power of
growth; and it grows.

The conviction with which the community ends the rite is the joyful
conviction that the trouble is over-past. The joy which the community
feels often expresses itself in feast and song; and where the
offerings are, as they most commonly are, food-offerings or
animal-sacrifice, the feast may come to be regarded as one at which
the god himself is present and of which he partakes along with his
worshippers. The joy, which expresses itself in feast and song, may,
however, not make itself felt until the prayer of the community has
been fulfilled and the calamity has passed away; and then the feast
comes to be of the nature of a joyful thank-offering. But it is
probably only in one or other of these two cases that the offering
comes to be consumed in the service of feast and song. And although
the rite may and does grow in this way, still this development of
it--'eating with the god'--is rather potentially than actually present
in the earliest form of the rite.

From this point of view, sacrificial meals or feasts are not part of
the ritual of approach: they belong to the termination of the
ceremony. They mark the fact of reconciliation; they are an
expression of the conviction that friendly relations are restored. The
sacrificial meal then is accordingly not a means by which
reconciliation is effected, but the outward expression of the
conviction that the end has been attained; and, as expressing, it has
the force of confirming, the conviction. Where the sacrificial rite
grows to comprehend a sacrificial feast or meal, there the
food-offering or sacrifice is consumed in the service. But the rite
does not always develop thus; and even without this development it
discharges its proper function. Before this development, it is on
occasions of distress that the god is approached by the community, in
the conviction that the community has offended, and with the object of
purging the community and removing the distress, of appeasing the god
and restoring good relations. Yet even at this stage the object of the
community is to be at one with its god--at-one-ment and communion so
far are sought. There is implied the faith that he, the community's
god, cannot possibly be for ever alienated and will not utterly
forsake them, even though he be estranged for the time. Doubtless the
feast, which in some cases came to crown the sacrificial rite, may,
where it was practised amongst peoples who believed tha