eir very origin, different from magical rites. Religious rites are,
first, rites of approach, whereby the community draws nigh to its god;
and, afterwards, rites of sacramental meals whereby the community
celebrates its reconciliation and enjoys communion with its god. Those
meals are typically cases of 'eating with the god,' celebrated on the
occasion of first-fruits, and based on the conviction, which has
slowly grown up, that 'the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness
thereof.' Meals, such as were found in Mexico, and have left their
traces in Australia, in which the fruit or the animal that was offered
had come to be regarded as standing in the same relation to the god
as an individual does to the species, are meals having the same origin
as those in which the community eats with its god, but following a
different line of evolution.

The object of the sacrificial rite is first to restore and then to
maintain good relations between the community and its god. Pushed to
its logical conclusion, or rather perhaps we should say, pushed back
to the premisses required for its logical demonstration, the very idea
of renewing or restoring relations implies an original understanding
between the community and its god; and implies that it is the
community's departure from this understanding which has involved it in
the disaster, from which it desires to escape, and to secure escape
from which, it approaches its god, with desire to renew and restore
the normal relations. The idea that if intelligent beings do something
customarily, they must do so because once they entered into a
contract, compact or covenant to do so, is one which in Plato's time
manifested itself in the theory of a social compact, to account for
the existence of morality, and which in Japan was recorded in the
tenth century A.D. as accounting for the fact that certain sacrifices
were offered to the gods. Thus in the fourth ritual of 'the Way of the
Gods'--that is Shinto--it is explained that the Spirits of the Storm
took the Japanese to be their people, and the people of Japan took the
Spirits of the Storm to be gods of theirs. In pursuance of that
covenant, the spirits on their part undertook to be Gods of the Winds
and to ripen and bless the harvest, while the people on their part
undertook to found a temple to their new gods; and that is why the
people are now worshipping them. It was, according to the account
given in the fourth ritual, the gods themselves w