably conclude this lecture by referring to what of their teaching bears upon the points in which we are most interested—the necessity for an expiation of some kind to ease the burdened con¬ science and bring peace to the penitent heart . 1 In the sacrificial rites of the ancient religions which we have been considering, we find no trace of belief in the atoning efficacy of sacrifice in our sense of the word. They were only piacular as intended to influence the general working of the cosmos for the benefit of the sacrificer, and not to make good any offence which lie had committed against a righteous deity. We can¬ not associate them with the forgiveness of sin, for in thes^ Religions the sense of sin was so weak as to be almost non-existent. In_ India, as we have seen, sin was conceived of only as demerit, a misfortune rather 1 Mahaffy, Problems in Greek History , pp. 197, 201. IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 163 than a fault j and though, in the more ethical religions of Iran and Babylonia, it was an offence against “ the laAv of purity,” the impurity was only physical, result¬ ing from contact with the diseased, or with the dead, or with unclean animals. The Iranian conception of the unpardonable sin—the sin that was inexpiable by death here and by torments hereafter—rose no higher than the sacrilege of burning or burying the dead, the eating of a human corpse or of the carcase of a dog. The sins which we find confessed and lamented in the so-called penitential psalms of Chaldsea , 1 are all of a similar character. The suppliant knows that one of the gods is angry because he is suffering pain, and he believes that this evil has come upon him because he has eaten or unwittingly trodden upon the unclean or forbidden thing . 2 The Egyptian religion rose higher than all these, in insisting upon works of justice and mercy as the proof of religious sincerity ; but the purest of its prayers, and the loftiest of its hymns, express no conviction of sin, no repentance from it, and 1 Records of the Past , vol. iii. p. 136 ; Trans. Bib. Soc. Archceol., vol. ii. p. 60. In Babylonian religion we find the same dualism as in the Iranian. The distinction between evil and good was between ele¬ ments and animals that were hostile or helpful to man, and between spirits malevolent and spiiits benevolent in their relation to man. In Iran the chief struggle and the most important function of the priest, was to de¬ fend from and chase out the de¬ filing and most dangerous power of death. In Babylonia it was the existence of disease that most powerfully impressed mankind, and invested the physician with the reputation of the ma¬ gician and the sanctity of the priest. As in Iran,' the rites were magical, and the hymns addressed to the sun-god were of the char¬ acter of incantations. —Sayce, Hibbert Lecture , pp. 329, 353\ 164 SACRIFICE no supplication for pardon. Only once or twice are the Egyptians found making any confession at all . 1 A process is described in the Ritual of the Dead for separat¬ ing a man from his sins, hut it consists not in confessing and repenting of, but in denying and disproving them, and in asserting his integrity. The sins which the man did not commit, and the good things which he did, are enumerated . 2 Even when praying upon the brink of the fire cleansing “pools of peace,” “Extract all evil out of me,” “ Blot out my faults,” the soul is found protesting five times over, “ I am pure .” 3 In the judgment hall the heart could be weighed in the balances, even against truth, and not be found wanting ; a clear indication of a much lower idea of man’s relation to the Divine holiness, and of a far weaker sense of human infirmity and proneness to evil than meet us whenever and wherever we open the Bible. In all these religions, however, at a certain level of thought, sacrifice was offered to conciliate alienated or offended deities, and to keep them propitious or favour¬ able to men. In such a stage of belief the gods were associated with the operations of nature, and any calam¬ ity or disaster was traced to their caprice, or to their envy and jealousy of the good fortune of men. They were supposed to be active only in plague or famine or drought, to interpose in human affairs, not by giving fruit¬ ful seasons and happy days, but by smiting the earth with a curse ; and in order to buy off their wrath in a 1 Records of the Past, vol. vi. 3 Bunsen, Egypt, vol. v. p. 260; pp. 100-1. Rawlinson, History of Ancient 2 Ibid., pp. 137-9. Egypt, vol. i. p. 406 seq. IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 165 time of calamity, or to keep them from troubling the world, only sacrifices which involved loss or suffering to the offerers could suffice. It was so wherever the great religion of Assyria or Baalism prevailed in any organised form. For Baalism was nature-worship in its most extra¬ vagant expression, based upon the idea of solar energy in its destructive and productive phases. Whether as Moloch or Melcar or Kronos or as the fearful fire-god of the Carthaginian or the Celt—whose worship has left many memorials of its horrors in our folk-lore and customs—Bel was a monstrous deity, who could only be kept from doing evil to men by being constantly gorged with hecatombs of bulls and of goats and the blood of thousands of rams. “ Round his altars upon the tops of the mountains, or by the stones of the brooks, his priests danced with frantic shouts, cutting themselves with knives, scorching their limbs with fire.” Human sacrifice—offered not with the savage’s intent of slaying the god for the profit of his worshipper, but as it was offered by the chosen chieftains of the Danai in Aulis , 1 to turn away anger or “ to please the winds” 2 —was everywhere a grim reality . 3 Appreciating their own worth as superior to all creatures, men were inclined to offer upon such occasions, not an animal, even the choicest, but one of themselves as the “ best of all seeds,” and their own proper representative. Expanding the significance of the ancient Gaulish J Lucretius, De Rev. Nat., i. i. 443, 592. 80-101 ; iEscli., Agam., 188-210. 3 Herod., ii. 40 ; Pint .,DcSup., AEn., ii. 116 ; lA\caxi,Pharsal., ii. 7 ; Porpli De Abstin., ii. 55. 166 SACRIFICE maxim, “pro vita hominis nisi hominis vita reddatur , non posse aliter deorum immortalium numen placari arbitrantur 1 the victims burned upon the altars or at the tophets of the horrible fire-god, were not slaves or prisoners captured in war, but, as annually in Carthage , 1 2 3 the choicest children of the noblest houses. Among the wild inhabitants of pre-Christian Europe great was the rejoicing when the lot which decided the victim for the yearly sacrifice fell upon the bravest soldier in the army, or upon the chief of the tribe . 3 In all these religions the idea of substitution, of vicari¬ ous sacrifice, is profoundly rooted. The victim, whether animal or human, took the place of the offerers,for whose members its several parts were considered equivalent— Cor pro corcle, precor, pro fibris sumite fibras. Hanc animam vobis pro meliore damus . 4 On occasions of great peril, when disaster threatened or had actually fallen upon the nation, the propitiatory sacrifice was considered more efficacious when the substitution was voluntary ; and so, in most ancient religions we find traditions of individual acts of self- immolation and devotion in which the foremost man, like the QEdipus of Sophocles, goes straight to his own ruin, that he might bear as king and priest his people’s woe ; or, like Decius in Eoman story, “Omnes minas peri- culaque ab Deis superis inferisque in se unum vertit.” 5 1 Csesar, De Bell. Gall., vi. 16. 4 Ovid, Fasti , vi. 161-2. 2 Diod. Siculus, xx. c. 14 ; 5 (Edipus Bex, 58 seq. ; Livy, Euseb., Prcep. Evang., iv. 16. Hist. , viii. 9,10; Cicero, De Nat. *N\ts\\\s,DeTheol.Gent.,Tp.($&3. Deor., iii. c. 6. IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 167 In China a pious king is reported to have offered himself in a time of universal calamity as the substitute for his people, and, after earnest supplication that his vicarious offering would be accepted in place of his perishing sub¬ jects, he was actually immolated . 1 More remarkable still is the Phoenician tradition, referred to by Eusebius , 2 of the ancient king or “ II ” who, when the realm was en¬ dangered by a very disastrous war, took his only son, and after investing him with the robes and insignia of royalty, sacrificed him upon an altar specially prepared for the purpose. In the light of what had transpired on Calvary at least a generation before the fragments of Sanchonia- thon were being translated by Philo Biblyos, from whom Eusebius quoted the story, and especially in the light of the interpretation which the apostles had given of the crucifixion of Christ, we need not wonder that the tradi¬ tion of the offering of a son— a^a'jrrjrov, piovoyevTj ; as \vrpov , by way of satisfaction; rt^copoL^ Sai/xocrL, to avert the vengeance of God, and to prevent general ruin dvrl rfjs irdvTwv (j>6opas —should have powerfully affected theologians in all ages of the Church, as a type from the heart of heathendom prefiguring what all men needed in God’s loving sacrifice of His willing Son for their redemption . 3 1 Legge, Religions of China, p. 54 ; Martin’s Hist, of Sinim, book iii. p. 75. 2 Prcep. Evang., bks. i. vi. vii. x. 3 Bryant, Observations, pp. 286, 292 ; Magee, Discourses and Dis¬ sertations on A tonement and Sacri¬ fice, 5th edition, vol. i. pp. 372-80. For discussion as to genuineness of the Sanchoniathon fragments, see Renan, Memoire sur San¬ choniathon, Paris, 1858 ; Lobeck, Aglaophanos, ii. 1273; Baudissin, Article in Herzog Real-Enc., xii. pp. 364-72 ; Movers, Die Phoni- zen, pp. 99, 116. 168 SACRIFICE Far more remarkable than what Byrant describes as this “ most wonderful piece of history ” and this striking resemblance to the one great and final sacrifice, is the approach in thought and feeling towards it indicated in the poetry and philosophy of Greece. In the trilogies of the oldest tragic poet, the polytheism of the people —the old Homeric gods, each with his own delegated sovereignty under the supremacy of Zeus—is represented. But the gods of ZEschylos are very different from the gods of Homer. They are no longer capricious, jealous of man’s prosperity, outside the pale of moral obligation ; they are terrible and mysterious beings, like the “ mighty ones ” of Egypt. Tormenting doubts as to whether might (tc paros) in them was only might, or might and justice (Sl/cy) in unison, and as to whether the conflict between man and their superior might as expressed in nature would end in man’s destruction, or in some distant reconciliation of the two, are freely set forth in the Prometheus. With true insight it has been ob¬ served that in the great Titan enduring the wrath of Zeus “ there is embodied, on the one hand, that law of sacrifice which has made all the great benefactors and teachers of mankind achieve their task and win their victory through suffering; and on the other, the truth that the first result of the possession of enlarged powers is a new self-assertion, the spirit of independence and rebellion against the control of a divine order, the ‘many inventions’ that tend to evil, an outburst of impiety and lawlessness, needing the discipline of punishment before it can be brought round again into o o IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 169 a nobler harmony.” “ During the process the govern¬ ment under which men live appears stern, arbitrary, and tyrannical. The eagle’s fangs rend the heart of the hero Titan who represents the intellect of mankind as a race, the mind which belongs to all in its defiant self- assertion. The struggle and the agony must last till Cheiron comes of his own free will to bear the pains of death and so deliver him .” 1 In this great mythos which all thinkers have ranked among the noblest “ of the unconscious prophecies of heathendom,” one of the profoundest anticipations of an eternal truth, the poet’s meaning was probably far lower than his theme. It is plain, however, that his Zeus is no longer “ the ancient giant tyrannous and strong, the vengeful ruler of this scorned world,” 2 sending calamity upon men through sheer envy of their happiness. He protested against such an explanation of the mystery of evil as gross super¬ stition, he referred to it as “ an old saw,” a belief of very ancient days , 3 and he plainly asserted his own conviction that if disaster followed prosperity, it was as the penalty of yielding to its peculiar temptation to become impious and proud. The suffering in man’s lot was felt to be the fruit of man’s sin, his evil was his guilt. It had its fountain in some offence which might have been avoided, but which once committed did not end with the offender. It descended with accelerating force through successive generations—in which the penalty 1 Plumptre, Introd. to transla- Daphne and other Poems, p. tion of AEJschylos, p. lxvii. 358. 2 Fred. Tennyson, “Niobe,” in 3 Again., 470 ; 665-782. 170 SACRIFICE became the parent of sin in an ever-increasing load of guilt, and “ the murderous mischief waxed worse and worse, until it fell at last upon the least guilty —upon one innocent in comparison with the first and all other transgressors—who, by penitence, suppli¬ cation, sacrifice, redeemed his house from the primeval curse. Sophocles, the greater successor of iEschylos, appre¬ hended even more firmly and enunciated more clearly the operation of this inexorable Nemesis. He believed in the supremacy of the all-pervading power whose laws unchangeably avenged themselves upon the impious. Dwelling invisible and beyond all human ken, he will not explain to perplexed mortals the diffi¬ culties connected with his government. 1 Providence, like human life, was to Sophocles a tale that could not be told, till death was passed. The mystery of suffering, often apparently undeserved, and the evil destiny trans¬ mitted from age to age, oppressed him; but he was careful to note the connexion between the original mad¬ ness—the 7 TpcoTap X o$ ary 2 —with faults of some kind in each sufferer which called for correction and for profitable chastening. 3 The disciplinary value of suffer¬ ing, however, was not wholly penal, but educative. In the case of the wise, afflictions were overruled for o’ood o } and out of evil good was brought. To both poets the dread ministers of the divine retribution, the relentless Erinnyes, could be transformed after the appeasement of their wrath into the benevolent (eixfipoves^ Eumenides, 1 (Ed. Rex , 865-871. 2 iEschylos, Again., 1163. 3 (Ed. Rex, 1432, 1472. IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 171 aefival deal} Penalty meekly accepted would purify and refine. Under submission to Zeus Soter—“ the consum¬ mating (reXern?) saviour god, in whom the opposition between the serene gods of the worlds above and the gloomy powers of the realms below is equalised and tempered down,” 1 2 — the 7 raO^fjeara would become fMaOr/fiara, and “ calm wisdom gained by sorrow profits much,” 3 “ Zeus who men in wisdom’s path doth train, Who to our mortal race Hath given the fixed law that pain is gain.” 4 It is important to note that in the thought of both poets—and indeed of all men of profound feeling among the ancient Greeks—consciousness of moral discipline, chastisement overruled to their profit by supreme power (/rparo?) and justice (A Ur]\ was not sufficient to sustain the sufferer under the trial of his affliction. There still rested upon him the burden of his guilt, and from that guilt he could not deliver himself either by the pay¬ ment of fine, or by the endurance of penalty. Emanci¬ pation was possible, but it could only be obtained by expiation and lustration wrought by the blood of sacrifice, and by water poured or sprinkled over the penitent through the mediation of another. To fulfil such an office to a suppliant (t/ceV???) who generally came from far, fleeing from the vengeance of man, and from the fierce wrath of the dreadful Erinnyes roused by his crime—making 1 Eumenides, 361, 993. 3 Eumenides, 495. 2 Muller’s Dissert, on the Eu- 4 Agamemnon , 170. menides, p. 222. 172 SACRIFICE humble entreaty (r7rpocrrpo7ry ) that by rites of atonement ( [IXaafioL ) the Erinnyes might be appeased, and that by rites of purification (/ caOapio-fjLoi ) he might be cleansed from blood-guiltiness and restored to society—was the greatest kindness which a man could show to a friend. This doctrine as to the efficacy of these expiatory and purificatory ceremonies is said to be traceable to Epimenides, who seventy years before the time of iEschylos had been summoned from Crete to Athens to expiate the wrath which a great crime had brought upon the land. This he is said to have done by turning loose some white and some black sheep from the Areopagus, and by sacrificing them to the gods before whose altars they lay down. If they rested where no altar was, one was erected to the unknown divinity who seemed to desire the sacrifice. 1 At the same time he had a temple erected to the venerable goddesses (the Erinnyes) and two unhewn stone pillars set up in the Areopagus as perpetual reminders that the evil powers that vexed the city, and which must never again be invoked, were outrage (vftpts) and shamelessness (dvacSeta). 2 Making allowance for the legends that have gathered round his memory, the leading ideas of his teaching are unquestionably reflected in these ceremonies, which were recognised and enforced under the sacred law of Athens. Its decree was fixed and unbending that the shedder of blood must be outlawed and not allowed to 1 Miiller, Dissert., p. 171 ; 2 Clem. Alex., Protrep., 22. Plumptre, Introd. to sFschylos, Cicero, De Leg. II.. ii. p. xxix. IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 173 converse with men, till, at the hand of one who frees from blood, “ the purple stream from yearling swine runs o’er him,” as, covered with clay, daubed over with filth, standing in some cases on the skin of the victim, he confessed his crime and made his suppli¬ cation. Belief in the efficacy of this atonement for blood, and of this purification of the blood-shedder, was universal in ancient Greece, and it lasted long. Plutarch, indeed, stigmatises the rites as pvirapal a^yvelac, and Plato indignantly denounced them as immoral, but they were practised and believed in by intelligent heathens long after the coming of Christ. It is well known that such a cultured Roman as Julian the apostate, though scoffing at the cleansing power of Christ’s atonement, sought cleansing and peace of mind by submitting to the filthy ceremony of the Taurobolium} The atoning sacrifice as IXao-^o^ was offered to appease the gloomy divinities of the under-world, and to satisfy the outraged Erinnyes. The celestial divinities were not propitiated, but Apollo demanded /ca6app.0L, purification by blood and water, as fitting the penitent for entrance upon a new life of righteousness. The distinction between the atoning and the cleansing rites, clearly explained by Muller , 2 is interesting as giving the ideas originally expressed by words which, used also in the New Testament, have occupied and exercised Christian theologians from the 1 For description, see Thom- 2 Dissertations on the Eumen- son’s Hampton Lecture on the ides , pp. 148-65. Atonement , p. 266. 174 SACRIFICE earliest down to the present times. iEschylos dwells with manifold delight upon the ceremony of supplication and atonement. Sophocles seems to make more of the ceremony of purification, the pouring of water as that which cleanses and renews, and insists upon the necessity for true repentance, and for short hut earnest prayer for forgiveness and help. But both poets are firmly convinced that man could not be his own redeemer, working out his own salvation. He must seek emancipation through others, mid with marvellous approximation to the thought that underlies the mystery of the Atonement, Sophocles makes (Edipus entreat another to take his place—who will make the vicarious lustration in the fulness of a self-devoted love— “For one soul working in the strength of love Is mightier than ten thousand to atone.” 1 Although this thought is well described as “ standing without parallel to it in the literature of antiquity,” 2 these unconscious prophecies of the fountain which Jehovah would open for sin and for uncleanness, and of the Bedeemer who would vanquish the gods of Greece— even as Kronos had been vanquished by Zeus, because though mightier than they, he “ was to be the bearer, not the builder of man’s woes ”—have abundant parallels in the writings of other noble Greeks. Let it suffice that 1 (Ed. Col., 40; 466-492; chylos und Sophocles, p. 87; 496-500. Plumptre, Sophocles, Introd. p. 2 Dronke, Die Religion und lxxxvi. sittlichen Vorstellungen des JEs- IN' HIGHER POLYTHEISM 175 we refer to Plato, wlio had clear insight into the wants of humanity as needing salvation. In Aristotle this confession is profound and searching, as when he says in his Nicomachean Ethics, that “ not one of the moral virtues springs up in us by nature.” To Plato, evil was not an excrescence in man’s nature which might be rubbed off; it was in the heart, the very fountain of life. St. Paul’s conception of the struggle between the flesh and the spirit,” St. John’s assertion that the whole world lieth in wickedness,” almost seem to have been anticipated by Plato. Man’s evil was the result of sin, in which all men were involved, and for which each one is responsible, and no salvation from evil was possible unless by redemption from sin and reunion with deity. This could never be accomplished by man himself. Plato had no conception of a Divine Pedeemer, of a God who could suffer and die for His creatures. This was a void in the theology of Greece, which neither Plato nor any other thinker could supply. But he has said some strange things about “ heavenly powers ” which operate in and upon earthly life, by the media of ideas, which, in themselves eternal, are really the saviours of the world . 1 Believing in the possibility of salvation, he yet could only hope for it from super¬ human intervention. He was the first and only heathen philosopher who, renouncing all faith in any scheme of salvation by works, looked for the redemption of the world to a divine power existing in it and operating towards this end. It is true that there are many non- 1 Legg., i. 644 ; Theat., 177 ; Gorg., 492 ; Rep., vi. 500, and viii. 555. 176 SACRIFICE Christian and even antichristian dicta in his teaching; and specially antipodal to the Gospel idea of the glori¬ fication of the Son of Man is his idea of the glorification of humanity. But in awakening and deepening the sense of the necessity for reconciliation with Deity, and in strengthening the hope of reconciliation, he prepared the way for the Gospel. He knew not, for he could not know, to what end Divinity was shaping his work, and at the best he saw dimly and prophesied only in part. His utterances of the truth, like all unconscious predictions of heathendom, are indeed disjecta membra , and as we read them we feel that we are “ waiting with Ezekiel, till, at the Lord’s bidding, the scattered hones are joined into a body, to which the Holy Spirit gives life.” In the light of the great consummation, however, we see from what source they proceeded, and to what end they were made to tend . 1 It may safely be averred as a conclusion from our survey of the highest beliefs of the ancient world, that the scattered elements of truth found here and there in them can only be satisfactorily harmonised in the Catholic faith of Christendom. And therefore these guesses and fragments sufficiently indicate a Divine purpose for all mankind, which even the Hebrew seers could only predict and not display. We see currents flowing from out of the midst of heathendom to meet the purer and fuller tides of Christianity. We see 1 Eclersheim, Life and Times Element in Plato , pp. 204, 207, of Jesus the Messiah , vol. i. p. 238, 248. 171 ; Ackerman, The Christian IN HIGHER POLYTHEISM 177 heathendom preparing the way, supplying the moulds and the language for the reception and distribution of Christian truth. Even its aberrations from the truth testify to necessities, which it could not satisfy, and also to capacities to receive what it could not produce. There is something pathetic and prophetic in the fact that most of these religions feed the hope of a higher good than they know. The Greek and Roman cults have vanished long ago, for they have served their purpose, and of the heathen religions that survive, not one is satisfied that what is perfect is come to them. Hinduism expects its final Avatar; Buddhism waits for another Buddha; Mazdeism, in ruins, looks out for the fulness of time when Soshiant will restore all things, and though perhaps not speedily, yet eventually they will all be gathered up in the sure hope of Judaism, whose Messiah having really come, is fulfilling all things. N LECTURE IV SACRIFICE AS EXHIBITED IN THE OLD TESTAMENT Patriarchal and Mosaic Sacrifices Without the New Testament the elaborate ceremonial, and even much of the doctrine contained in the Old Testament, would be enigmatical. The gospels and epistles supply the interpretation; and by their light we discover that the law and the prophets represent an economy which prepared the way for the after dispensa¬ tion, which, as only in course of proceeding, is even yet inadequately comprehended by us. In like manner, the Old Testament throws an interpreting light upon the religious beliefs and practices of all mankind. Sepa¬ rating what is accidental from what is essential, it gathers up and gives vitality and completeness to every element of universal religion in them; and, just as Christianity spiritualises what of Judaism it has adopted, so the Old Testament refines and purifies what of other religions it has assumed. It is a gross misconception of the old economy that all its ordinances and rites were formally and exter- SACRIFICE AS EXHIBITED IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 179 nally unlike those of former times, and of nations bordering with Palestine. Many of the traditions, customs, and ceremonies described in the Bible are similar to those which are exhibited in the books of other religions. Coincidences between them are found to multiply every year, and yet these affect the originality of the Hebrew Bible as little as the resemblances be¬ tween heathen and Christian moral precepts affect the originality of the Gospels. The originality is displayed in the use to which materials which are common to all have been put ; 1 for working with such it is undeniable that the Hebrew authors have produced a very different result. Under their handling, traditions and rites which in heathendom have only a cosmic significance are found to be always purified from old associations, and inspired with new ethical and religious ideas. Even when apparently accommodating themselves to popular notions, it is always to use them in illustra¬ tion of spiritual truths, or to enforce high moral pre¬ cepts. In the Bible we find no custom or rite that was essentially - or exclusively heathen; we find several forbidden which were harmless, because they might prove a temptation and a snare, and we find that those which have been preserved have acquired quite a new significance, so that though in form they seem 1 “ The Biblical historians were they infused them.” — Driver, dependent for their materials on Sermons on the Old Testament , p. ordinary human sources; their 5 ; Lenormant, Les Origincs de inspiration shows itself in the V Histoire, vol. i. p. xviii. seq., p. application which they made of 106 seq., ed. 1880. them, and the spirit with which 180 SACRIFICE to be identical, their real purpose is essentially antagon¬ istic . 1 In fact the Hebrew Bible begins at a much higher point than the scriptures of other religions ever reached. Polytheism, under the treatment of the higher class of minds, was resolved into pantheism, and in some rare instances into theism. The Hebrew Scriptures start from monotheism; they postulate a personal Deity, distinct from and superior to the universe which He has created and governs. This belief, of which tradition makes Abraham the first prophet, is not in Scripture represented as “the out¬ come of a Semitic peculiarity of instinct .” 2 The language which the descendants of Abraham spoke was funda¬ mentally that of the Canaanites whom they dis¬ possessed, and it was very closely related to that of the Assyrians who conquered and led them captive. But the religion of Abraham, both in form and faith, was not only distinct from but essentially antagonistic to that of the land which he forsook, that of Palestinian tribes among whom he sojourned, and that of Assyria which “as the rod of God’s wrath” was to punish his apostate seed. The Semitic disposition in all these instances was peculiarly prone to polytheism, and by the many cults of Semitic polytheism the Hebrews were always very powerfully impressed. Down to the time of their overthrow and captivity 1 Kalisch, Commentary on 2 Renan, Nouvclles Considero,- Genesis , p. 87 seq. ; Simon, The tions sur le caractere generate des Redemption of Man, p. 152. peuples Semitiques: Paris, 1859. AS EXHIBITED IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 181 they were continually falling away into it. Mono¬ theism therefore as held by the Hebrews was never free from the influence of debasing superstition. It was a belief capable both of expansion and purification, and Scripture in recording the prolonged and severe training under which a people who actually struggled against it were separated from heathenism and educated to purer apprehension of truth, so far from excluding the ideal development in religion, offers itself as a remark¬ able example of it . 1 Although, however, the original conception became gradually more distinct and more refined, it was never exchanged for another. Even when freed from all that was local in the original faith, the God of Moses, the God of the Prophets, and even of Christ Himself was essentially the God of Abraham . 2 Hebrew monotheism is a puzzle to those who would evolve the catholic religion of the descendants of Abraham from a worship as ethic and tribal as that of any local Bel in the many forms of Baalism. They endeavour to educe it from henotheism, or monolatry, by a long process in which the narrowest conceptions were expanded, and the most superstitious rites were re¬ formed, into the faith and worship of the post-exilic period . 3 It does not fall within the scope of this lecture to discuss theories which have been very fairly and effectively handled by one of my learned pre- 1 Kalisch, Com. on Genesis, p. 185. 2 Muller, Physical Religion, p. 220, 1. 3 Kuenen, Religion of Israel , vol. i. p. 223 seq.; Kuenen, “National Religions,” Hibbert Lecture, p. 118 seq. ; Montefiore, Hibbert Lecture, 1892, Lect¬ ure I. 182 SACRIFICE decessors, Professor Eobertson; but I unhesitatingly adhere to his conclusion, that the origination of the monotheistic conception in the prophets of the eighth century, would be as great a puzzle as its origination in the days of Abraham. By no process of develop¬ ment can we evolve any of the Belim into Jehovah, the lofty and Holy One inhabiting eternity, ruling wisely in heaven and justly upon earth. The prophetic writings of the eighth century are unaccountable unless as the outgrowth of a long previous course of reflection upon higher than heathen beliefs. If Hebrew religion started from the idea, however crudely apprehended, of the unity of God, the Creator and Euler of the world, then the truths proclaimed by Amos and Isaiah, and the clearer perceptions of these truths expressed by Jeremiah and Ezekiel, are natural developments of the original faith. If otherwise, the prophets are per¬ sonalities as inexplicable as Abraham himself, and their teaching is indeed “ as great a psychological and moral miracle as any of the miracles recorded in Scripture .” 1 We do not get rid of the difficulty by bringing the origin of monotheism a little nearer to ourselves. The monotheistic idea in whatever age it emerged was mira¬ culous, or, as described by Prof. Max Muller long ago , 2 it was “ a special Divine revelation.” This is the theory clearly formulated and advanced in the Bible. In it, we are confronted at the very outset by the difference 1 Robertson, The Early Re- 2 Semitic Monotheism: Chips ligion of Israel, “first edition,” from a German Workshop, vol. i. p. 165. p. 373. AS EXHIBITED IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 183 between natural and supernatural religion—between general and special revelation. The immense superi¬ ority of the Bible to all other sacred books is uni¬ versally admitted; for the more they are examined and compared with it, the more clearly shines out the fact, that “ though the belief in Deity in some form or another is universal in humanity, saving knowledge of Deity is only to be found in the Hebrew Scriptures.” While every other religion, however pure it may have been in some stage of its history, inevitably declined into superstition, and was eventually abandoned by the higher class of minds, the religion of the Hebrews, against their natural disposition, went on developing in its higher representatives purer faith and worthier worship. The authors of the Hebrew Bible believed that this was due to progressive Divine revelations of the truth otherwise inaccessible to the human mind. The Bible professes to record the unfolding of that revelation —special as distinguished from the general—originally communicated in nature and in the constitution of man. The Bible implies and demands the acknowledg¬ ment of this universal and primeval revelation, but it wil] not allow us to regard its own revelation as the natural outgrowth of it. So the religion of the Bible is not the religion of the natural man in a higher stage oi development. It is a new and distinct dispensation designed to educate man’s spiritual instincts, purify his natural conceptions and beliefs, and prepare him by ever enlarging disclosures for that manifestation in Christ which has sufficed ever since to sustain him in 184 SACRIFICE his conflict with doubt respecting his origin and his destiny . 1 We are not involved in the discussion of the various theories as to the authorship and construction of the Pentateuch. We examine it, just as we do any other sacred books, in order to ascertain what are the religious conceptions and beliefs contained in it, and what is the purpose which it was designed to serve. It is a composite book, in which at least two streams of narrative, clearly definable by phraseology, style, and spirit, are combined ; 2 but no one will call it a col¬ lection of fragments thrown carelessly together. It is an organic production, conceived upon one design, and exhibiting a natural relation of all the parts to each other and to the whole. That it contains very ancient materials all will admit, and when we apprehend how, and to what high ends, these have been mani¬ pulated, we feel that the man or set of men “ who devised and carried out to so logical a conclusion the plan of it, if tried by the standard of human genius, must have been great men/ They have neither disclosed extraordinary secrets, nor satisfied speculative curiosity; they have attempted neither to write history, nor to expound science, in the sense in which these things aie understood by us. Their narratives often refer to insignificant persons and events never alluded to by the ordinary historian, and they wrote for a people to 1 Comp. Boedder, Natural ences to Miracles, pp. 10, 11. Theology, pp. 2, 3, quoted by 2 Driver, Introduction to the Prof. Dickson in his examina- Literature of the Old Testament, tion of Prof. M. Muller’s Refer - third edition, pp. 109-114. AS EXHIBITED IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 185 whom scientific explanations of physical problems would have been unintelligible. Their language is popular and poetic, but their purpose is that of the prophet, for they have recorded the first unfoldings of an ever-enlarging revelation of a Divine purpose of mercy for all mankind. So in the very beginning of their work human evil and Divine good, man’s sin and God’s salvation confront each other. These two facts are constantly kept before us, and round them as the two poles of an axis the whole Bible revolves. Its one theme appears to be the misery of alienation from God by reason of human sin, the blessedness of reconcilia¬ tion to God, by means of Divine grace. “ From the sin of the first man to the entire ruin of the Hebrew nation, there is recorded a dark unbroken tale of evil; but, above it, unbroken to the coming of Christ, there is a series of announcements of salvation which commences at the very point at which the develop¬ ment of evil is recorded to have begun,” 1 and to make clear to us the foundation and origin of this salvation, and to indicate one or two stages in the revelation of it, the Pentateuch was produced. So though, like some other sacred books, it begins with a cosmogony, it is in order to enunciate truth which had eluded the grasp of the Hindoo and Chaldean sages, yea of the wisest men in all other religions. To them matter was eternal, the material was confounded with the spiritual universe, and gods and men and all things were evolving from, or being resolved into, the surging 1 Ackerman, The Christian Element in Plato , p. 219. 186 SACRIFICE deep of chaos . 1 In the Bible, matter in all its forms is the creature of One who is eternally distinct from it, and who, as its self-existent and supreme controller, moulds and disposes it to His own purposes. In like manner it carefully separates the truth of the creation of man in the image after the likeness of his Maker, from the conception universal in heathendom of man as physically descended from deity. Then laying hold of one of the universal institutions of mankind, the Sabbath—which, though associated in other religions with lunar phases, may correctly be said to date from creation, seeing that the necessity for it is a fact in the constitution of man—it connects with it the great truths of a completed creation, and of the necessity for con¬ stant recreation for man’s spiritual nature, and so “ it makes the Sabbath a great educator of the Hebrew people and of mankind.” Similarly treated is the other primeval and more extensively diffused institution in which we are interested. Sacrifice as we have seen is in all religions taken for granted as a natural part of the economy of life, for it is as much assumed that men will worship God by sacrifice as that they will worship Him at all. In the Pentateuch the universal fact of sacrifice begins to be divinely interpreted, and we begin to apprehend how and for what ends it has been enlisted in the service of God. In all other religions it is efficacious as having power with the gods to prevail; it originates in man and is offered to deity; 1 Schrsecler, Cuneiform Inscrip- on Gen. i. ; Records of the Past tionsandthe Old Testament^ 1883), (second series), 1888, i. p. 133 seq. AS EXHIBITED IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 187 but from the Pentateuch we learn that sacrifice is effectual, not from any virtue in it, or in them who administer it, but only as a divinely sanctioned means of grace through which God mediates to those who have faith in Him, His forgiveness and blessing. It is significant that in the Pentateuch sacrifice meets us in immediate connexion with the record of a fall from a state of loving, self-forgetful communion with his Creator, due to man’s own perversity. Realising his alienation because of sin, man everywhere and always is afraid of and would hide himself from any manifestation of God. In God’s presence he is convicted of sin by his very devices to cover his shame on account of it. This is the doctrine of Genesis, which universal experience has confirmed; and inti¬ mately associated with this doctrine is another peculiar to the Bible, namely, that though man has alienated him¬ self from his Creator, the Creator abides eternally faith¬ ful to His rebellious creatures. In language symbolic and hieroglyphic, the Creator is described as instructing man that part of the penalty due to his faithlessness must be endured. It is required for his correction, so as to render compact with evil impossible to a nature created originally good. But to encourage him to con¬ tinue the conflict with evil, final victory over it is pro¬ mised ; and as a pledge of the Divine forgiveness and help, the Lord covers his shame, not by the fig-leaves of his own devising, but by “ coats of skin ” The language is not only metaphorical but anthropo¬ morphic, for because of the limitations of human 188 SACRIFICE nature and language, the truth to he conveyed would otherwise be unintelligible by us. There is no an¬ thropomorphism however in the truth itself. God is represented as meeting a want which man had attempted but failed to supply. Man had succeeded in clothing his nakedness, in finding a covering for his body, but he could not succeed in covering his shame because of sin. Neither instinct nor reason could show him a way of quieting his accusing conscience. That was peculiarly God’s act, and any action of man’s required for its accomplishment was the result of a Divine suggestion made to a creature formed to know God and to receive communications from Him. The expression, “ God covered upon them,” is remarkable, for it constantly recurs under the Law to describe the design of offerings which were specially intended to atone for guilt. The inference seems logical, and almost inevitable, that the authors of the Pentateuch desire to teach that the first dawning upon the human conscience of the truth that with God is forgiveness, was coeval with the sacrifice of innocent life on behalf of the guilty. And so there was not only supplied “ a sacrificial language ”; 1 there was also suggested “ a basis of worship ” of the un¬ changeable God by a creature self-condemned for having changed his relation to Him. Man must abandon his own devices for undoing the effects of his sin and for regaining his lost fellowship with God. He must adopt the Divine method, and follow the Divine leading to whatever consummation it tended. Relief for a guilty 1 Fairbairn, Typology , vol. i. pp. 440-45. AS EXHIBITED IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 189 conscience could not be obtained in any of the ways in which man is prone to seek it. By no act of his own, not even the substitution of the fruit of his body, can he find a covering for the sin of his soul. In all such endeavours the life offered was involved in the common transgression and penalty. Peace of mind would only ensue from faith in a sinless life substituted for a sinful one; in the clothing of inno¬ cence for the covering of shame . 1 If this be the truth which the authors of Genesis sought to exhibit, it follows naturally that the first sacrifice recorded by them should bear distinctly im¬ pressed upon it the Divine approbation. It is referred to in the epistle to the Hebrews, where we have clearly stated the Christian interpretation of its significance. It would be very hazardous to assert that it was so regarded in primeval times, but we may safely conclude that when the Pentateuch in its present form was first produced, and probably in the very ancient times when the frag¬ ments preserved in the early chapters of Genesis found 1 Compare Cave, Scriptural Doctrine of Sacrifice , p. 39. In some heathen sacrifices the skin of the victim was used to clothe the idol, and sometimes also the worshipper, so that he might be invested with its efficacy and have its life identified with his own. Professor Robertson Smith finds in such heathen rites the origin of the metaphors, “robe of righteousness,” “gar¬ ments of salvation ” (Religion of the Semites, pp. 404, 440 seq.). The authors of the Hebrew Bible would not assume so polytheistic an idea in their spiritual religion. They founded the metaphors on the official attire of the priests, pure white linen without any leopard skin, such as was worn by the Egyptian priesthood. From the same source St. John derived his figure of the white robes of the saints, for white is the livery of heaven, the symbol of holiness. 190 SACRIFICE their way into the stream of universal tradition, the belief prevailed that a sacrifice presented after the manner and in the spirit of Abel’s was acceptable to God. Of that method or way of approaching to God in worship it could be said, as it was said of the Sabbath, “ the Lord sanctified it and blessed it.” Turning the Divine sugges¬ tion of forgiveness into a ground of personal obligation and privilege, Abel brought his offering. Interpreted by later legislation, it could not be classified among the sin-offerings (chata-ath), nor among the offerings of consecration (oloth), nor among the peace-offerings (shelamim), which were in part sacramental. It was eucharistic (mincha), but it expressed the thankfulness of a sinful and penitent man. It was the only offering by which he could indicate his sense of helplessness and sinfulness, and in which he could embody his appeal to the faithfulness of his Creator, to whose fellowship he longed to be restored. The New Testament com¬ ment upon the action was that “ by faith,” that is, in trustful surrender to God’s majesty and mercy, he “ offered a much more excellent sacrifice than Cain.” 1 He confided in God so thoroughly, and he longed so earnestly to be made one with Him, that though he may not have conceived of his victim as his representa¬ tive, he yet, in it or with it, surrendered himself to God. Now, even according to the narrative, Cain did not offer in faith but in discontent. Though the act was religious, he was influenced in performing it by a sinful feeling which was waiting at the door of his heart for 1 Hebrews xi. 4. AS EXHIBITED IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 191 its opportunity against him, as a wild beast lurks for its prey. The interpretation given in the Talmud is that he did not offer his best as Abel piously offered his choicest, but that, taking without selection whatever fell to his hand, he rendered rather than offered it. It was the sacri¬ fice of a heathen, who expected something in return, and was offended because it was not given. The offerer was unacceptable, for he had in him none of the spirit of true worship, and so his offering, as expressing no self¬ surrender, could not be divinely-acknowledged . 1 All through the Pentateuch there is a silent but powerful condemnation of heathen rites and beliefs in the contrasts which are designedly presented to them by ordinances which are exhibited in it as divinely autho¬ rised and sealed. So, against the rejected heathen sacri¬ fice of Cain, there is set forth the accepted sacrifice of Abel. It may be said to summarise the faith which underlay the Hebrew religion, and which made sacrifice indispensable in its worship. It is the truth propounded and maintained by the prophets and psalmists , 2 who, while denouncing the sacrifices of the wicked as abominable, and while railing at hypocrites who dared to substitute offerings for personal devotion, always upheld pure sacrifice as a very valuable means of grace. Our Lord Himself acknowledged the sacrificial law as binding. He partook of the Passover, commanded the healed lepers to offer the sacrifice required for their cleansing, and told his disciples to seek reconciliation with each other 1 Cave, Script. Doct. of Sacr., 2 Psalms li. 20, 21 ; Isaiah p. 49 ; Maurice, Sacrifice, p. 14. lvi. 7 ; Jeremiah xxxiii. 17, 18. 192 SACRIFICE before bringing their gifts to God’s altar. The Ivab- balists taught that the advent of Messiah would render sacrifice unnecessary, for He would effect all that could be obtained by means of it, but till then, when reverently and fervently offered, it effected much. Without a proper sacrifice God could not be worshipped becomingly. Without trustful surrender to the Divine mercy in the sacrifices his sacrifice, however precious, would be worthless, but with this surrender it availed to please God and satisfy his own conscience. So in the beginning of the Hebrew Bible we read that “ to Abel and to his offering God had respect,” and in the close of it, it is predicted of the Messenger of the Covenant that he “ shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness. Then shall the offering of Judah and Jerusalem be pleasant unto the Lord, as in the days of old, and as in former years.” 1 1 Malachi iii. 4. According to Magee ( Dissert . and Discourses , vol. i. pp. 53,126, 259) Cain, the first-born of the Fall, exhibits the first fruits of his parents’ disobedience in the arrogance and self-sufficiency of reason. “He is the first deist displaying in his rejection of the revelation the same spirit which rejected the sacrifice of Christ, on the ground that confession of sin and repentance from it is all that is required for reconciliation.” It is a fact clearly established by many quotations from Hebrew and heathen religious literature, that if deity be pleased with simple repentance, no man has ever been able by repentance to appease conscience and overcome his remorse or condemnation of himself. At the same time, though man has everywhere attempted by expiatory rites to do so, the result has universally and invariably been that ex¬ pressed by Porphyry, “that there was wanting some effectual method of delivering men’s souls which no sect of philosophy has ever yet found.” (Augustine, De Civ. Dei, Bk. x. ch. xxxii. ; Outram, De Sacrificiis, ch. xx.) AS EXHIBITED IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 193 The first recorded sacrifice is the prelude to the more definite and elaborate types of sacrifice in Mosaic and Levitical worship. The very next mention of sacrifice in the Bible seems more clearly to exhibit its original intention. Noah’s sacrifice, consisting of selections from all animals afterwards recognised by the Law as fit for sacrifice, was offered upon an altar, and consumed by fire; whereas Abel’s was brought “ before the Lord.” It was not personal like Abel’s, for it represented the sacrifice of the remnant of the whole human race that had experienced a wonderful redemp¬ tion from universal judgment. In Noah and his house, humanity had been saved, and so from a sense of over¬ whelming debt, they brought abundance of offerings. Deeply sensible however of unworthiness, and conscious of the evil propensities of a nature which they had inherited and shared with those who had perished, they sacrificed after a manner which seemed to antici¬ pate the ritual of the sin-offering under the Law. Thus, although in the strict sense of the word no sacrifice of atonement is traceable in patriarchal times, it may be correctly said that this sacrifice of thanksgiving “ex¬ hibits an elementary and symbolic confession of the necessity for it.” 1 And naturally so ; for it was offered by those who having seen the severity of the Divine judg¬ ment upon sin, drew near with confession of sin and with thanksgiving for their experience of the Divine mercy. As such it is represented as having been graciously 1 Cave, Scripture Doctrine of Genesis, pp. 178, 179; Oeliler, Sacrifice , p. 46; Maurice, Sacri- Old Test. Theol., vol. i. p. fice, pp. 26-28 ; Kalisch, Com. on 394. 0 194 SACRIFICE accepted. Pleased with their penitence, submission, and devotion, expressed in their sacrifice, the Lord is said to have “ smelled a sweet savour ”—literally “ an odour of rest,” of satisfaction . 1 This expression seems ruder and more archaic than the phrase, “The Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering ,” 2 but we may be sure that in the mind of the writer it had nothing of the idolatrous taint which elsewhere attaches to it, when it is said that the gods, like hungry men, were pleased with the fumes of sacrifice. The most refined writers do not hesitate to employ popular sayings to express spiritual conceptions. The same phrase is used by the Hebrew prophets and the Apostles of Christ , 3 who must have abominated its old heathen significance. Genesis, like most antique literary works, is more poetic and pictorial than prosaic and historical; and, like all religious books, it must be read with some exercise of the imagination. If we allow the man of science to speak of the “ horns of the moon,’ and are never misled by a Scriptural reference to the “ wings of the morning,” “ the eyelids of the dawn.” we need not infer from the use of this phrase that the writer meant to express by it the Divine satisfaction with the materials of the sacrifice . 4 And so, whereas the narrative of the Pall ends with a curse, pronounced upon the whole earth, that of the Deluge closes with a blessing upon Noah and his seed, and a Divine promise that the earth should no more suffer for the sins of man . 5 1 Compare Zephan. iii. 17, ex- 3 Amos v. 21, 22; Phil. iv. 18. pressing Jehovah’s delight in 4 Ivalisch, Com. Gen., pp. 200*1; Jerusalem, 11 He shall rest in His Lange, Com. Gen., pp. 323-4. love Gen. viii. 21. 2 Gen. iv. 4. 5 Gen. viii. 20-22, and ix. 1-7. AS EXHIBITED IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 195 In the same popular language, God is represented as having “established a covenant 1 with Noah.” It is the first time we meet the word in Scripture, and we find at once, that while the word is one common to the speech of all men, the idea suggested by it is new and peculiar to the Bible. Elsewhere the invariable idea of a covenant is that of a bargain or compact between parties, fulfilled and expressed by mutual pledges; but in this—the first of several subsequent “ covenants ” recorded in the Pentateuch—God alone acted, and the pledges were proffered by Him without any demand on His part for a counterpledge. The use of the word marks an enlarged revelation of the Divine nature as merciful and gracious which was communicated to man, and also of the great truth which like a thread of gold runs through all Scripture, binding all the parts of it together, that the Divine and the human must combine and co-operate in evolving God's eternal purpose of redemption. The language employed in describing it was also a revela¬ tion of the never-failing Divine government of nature, whose universal constancy is unalterable whether by the wickedness or by the entreaties of men . 2 This is a truth which directly contradicts the belief which is universal in heathen religions, that the government of the world and of man is unstable, ever changing with the caprice of the powers that control them. Another contradiction to heathen doctrine and practice is found in the renewal in even more energetic terms of the original dominion of man over the animals . 3 In the 1 Genesis ix. 9. 2 Genesis ix. 10-14. 3 Genesis ix. 2-3. 196 SACRIFICE lower religions, the fear of the beasts, as we have seen, is too much upon man, who finds in them his kinsmen and his gods; but the Hebrews made in the image of God—in respect of their moral and spiritual nature— were instructed to use freely for their necessities and for their comfort the beasts which never were created after the likeness of man. All that were wholesome could be slaughtered by any individual without the consent of the community, not only for religious, but for domestic and personal purposes. The importance generally attached among ancient peoples to the blood as the seal of life was recognised, but even here the Hebrew custom was separated from and elevated above the heathen one. For “ the flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat ,” 1 that is, the eating of not raw flesh but living flesh was rigorously forbidden, after¬ wards on the penalty of death. The animal had to be slaughtered before it could be eaten, even in sacrifice. Then all slaying of men, whether in anger or for sustenance, or for sacrifice, was declared a crime against the majesty of God , 2 which would incur the whole severity of the Divine wrath. Man’s blood could only be shed when God’s law of justice demanded it, for only He who originally gave it, had the right to resume or take it away . 3 These tacit but unmistakable contradictions to heathen beliefs and rites, surely indicate that the 1 Genesis ix. 4. Genesis , p. 217 seq.; Keil and 2 Genesis ix. 5-6. Delitzscli, Com. on Pent. i. p. 150 3 Trumbull, The Blood Cove• seq.; Kurtz, Hist, of the Old nant, p. 214 ; Kalisch, Com. on Covenant , i. p. 104. AS EXHIBITED IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 197 religious institutions of the Hebrews were “ not common to all their neighbours,” in respect of their essential significance and intention. Even when external re- semblances occur, they always cover ideas and purposes directly distinct and contrasted. In Genesis there seems to be reflected the difference between the natural development of the human race, and its supernatural or Divine education. Though starting from a common origin upon a common plane, mankind is represented as having very early diverged into two separate streams, which tended in very different directions. The Cainites, proceeding on the level of nature, and guided by human reason, are seen advancing towards material civilisa¬ tion ; 1 the Sethites yielding their religious instinct to Divine control, are being led upward to purer and more spiritual conceptions of faith and duty . 2 By the com¬ mingling and confusion of the two streams , 3 the race is represented as having so degenerated, and as having so corrupted the world, that both had to be purified by uni¬ versal judgment. In the family of Noah the righteous, human history was renewed, but even after the Deluge, and under a dispensation of mercy, man’s proneness to obstinate self-assertion broke out. Nimrod succeeded “ the giants ” of the older world in his defiant attempt to resist the operation of the law of providence . 4 Yet in this case the rebels were not divinely destroyed ; they were allowed “ to shatter themselves against uni¬ versal and unchangeable order,” withdraw themselves 1 Genesis iv. 16-24. 2 Genesis iv. 25, 26. 3 Genesis vi. 1-8. 4 Genesis xi. 1-9. 198 SACRIFICE from the “ covenant ” which in Noah and his seed united > mankind with God, and go each his own way to their own quarter and destiny. The alliance, however, between God and the human race is represented as being maintained by a succession of “ covenants,” or ever-enlarging revela¬ tions, individual, national, and universal in their scope. The intention of all of them is to instruct men that salva¬ tion from the inherited curse can only be obtained by trustful dependence upon the Divine mercy and hearty acceptance of the Divine method. So while the blessing of material sustenance and natural safety was in Noah assured to all the race, the religious blessing or promise, still very indefinite, was restricted to one man and his seed . 1 It is the first intimation of a Divine purpose of redemption for all mankind, and it was revealed to one, who, in direct contrast to Nimrod—the type of un¬ believing humanity—showed himself like Abel and Noah a man of unlimited obedience and trustful submission to God. Abraham therefore became the clear type and head of all the faithful, the first representative of the Church, as divinely elected and saved out of a fallen race, that through it all nations might eventually be called and blessed . 2 In the stories concerning this patriarch and his successors, as in a series of word-pictures, there is pre¬ figured the ideal character and aims of humanity as the people of God. We behold them, not making history nor founding a kingdom like the heroes of other nations, but prophesying in action of the kingdom in 2 Kaliscli, Com. on Genesis, p. 329. 1 Genesis xii. 2. AS EXHIBITED IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 199 which God alone is to rule. 1 So as regards worship, Abraham from the first appears as a builder of altars, at each of which he “ invoked the name of the Lord ,” 2 thus conjoining with the material mode of worship the higher worship of prayer, of which Seth is said to have been the first prophet. 3 He did not scruple to rear them upon the sites of old idolatries, 4 and under trees associated with very cruel superstitious rites, 5 for the Divine revelations which he had received at them con¬ verted them into sacred spots. In the same toleration of one who was animated by a spiritual religion, and was ready to acknowledge the Divine working in every pure mind, he accepted the blessing of one of a succession of priest- kings who appeared to have ruled in Salem down to the wars of the Con