er, anywhere, developed without rites. They, like language,
are the work of the community, collectively; and they are a mode of
expression which is, like language, intelligible to the community,
because the community expresses itself in this way, and because each
member of the community finds that other members have thoughts like
his, and the same desire to draw near to a Being whose existence they
doubt not, however vaguely they conceive Him, or however
contradictorily they interpret His being. But, if language is
indispensable to thought, and a means whereby we become conscious of
each other's thought, language is not thought. Nor are rites, and
outward acts, religion--indispensable though they be to it. They are
an expression of it. They must be an inadequate expression; and they
are always liable to misinterpretation, even by some of those who
perform them. The history of religion contains the record of the
misinterpretations of the rite of sacrifice. But it also records the
progressive correction of those misinterpretations, and the process
whereby the meaning implicit in the rite from the beginning has been
made manifest in the end.

The need and the desire to draw nigh to the god of the community are
felt in the earliest of ages on occasions when calamity befalls the
community. The calamity is interpreted as sent by the god; and the god
is conceived to have been provoked by an offence of which some member
of the community had been guilty. We may say, therefore, that from
the beginning there has been present in the common consciousness a
sense of sin and the desire to make atonement. Psychologically it
seems clear that at the present day, in the case of the individual,
personal religion first manifests itself usually in the consciousness
of sin. And what is true in the psychology of the individual may be
expected within limits to hold true in the psychology of the common
consciousness. But though we may say that, in the beginning, it was by
the occurrence of public calamity that the community became conscious
that sin had been committed, still it is also true to say that the
community felt that it was by some one of its members, rather than by
the community, that the offence had been committed, for which the
community was responsible. It was the responsibility, rather than the
offence, which was prominent in the common consciousness--as indeed
tends to be the case with the individual also. But the fact that the
o