dea of sacrifice is
certainly a primal human instinct, but that the true interpretation has
been put upon it by the teaching of Christ. I should myself feel that
the idea of sacrifice belonged wholly to the old dispensation. That
man, when he began to form some mental picture of the mysterious nature
of the world of which he found himself a part, saw that there was, in
the background of life, a vast and awful power, whose laws were
mysterious and not, apparently, wholly benevolent; that this power
sometimes sent happiness and prosperity, sometimes sorrow and
adversity; and that though to a certain extent calamities were brought
about by individual misconduct, yet that there were innumerable
instances in the world where innocence and even conscientious conduct
were just as heavily penalized as guilt and sin. The apparently
fortuitous distribution of happiness would alarm and bewilder him. The
natural instinct of man, thus face to face with a Deity which he could
not hope to overcome or struggle with, would be to conciliate and
propitiate him by all the means in his power, as he would offer gifts
to a prince or chief. He would hope thus to win his favour and not to
incur his wrath.

But the teaching of the Saviour that God was indeed a Father of men
seems to me to have changed all this instantaneously. Man would learn
that misfortune was sent him, not wantonly nor cruelly, but that it was
an educative process. If even so he saw cases, such as a child tortured
by agonizing pain, where there seemed to be no personal educative
motive that could account for it, no sense of punishment which could be
meant to improve the sufferer, he would fall back on the thought that
each man is not isolated or solitary, but that there is some essential
unity that binds humanity together, and that suffering at one point
must, in some mysterious way that he cannot understand, mean
amelioration at another. To feel this would require the exercise of
faith, because no human ingenuity could grasp the method by which such
a system could be applied. But there would be no choice between
believing this, or deciding that whatever the essential nature of the
Mind of God was, it was not based on human ideas of justice and
benevolence.

The theory of religion would then be that the crude idea of
propitiatory and conciliatory sacrifice would fall to the ground; that
to use the inspired words of the old Roman poet--

"Aptissima quaeque dabunt Di