ught he had done anything to be
ashamed of and which required to be put right. He was simply treating
his god as he would have treated a powerful earthly patron or
potentate, that is, he was apologising for anything he might have done
to alienate his favour. This notion of the necessity for placating God
is to be found in close association with the worthier spiritual
instincts to which I have already referred, and it has not even yet
disappeared from our thinking. Unbiassed readers of the Old Testament
will find abundant justification for this statement. We are told
repeatedly therein that the anger of the Lord was kindled against
Israel or against this or that individual, and that the whole community
had in consequence to humble itself before Him in order to avert
plague, or pestilence, or some other form of general calamity. Not
only was Jehovah thought of as a kind of larger man who was at once
protector and tyrant to his people, he was but the God of Israel in
contradistinction to the gods of other nations, one God out of many.
It was only gradually, and after the lapse of ages, that Israelites
came to think of their God as the God of the whole earth and a being
who must be worshipped in righteousness. Israel was fortunate in
possessing what other nations had not in the same degree, a succession
of specially inspired men, teachers of moral and spiritual truth called
prophets. The best of these--for no doubt the generality of them spoke
only the language of their time--earnestly protested against material
ideas of sacrifice and inadequate notions about God. They declared
that God and the moral ideal were one and that the best way to serve
the former was to be true to the latter. True sacrifice, they
maintained, was of a spiritual kind and ought never to be thought about
in any other sense. Thus in the fifty-first psalm the writer, one of
the prophetic school, thus contrasts mere ceremonialism with spiritual
worship:

Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it; Thou delightest not
in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. A
broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.

Or take the prophet Micah, chapter vi., verse 6. Here is a reference
to human sacrifice, to which the Israelites were prone from time to
time, following the example of their neighbours:

Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the Most
High God? shall I come before Him