offering of the best of their
possessions to the god the worshippers thought they were rendering to
him of his own. As he was at once the giver and the guardian of life,
they felt bound to render him the best of the fruits of life. This was
a true thought, a principle essential to all true spiritual life, and
implied in all spiritual aspiration. The reader will have already seen
that it is fundamental to the New Theology. However crude and even
repellent some of its expressions may have been in ancient modes of
worship, it is the same truth all ages through--the truth that God and
man are essentially one.

+2. The solidarity of the individual with the community.+--A further
idea underlying primitive sacrifice was that of the solidarity of the
individual with the community as a whole. In the Chaldean tribes out
of which Israel arose personality as we know it had not even emerged.
Readers of the Old Testament will not need to be reminded that in the
earlier stages of Israel's existence as a people the whole nation was
repeatedly said to be punished for the behaviour of individuals, and
families perished for the transgression of a father, as in the case of
Achan. No particular attention was ever paid to the individual as
such. A man had no life of his own, and no value, apart from the life
of the community. He belonged to it, not to himself. Hence, when any
communal act of worship was performed, when any tribal sacrifice was
made to the deity, the organic unity of the individual with the whole
was specially emphasised. Physically and spiritually the unit was held
to belong to the whole, and to exist for the sake of the whole. Here
again we have a great truth, the foundation truth of all morality, and
a truth which reaches its highest in the life of Jesus. The deepening
of individual self-consciousness, and the increased perception of
individual value, have neither weakened nor destroyed it, for it is
written in the very constitution of the universe. Mankind is
fundamentally one; here is morality. We are individually fulfilled in
God; here is religion. These are the cognate ideas underlying all
modes of sacrificial worship, ancient or modern. These are the ideas
which find elaborate ceremonial expression in the Israelitish Day of
Atonement as described in the Old Testament. The main purpose of these
observances was the desire to assert as solemnly and emphatically as
possible the essential oneness of the co