ngry--for
anger is a passion; and obviously they cannot be appeased by gifts or
prayers. Even men, if they are honest, require higher motives than that.
God is unchangeable, always good, always doing good. If we are good, we
are nearer to the gods, and we feel it; if we are evil, we are separated
further from them. It is not they that are angry, it is our sins that
hide them from us and prevent the goodness of God from shining into us.
If we repent, again, we do not make any change in God; we only, by the
conversion of our soul towards the divine, heal our own badness and
enjoy again the goodness of the gods. To say that the gods turn away
from the wicked, would be like saying that the sun turns away from a
blind man.

Why then do we make offerings and sacrifices to the gods, when the gods
need nothing and can have nothing added to them? We do so in order to
have more communion with the gods. The whole temple service, in fact, is
an elaborate allegory, a representation of the divine government of the
world.

The custom of sacrificing animals had died out some time before this.
The Jews of the Dispersion had given it up long since because the Law
forbade any such sacrifice outside the Temple.[188:1] When Jerusalem was
destroyed Jewish sacrifice ceased altogether. The Christians seem from
the beginning to have generally followed the Jewish practice. But
sacrifice was in itself not likely to continue in a society of large
towns. It meant turning your temples into very ill-conducted
slaughter-houses, and was also associated with a great deal of muddled
and indiscriminate charity.[188:2] One might have hoped that men so
high-minded and spiritual as Julian and Sallustius would have considered
this practice unnecessary or even have reformed it away. But no. It was
part of the genuine Hellenic tradition; and no jot or tittle of that
tradition should, if they could help it, be allowed to die. Sacrifice is
desirable, argues Sallustius, because it is a gift of life. God has
given us life, as He has given us all else. We must therefore pay to Him
some emblematic tithe of life. Again, prayers in themselves are merely
words; but with sacrifice they are words plus life, Living Words.
Lastly, we are Life of a sort, and God is Life of an infinitely higher
sort. To approach Him we need always a medium or a mediator; the medium
between life and life must needs be life. We find that life in the
sacrificed animal.[189:1]

The argument s