mmunity with God, and of every
individual with all the rest. Everything which tended to separate
between Israel and her God was ceremonially put away on this great
occasion. From the religious point of view it was the beginning of a
new year. The Babylonian new year began about the same time. It was
supposed that a man's good or evil fortune was appointed on new year's
day and settled past all possibility of revision on the tenth day
after. The intervening nine days were therefore kept as a sort of
Lenten season; the tenth day was the grand occasion for the making sure
of the harmonious relations of the community with the deity. It will
be seen, therefore, that psychologically the idea of Atonement takes
precedence of the idea of sin. Most westerners are accustomed to think
exactly the reverse, and that is why the various theories of Atonement
which have appeared and disappeared in the course of Christian history
have so generally obscured the truth. The root principle of Atonement
is not that of escaping punishment for transgression, but the assertion
of the fundamental oneness of God and man. This may or may not be
accompanied by feelings of guilt and contrition, but it is the very
marrow of religion. Atonement implies the acting-together of God and
man, the subordination of the individual will to the universal will,
the fulfilment of the unit in the whole.

+Sense of sin not originally essential to atonement.+--It ought to be
recognised that in Semitic modes of worship the idea of sin did not
originally hold the place it has since come to hold in the Christian
consciousness. The Babylonian and the early Israelite were greatly
afraid of offending God, but they do not seem to have thought of such a
transgression as being morally culpable. The profound sense of sin
which characterises so many of the psalms and prophetic writings of the
Old Testament was a comparatively late development. The primitive
Semites had a markedly anthropomorphic idea of their deities. They
thought of any divine being as more or less like an ordinary man and
liable to take umbrage at little things. It was even possible to
offend him without knowing it, and therefore to be left without
protection against the ills of life. It was to make sure of smoothing
away all possible misunderstandings that covering sacrifices were
offered from time to time; but the offering of these sacrifices did not
necessarily mean that the worshipper tho