eater if he ignores
the principles of religion and cannot get information and instruction
outside the temple of religion. For Catholics, there is only one true
mode of public worship, and that is the Sacrifice of the Mass. No
layman is sufficient unto himself to provide such an act of religion.
He has, therefore, no choice, he must assist at that sacrifice if he
would fulfil the obligation he is under of Sunday worship.

CHAPTER LI.
WORSHIP OF SACRIFICE.

WE Catholics contend, and our contention is based on a law of nature
that we glean from the history of man, that sacrifice is the soul of
religion, that there never was a universally and permanently accepted
religion--and that there cannot be any such religion--without an altar,
a victim, a priest, and a sacrifice. We claim that reason and
experience would bear us out in this contention, even without the
example and teaching and express commands of Jesus Christ, who, in
founding a new and the only true religion, Himself offered sacrifice
and left a sacrifice to be perpetually offered in His religion; and
that sacrifice constitutes the high worship we owe to the Creator.

It is our conviction that, when man came into the presence of the
Almighty, his first impulse was to speak to Him, and his first word was
an act of adoration. But human language is a feeble medium of
communication with the Almighty. Man talks to man. To talk with God, he
sought out another language; and, as in the case of Adam's sons, he
discovered in sacrifice a better and stronger mode of expressing his
religious feelings. He therefore offered sacrifice, and sacrifice
became the language of man in his relations with the Deity.

In its simplest definition, sacrifice is the offering to God of a
victim, by one authorized for that task. It supposes essentially the
destruction of the victim; and the act is an eloquent acknowledgment,
in language that is as plain as it possibly can be made, that God is
the supreme Lord of life and death, that all things that exist come
from Him, and revert to Him as to their natural end.

The philosophy of sacrifice is that man, in some manner or other, had
incurred the wrath of the Almighty. The pagan could not tell hi just
what his offense consisted; but there is nothing plainer than the fact
that he considered himself under the ban of God's displeasure, and that
sin had something to do with it; and he feared the Deity accordingly.
We know that original sin was