h the
absorption, by god and man, of the same sacred food.

+1048+. In some forms of Christianity the sacramental eating is brought
into connection with the atoning death of a divine person, but this
latter conception came independently by a different line of thought. Its
basis is the idea of redemption, which is an element in all sacrifice
proper. And, as the death of the divine victim is held to rescue the
worshiper from punishment for ill doing, the conclusion is natural that
the former stands in the place of the latter. In the higher forms of
thought such substitution could only be voluntary on the part of the
victim. Traces of the self-sacrifice of a god have been sought in such
myths as the stories of the self-immolation of Dido and Odin; but the
form and origin of these myths are obscure[1898]--all that can be said
of them in this connection is that they seem not to contain expiatory
conceptions.[1899] The higher conception of a divine self-sacrifice is a
late historical development under the influence of convictions of the
moral majesty of God and the sinfulness of sin.

+1049+. _Union with the divine through a sanctified victim._ The
conception of sacrifice as bringing about a union of the divine and the
human is reached in a different way from that of Smith by MM. Hubert and
Mauss, and receives in their hands a peculiar coloring.[1900] They hold
that the numerous forms of sacrifice cannot be reduced to "the unity of
a single arbitrarily chosen principle"; and in view of the paucity of
accurate accounts of early ritual (in which they include the Greek and
the Roman) they reject the "genealogical" (that is, the evolutionary)
method, and devote themselves to an analysis of the two ancient rituals,
the Hindu and the Hebrew, that are known in detail and with exactness.
They thus arrive at the formula: "Sacrifice is a religious act which, by
the consecration of a victim, modifies the state of the moral person who
performs it, or of certain objects in which this person is interested."
The procedure in sacrifice, they say, consists in establishing a
communication between the sacred world and the profane world by the
intermediation of a victim, that is, of a thing that is destroyed in the
course of the ceremony; it thus serves a variety of purposes, and is
dealt with in many ways: the flesh is offered to hostile spirits or to
friendly deities, and is eaten in part by worshipers or by priests; the
ceremony is employed