f the year_, when thou gatherest in thy
labours out of the field" (Exod. xxiii. 16).

In dealing with unbelief we must look at things from the unbelieving
angle of vision. No sceptical theory has any right to invoke for its
help a special and differentiating quality in Hebrew thought. Reject the
supernatural, and the Jewish religion is only one among a number of
similar creations of the mind of man "moving about in worlds
unrecognised." And therefore we must ask, What notions of sacrifice were
entertained, all around, when the Hebrew creed was forming itself?

Now, we read that "in the early days ... a sacrifice was a meal.... Year
after year, the return of vintage, corn-harvest, and sheep-shearing
brought together the members of the household to eat and drink in the
presence of Jehovah.... When an honoured guest arrives there is
slaughtered for him a calf, not without an offering of the blood and fat
to the Deity" (Wellhausen, _Israel_, p. 76). Of the sense of sin and
propitiation "the ancient sacrifices present few traces.... An
underlying reference of sacrifice to sin, speaking generally, was
entirely absent. The ancient sacrifices were wholly of a joyous
nature--a merry-making before Jehovah with music" (_ibid._, p. 81).

We are at once confronted by the question, Where did the Jewish nation
come by such a friendly conception of their deity? They had come out of
Egypt, where human sacrifices were not rare. They had settled in
Palestine, where such idyllic notions must have been as strange as in
modern Ashantee. And we are told that human sacrifices (such as that of
Isaac and of Jephthah's daughter) belong to this older period (p. 69).
Are _they_ joyous and festive? are they not an endeavour, by the
offering up of something precious, to reconcile a Being Who is
estranged? With our knowledge of what existed in Israel in the period
confessed to be historical, and of the meaning of sacrifices all around
in the period supposed to be mythical, and with the admission that human
sacrifices must be taken into account, it is startling to be asked to
believe that Hebrew sacrifices, with all their solemn import and all
their freight of Christian symbolism, were originally no more than a
gift to the Deity of a part of some happy banquet.

It is quite plain that no such theory can be reconciled with the story
of the first passover. And accordingly this is declared to be
non-historical, and to have originated in the time of the