the recent
researches of specialists in comparative religion, were, in fact, of
later growth. They are accretions which, by a very natural and
intelligible process, have overlain the oldest and really fundamental
ideas which lie at the root and origin of sacrifice.

These two ideas were, however, present all through, in what we might
perhaps call (without committing ourselves to any psychological theories)
the racial subconsciousness. They were always there, ready to be evoked
by the appropriate stimulus, whenever applied. They constituted the real
essence and meaning of the ancient mysteries, which from 800 B.C.
downwards formed so important a part of the real religion of the ancient
world, and which have left their mark on the language of St. Paul and
other early Christian teachers. These mysteries, roughly and broadly
speaking, were of the nature of a religious reformation. They
represented the discarding of the propitiatory idea in favour of the
original meaning of sacrifice as communion.

These earliest notions of sacrifice really underlay the sacrifices of the
Old Testament, especially in the case of the peace offerings. But, in
these, we become conscious of a third element, the conviction that sin is
a barrier to the Divine Communion. When the worshipper, in the
sin-offering, laid his hands upon the head of the victim, he was, by a
significant action, repudiating his sin, and presenting the spotlessness
of the victim as his own, his own in will and intention henceforth. The
blood was sprinkled upon the altar as the symbol of the life offered to
and accepted by God; it was sprinkled upon the worshipper as the sign of
the communication to him of that pure Divine life, by virtue of his
participation in which man can alone approach God.

All this can be summed up in one word, "symbolism." All the value of
ancient sacrifices, including those of the Old Testament, lay wholly in
the moral and spiritual truths which, in a series of outward and
significant actions, they stood for and symbolised. To attach objective
value to that which was external in the Old Testament sacrifices, or even
to the outward accompaniments of the Supreme Sacrifice, the Death of
Jesus Christ upon the Cross, is to be guilty of a relapse from the
Christian, or even the prophetic spirit, into the late and debased pagan
idea of sacrifice, from which the ancient mysteries of the Eastern and
Greek world were a reaction. Certainly, the out