led sacrifices, and flatteries, called praises. Then the Kantian
moral law within you makes you conceive your god as a judge; and
straightway you try to corrupt him, also with presents and flatteries.
This seems shocking to us; but our objection to it is quite a recent
development: no longer ago than Shakespear's time it was thought quite
natural that litigants should give presents to human judges; and the
buying off of divine wrath by actual money payments to priests, or, in
the reformed churches which discountenance this, by subscriptions to
charities and church building and the like, is still in full swing. Its
practical disadvantage is that though it makes matters very easy for
the rich, it cuts off the poor from all hope of divine favor. And this
quickens the moral criticism of the poor to such an extent, that they
soon find the moral law within them revolting against the idea of buying
off the deity with gold and gifts, though they are still quite ready
to buy him off with the paper money of praise and professions of
repentance. Accordingly, you will find that though a religion may
last unchanged for many centuries in primitive communities where the
conditions of life leave no room for poverty and riches, and the process
of propitiating the supernatural powers is as well within the means
of the least of the members as within those of the headman, yet when
commercial civilization arrives, and capitalism divides the people
into a few rich and a great many so poor that they can barely live, a
movement for religious reform will arise among the poor, and will be
essentially a movement for cheap or entirely gratuitous salvation. To
understand what the poor mean by propitiation, we must examine for a
moment what they mean by justice.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ATONEMENT AND PUNISHMENT

The primitive idea of justice is partly legalized revenge and partly
expiation by sacrifice. It works out from both sides in the notion that
two blacks make a white, and that when a wrong has been done, it should
be paid for by an equivalent suffering. It seems to the Philistine
majority a matter of course that this compensating suffering should be
inflicted on the wrongdoer for the sake of its deterrent effect on
other would-be wrongdoers; but a moment's reflection will show that this
utilitarian application corrupts the whole transaction. For example, the
shedding of innocent blood cannot be balanced by the shedding of guilty
blood.