ce of the rite was maintained. The very object of that
communion might be misinterpreted and mistaken to be a means merely to
temporal blessings for the community, or even to personal advantages
for the individual. Or the punctilious performance of each and every
detail of the rite might tend to become an end in itself and displace
the spiritual communion, the attainment of which had been from the
beginning the highest, even if not the only or the most prominent,
{209} end which the rite might subserve. The difference between the
possibilities which the rite might have realised and the actual
purposes for which it had come to be used before the birth of Christ is
a difference patent to the most casual observer of the facts. The
dissatisfaction felt alike by Plato and the Hebrew prophets with the
rite as it had come to be practised may be regarded, if we choose so to
regard it, as the necessary consequence of pre-existing facts, and as
necessarily entailing the rejection or the reconstitution of the rite.
As a matter of history, the rite was reconstituted and not rejected;
and as reconstituted it became the central fact of the Christian
religion. It became the means whereby, through Christ, all men might
be brought to God. We may say, if we will, that a new meaning was put
into the rite, or that its true meaning was now made manifest. The
facts themselves clearly indicate that from the beginning the rite was
the means whereby a society sought or might seek communion with its
god. They also indicate that the rite of animal sacrifice came to be
found insufficient as a means. It was through our Lord that mankind
learned what sacrifice was needed--learned to "offer and present unto
thee, O Lord, ourselves, our {210} souls and bodies, to be a
reasonable, holy and lively sacrifice unto thee." That is the
sacrifice Christ showed us the example of; that is the example which
the missionary devotes himself to follow and to teach.

{211}

MORALITY

In this lecture I propose to consider the question whether morality is
based on religion or religion on morality. It is a question which may
be approached from the point of view either of philosophy or of
history. Quite recently it has been treated from the former point of
view by Professor Hoeffding in _The Philosophy of Religion_ (translated
into English, 1906); and from the point of view of the history of
morality by Mr. Hobhouse in his _Morals in Evolution_ (1906