therefore, a man offered the blood of a victim upon the altar, he
was symbolically declaring his recognition of the truth that the
individual life belongs to the whole and must give or pour itself out
to the common life and to God the source of all. Only in this way
could individuality realise itself; apart from the whole it was
meaningless and valueless.

+The truth beneath all sacrifice, however barbarous.+--This helps us to
see how, even underneath the most horrible and repellent modes of
ancient religious sacrifice, there was something essentially great and
noble. When a heathen mother passed her child through the fire to
Moloch, did the sacrifice cost her nothing? To be sure it did. It
must have been much harder to give her baby than to give herself. She
did it because she had been taught to believe that to give one's best
and dearest possession for the life of the whole was an action
acceptable to God and worthy of our relationship to Him. We have
deepened and purified that ideal, but we have not lost it; we never
can. As time went on men came to see that there was a higher way of
giving the self to the whole than that of immolating a physical life,
and a better way of symbolising that offering than by shedding the
blood of bulls and goats; but the essential truth beneath all the
intricate sacrificial systems of ancient Israel and her neighbours is
one that can never perish.

To sum up. Atonement is the assertion of the fundamental unity of all
existence, the unity of the individual with the race and the race with
God. The individual can only realise that unity by sacrificing himself
to it. To fulfil the self we must give the self to the All. This is
the truth presumed in all ancient ideas of Atonement. The idea of
placating a manlike God for offences committed against his dignity has
been a concomitant of this perception, even a hindrance to it, but it
has never wholly obscured the truth itself. That truth is constant and
essential to all religion and morality, and is the coordinating
principle to all between them.

CHAPTER X

THE ATONEMENT

+III. The Doctrine in Christian History and Experience+

+Antiquity of the essential truth.+--From what has now been said it
will, I hope, be clear that the roots of the Christian doctrine of
Atonement lie far back in history, especially Semitic history mediated
through the Old Testament, and that its fundamental truth is one with
which the world ca