ArcaMax Publishing > Books > Religion > Pagan and Christian creeds: their origin and meaning > Section 7
Pagan and Christian creeds: their origin and meaning

Edward Carpenter

VII. RITES OF EXPIATION AND REDEMPTION

There is a passage in Richard Jefferies' imperishably
beautiful book The Story of my Heart--a passage well known
to all lovers of that prose-poet--in which he figures
himself standing "in front of the Royal Exchange
where the wide pavement reaches out like a promontory,"
and pondering on the vast crowd and the mystery
of life. "Is there any theory, philosophy, or creed," he says,
"is there any system of culture, any formulated method, able
to meet and satisfy each separate item of this agitated pool
of human life? By which they may be guided, by which
they may hope, by which look forward? Not a mere
illusion of the craving heart--something real, as real as
the solid walls of fact against which, like seaweed, they
are dashed; something to give each separate personality
sunshine and a flower in its own existence now; something
to shape this million-handed labor to an end and
outcome that will leave more sunshine and more flowers
to those who must succeed? Something real now, and
not in the spirit-land; in this hour now, as I stand and
the sun burns. . . . Full well aware that all has failed, yet,
side by side with the sadness of that knowledge, there
lives on in me an unquenchable belief, thought burning
like the sun, that there is yet something to be
found.... It must be dragged forth by the might of thought
from the immense forces of the universe."

In answer to this passage we may say "No,--a thousand
times No! there is no theory, philosophy, creed, system or
formulated method which will meet or ever satisfy the
demand of each separate item of the human whirlpool."
And happy are we to know there is no such thing!
How terrible if one of these bloodless 'systems' which strew
the history of religion and philosophy and the political
and social paths of human endeavor HAD been found
absolutely correct and universally applicable--so that every
human being would be compelled to pass through its
machine-like maw, every personality to be crushed under
its Juggernath wheels! No, thank Heaven! there is no
theory or creed or system; and yet there is something--
as Jefferies prophetically felt and with a great
longing desired--that CAN satisfy; and that, the root of
all religion, has been hinted at in the last chapter. It
is the CONSCIOUSNESS of the world-life burning, blazing, deep
down within us: it is the Soul's intuition of its roots in
Omnipresence and Eternity.

The gods and the creeds of the past, as shown in the
last chapter--whatever they may have been, animistic
or anthropomorphic or transcendental, whether grossly
brutish or serenely ideal and abstract--are essentially
projections of the human mind; and no doubt those who are
anxious to discredit the religious impulse generally will
catch at this, saying "Yes, they are mere forms and
phantoms of the mind, ephemeral dreams, projected on
the background of Nature, and having no real substance or
solid value. The history of Religion (they will say) is a
history of delusion and illusion; why waste time over
it? These divine grizzly Bears or Aesculapian Snakes, these
cat-faced Pashts, this Isis, queen of heaven, and Astarte
and Baal and Indra and Agni and Kali and Demeter
and the Virgin Mary and Apollo and Jesus Christ and
Satan and the Holy Ghost, are only shadows cast outwards
onto a screen; the constitution of the human mind makes
them all tend to be anthropomorphic; but that is all; they
each and all inevitably pass away. Why waste time over
them?"

And this is in a sense a perfectly fair way of looking at
the matter. These gods and creeds ARE only projections
of the human mind. But all the same it misses, does this
view, the essential fact. It misses the fact that there
is no shadow without a fire, that the very existence of
a shadow argues a light somewhere (though we may not
directly see it) as well as the existence of a solid form which
intercepts that light. Deep, deep in the human mind there is
that burning blazing light of the world-consciousness--
so deep indeed that the vast majority of individuals are
hardly aware of its existence. Their gaze turned outwards is
held and riveted by the gigantic figures and processions
passing across their sky; they are unaware that the
latter are only shadows--silhouettes of the forms inhabiting
their own minds.[1] The vast majority of people have
never observed their own minds; their own mental forms.
They have only observed the reflections cast by these.
Thus it may be said, in this matter, that there are three
degrees of reality. There are the mere shadows--the
least real and most evanescent; there are the actual
mental outlines of humanity (and of the individual), much
more real, but themselves also of course slowly changing;
and most real of all, and permanent, there is the light "which
lighteth every man that cometh into the world"--the
glorious light of the world-consciousness. Of this last it
may be said that it never changes. Every thing is
known to it--even the very IMPEDIMENTS to its shining.
But as it is from the impediments to the shining of a light
that shadows are cast, so we now may understand that
the things of this world and of humanity, though real in
their degree, have chiefly a kind of negative value; they
are opaquenesses, clouds, materialisms, ignorances, and the
inner light falling upon them gradually reveals their negative
character and gradually dissolves them away till they
are lost in the extreme and eternal Splendor. I think
Jefferies, when he asked that question with which I have
begun this chapter, was in some sense subconsciously,
if not quite consciously, aware of the answer. His frequent
references to the burning blazing sun throughout
The Story of the Heart seem to be an indication of his real
deep-down attitude of mind.

[1] See, in the same connection, Plato's allegory of the Cave,
Republic,Book vii.


The shadow-figures of the creeds and theogonies pass away
truly like ephemeral dreams; but to say that time spent
in their study is wasted, is a mistake, for they have
value as being indications of things much more real than
themselves, namely, of the stages of evolution of the human
mind. The fact that a certain god-figure, however grotesque
and queer, or a certain creed, however childish, cruel,
and illogical, held sway for a considerable time over
the hearts of men in any corner or continent of the world
is good evidence that it represented a real formative urge at
the time in the hearts of those good people, and a definite
stage in their evolution and the evolution of humanity. Certainly
it was destined to pass away, but it was a step, and
a necessary step in the great process; and certainly it
was opaque and brutish, but it is through the opaque
things of the world, and not through the transparent,
that we become aware of the light.

It may be worth while to give instances of how some early
rituals and creeds, in themselves apparently barbarous
or preposterous, were really the indications of important
moral and social conceptions evolving in the heart of
man. Let us take, first, the religious customs connected
with the ideas of Sacrifice and of Sin, of which such
innumerable examples are now to be found in the modern
books on Anthropology. If we assume, as I have done
more than once, that the earliest state of Man was one
in which he did not consciously separate himself from
the world, animate and inanimate, which surrounded him,
then (as I have also said) it was perfectly natural for
him to take some animal which bulked large on his horizon--
some food-animal for instance--and to pay respect to
it as the benefactor of his tribe, its far-back ancestor
and totem-symbol; or, seeing the boundless blessing of
the cornfields, to believe in some kind of spirit of the
corn (not exactly a god but rather a magical ghost) which,
reincarnated every year, sprang up to save mankind
from famine. But then no sooner had he done this than
he was bound to perceive that in cutting down the
corn or in eating his totem-bear or kangaroo he was slaying
his own best self and benefactor. In that instant the
consciousness of DISUNITY, the sense of sin in some undefined
yet no less disturbing and alarming form would come in.
If, before, his ritual magic had been concentrated on the
simple purpose of multiplying the animal or, vegetable
forms of his food, now in addition his magical endeavor
would be turned to averting the just wrath of the spirits
who animated these forms--just indeed, for the rudest savage
would perceive the wrong done and the probability of
its retribution. Clearly the wrong done could only be expiated
by an equivalent sacrifice of some kind on the part of
the man, or the tribe--that is by the offering to the totem-
animal or to the corn-spirit of some victim whom these
nature powers in their turn could feed upon and assimilate.
In this way the nature-powers would be appeased,
the sense of unity would be restored, and the first At-one-ment
effected.

It is hardly necessary to recite in any detail the cruel and
hideous sacrifices which have been perpetrated in this
sense all over the world, sometimes in appeasement of
a wrong committed or supposed to have been committed by the tribe
or some member of it, sometimes in placation
or for the averting of death, or defeat, or plague,
sometimes merely in fulfilment of some long-standing
custom of forgotten origin--the flayings and floggings and
burnings and crucifixions of victims without end, carried
out in all deliberation and solemnity of established ritual.
I have mentioned some cases connected with the sowing
of the corn. The Bible is full of such things, from
the intended sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham,
to the actual crucifixion of Jesus by the Jews. The first-
born sons were claimed by a god who called himself
"jealous" and were only to be redeemed by a substitute.[1]
Of the Canaanites it was said that "even their daughters
they have BURNT in the fire to their gods";[2] and of the
King of Moab, that when he saw his army in danger of
defeat, "he took his eldest son that should have reigned
in his stead and offered him for a burnt-offering on the
wall!"[3] Dr. Frazer[4] mentions the similar case of the
Carthaginians (about B.C. 300) sacrificing two hundred children
of good family as a propitiation to Baal and to
save their beloved city from the assaults of the Sicilian
tyrant Agathocles. And even so we hear that on that
occasion three hundred more young folk VOLUNTEERED to
die for the fatherland.

[1] Exodus xxxiv. 20.

[2] Deut. xii. 31.

[3] 2 Kings iii. 27.

[4] The Golden Bough, vol. "The Dying God," p. 167.


The awful sacrifices made by the Aztecs in Mexico to
their gods Huitzilopochtli, Texcatlipoca, and others are
described in much detail by Sahagun, the Spanish missionary
of the sixteenth century. The victims were mostly
prisoners of war or young children; they were numbered
by thousands. In one case Sahagun describes the huge Idol
or figure of the god as largely plated with gold and
holding his hands palm upward and in a downward
sloping position over a cauldron or furnace placed below. The
children, who had previously been borne in triumphal state
on litters over the crowd and decorated with every ornamental
device of feathers and flowers and wings, were
placed one by one on the vast hands and ROLLED DOWN into
the flames--as if the god were himself offering them.[1] As
the procession approached the temple, the members of
it wept and danced and sang, and here again the abundance
of tears was taken for a good augury of rain.[2]

[1] It is curious to find that exactly the same story (of the
sloping hands and the children rolled down into the flames) is
related concerning the above-mentioned Baal image at Carthage
(see Diodorus Siculus, xx. 14; also Baring Gould's Religious
Belief, vol. i, p. 375).

[2] "A los ninos que mataban, componianlos en muchos atavios para
llevarlos al sacrificio, y llevabos en unas literas sobre los
hombros, estas literas iban adornadas con plumages y con flores:
iban tanendo, cantando y bailando delante de ellos . . . Cuando
Ileviban los ninos a matar, si llevaban y echaban muchos
lagrimas, alegrabansi los que los llevaban porque tomaban
pronostico de que habian de tener muchas aguas en aquel ano."
Sahagun, Historia Nueva Espana, Bk. II, ch. i.


Bernal Diaz describes how he saw one of these monstrous
figures--that of Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, all inlaid
with gold and precious stones; and beside it were "braziers,
wherein burned the hearts of three Indians, torn
from their bodies that very day, and the smoke of them and
the savor of incense were the sacrifice."

Sahagun again (in Book II, ch. 5) gives a long account
of the sacrifice of a perfect youth at Easter-time--which
date Sabagun connects with the Christian festival of the
Resurrection. For a whole year the youth had been held
in honor and adored by the people as the very image of the
god (Tetzcatlipoca) to whom he was to be sacrificed. Every
luxury and fulfilment of his last wish (including such four
courtesans as he desired) had been granted him. At the last
and on the fatal day, leaving his companions and his worshipers
behind, be slowly ascended the Temple staircase; stripping
on each step the ornaments from his body; and breaking
and casting away his flutes and other musical
instruments; till, reaching the summit, he was stretched,
curved on his back, and belly upwards, over the altar
stone, while the priest with obsidian knife cut his breast
open and, snatching the heart out, held it up, yet beating,
as an offering to the Sun. In the meantime, and
while the heart still lived, his successor for the next year
was chosen.

In Book II, ch. 7 of the same work Sahagun describes the
similar offering of a woman to a goddess. In both cases
(he explains) of young man or young woman, the victims
were richly adorned in the guise of the god or
goddess to whom they were offered, and at the same time
great largesse of food was distributed to all who needed.
[Here we see the connection in the general mind between
the gift of food (by the gods) and the sacrifice of precious
blood (by the people).] More than once Sahagun mentions
that the victims in these Mexican ceremonials not infrequently
offered THEMSELVES as a voluntary sacrifice; and Prescott
says[1] that the offering of one's life to the gods was
"sometimes voluntarily embraced, as a most glorious death opening
a sure passage into Paradise."

[1] Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, ch. 3.


Dr. Frazer describes[1] the far-back Babylonian festival
of the Sacaea in which "a prisoner, condemned to death, was
dressed in the king's robes, seated on the king's throne,
allowed to issue whatever commands he pleased, to eat, drink
and enjoy himself, and even to lie with the king's concubines."
But at the end of the five days he was stripped
of his royal robes, scourged, and hanged or impaled. It
is certainly astonishing to find customs so similar prevailing
among peoples so far removed in space and time
as the Aztecs of the sixteenth century A.D. and the Babylonians
perhaps of the sixteenth century B.C. But we know
that this subject of the yearly sacrifice of a victim
attired as a king or god is one that Dr. Frazer has especially
made his own, and for further information on it his classic
work should be consulted.

[1] Golden Bough, "The Dying God," p. 114. See also S. Reinach,
Cults, Myths and Religion, p. 94) on the martyrdom of St. Dasius.


Andrew Lang also, with regard to the Aztecs, quotes
largely from Sahagun, and summarizes his conclusions in
the following passage: "The general theory of worship was
the adoration of a deity, first by innumerable human
sacrifices, next by the special sacrifice of a MAN for the male
gods, of a WOMAN for each goddess.[1] The latter victims
were regarded as the living images or incarnations of the
divinities in, each case; for no system of worship carried
farther the identification of the god with the sacrifice
[? victim], and of both with the officiating priest. The
connection was emphasized by the priests wearing the
newly-flayed skins of the victims--just as in Greece, Egypt
and Assyria, the fawn-skin or bull-hide or goat-skin or fish-
skin of the victims is worn by the celebrants. Finally, an
image of the god was made out of paste, and this was divided
into morsels and eaten in a hideous sacrament by those
who communicated."[2]

[1] Compare the festival of Thargelia at Athens, originally
connected with the ripening of the crops. A procession was formed
and the first fruits of the year offered to Apollo, Artemis and
the Horae. It was an expiatory feast, to purify the State from
all guilt and avert the wrath of the god [the Sun]. A man and a
woman, as representing the male and female population, were led
about with a garland of figs [fertility] round their necks, to
the sound of flutes and singing. They were then scourged,
sacrificed, and their bodies burned by the seashore. (Nettleship
and Sandys.)

[2] A Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. ii, p. 97.


Revolting as this whole picture is, it represents as we know
a mere thumbnail sketch of the awful practices of human
sacrifice all over the world. We hold up our hands
in horror at the thought of Huitzilopochtli dropping children
from his fingers into the flames, but we have to remember
that our own most Christian Saint Augustine was content
to describe unbaptized infants as crawling for ever about
the floor of Hell! What sort of god, we may ask, did
Augustine worship? The Being who could condemn children
to such a fate was certainly no better than the Mexican Idol.

And yet Augustine was a great and noble man, with some
by no means unworthy conceptions of the greatness of
his God. In the same way the Aztecs were in many
respects a refined and artistic people, and their religion was
not all superstition and bloodshed. Prescott says of
them[1] that they believed in a supreme Creator and Lord
"omnipresent, knowing all thoughts, giving all gifts, without
whom Man is as nothing--invisible, incorporeal, one God,
of perfect perfection and purity, under whose wings we
find repose and a sure defence." How can we reconcile
St. Augustine with his own devilish creed, or the
religious belief of the Aztecs with their unspeakable cruelties?
Perhaps we can only reconcile them by remembering
out of what deeps of barbarism and what nightmares
of haunting Fear, man has slowly emerged--and
is even now only slowly emerging; by remembering also
that the ancient ceremonies and rituals of Magic and
Fear remained on and were cultivated by the multitude in
each nation long after the bolder and nobler spirits had
attained to breathe a purer air; by remembering that
even to the present day in each individual the Old and the
New are for a long period thus intricately intertangled. It
is hard to believe that the practice of human and animal
sacrifice (with whatever revolting details) should have been
cultivated by nine-tenths of the human race over the globe
out of sheer perversity and without some reason which at
any rate to the perpetrators themselves appeared commanding
and convincing. To-day [1918] we are witnessing
in the Great European War a carnival of human slaughter
which in magnitude and barbarity eclipses in one stroke
all the accumulated ceremonial sacrifices of historical
ages; and when we ask the why and wherefore of this
horrid spectacle we are told, apparently in all sincerity, and
by both the parties engaged, of the noble objects and commanding
moralities which inspire and compel it. We can hardly,
in this last case, disbelieve altogether in the genuineness
of the plea, so why should we do so in the former
case? In both cases we perceive that underneath the
surface pretexts and moralities Fear is and was the
great urging and commanding force.

[1] Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, ch. 3.


The truth is that Sin and Sacrifice represent--if you
once allow for the overwhelming sway of fear--perfectly
reasonable views of human conduct, adopted instinctively
by mankind since the earliest times. If in a moment of
danger or an access of selfish greed you deserted your
brother tribesman or took a mean advantage of him, you
'sinned' against him; and naturally you expiated the
sin by an equivalent sacrifice of some kind made to the
one you had wronged. Such an idea and such a practice
were the very foundation of social life and human morality,
and must have sprung up as soon as ever, in the course
of evolution, man became CAPABLE of differentiating himself
from his fellows and regarding his own conduct as that of
a 'separate self.' It was in the very conception of a
separate self that 'sin' and disunity first began; and it
was by 'sacrifice' that unity and harmony were restored,
appeasement and atonement effected.

But in those earliest times, as I have already indicated
more than once, man felt himself intimately related not
only to his brother tribesman, but to the animals and to
general Nature. It was not so much that he THOUGHT thus
as that he never thought OTHERWISE! He FELT subconsciously
that he was a part of all this outer world. And so he
adopted for his totems or presiding spirits every possible
animal, as we have seen, and all sorts of nature-phenomena,
such as rain and fire and water and clouds, and sun, moon and
stars--which WE consider quite senseless and inanimate.
Towards these apparently senseless things therefore he
felt the same compunction as I have described him feeling
towards his brother tribesmen. He could sin against
them too. He could sin against his totem-animal by
eating it; he could sin against his 'brother the ox' by consuming
its strength in the labor of the plough; he could
sin against the corn by cutting it down and grinding
it into flour, or against the precious and beautiful pine-
tree by laying his axe to its roots and converting it into
mere timber for his house. Further still, no doubt he
could sin against elemental nature. This might be more
difficult to be certain of, but when the signs of elemental
displeasure were not to be mistaken--when the rain withheld
itself for months, or the storms and lightning dealt death
and destruction, when the crops failed or evil plagues afflicted
mankind--then there could be little uncertainty that he had
sinned; and Fear, which had haunted him like a demon from
the first day when he became conscious of his separation
from his fellows and from Nature, stood over him and urged
to dreadful propitiations.

In all these cases some sacrifice in reparation was the obvious
thing. We have seen that to atone for the cutting-down
of the corn a human victim would often be
slaughtered. The corn-spirit clearly approved of this, for
wherever the blood and remains of the victim were
strewn the corn always sprang up more plentifully. The
tribe or human group made reparation thus to the corn; the
corn-spirit signified approval. The 'sin' was expiated and
harmony restored. Sometimes the sacrifice was voluntarily
offered by a tribesman; sometimes it was enforced, by lot
or otherwise; sometimes the victim was a slave, or a
captive enemy; sometimes even an animal. All that
did not so much matter. The main thing was that the
formal expiation had been carried out, and the wrath
of the spirits averted.

It is known that tribes whose chief food-animal was the
bear felt it necessary to kill and cat a bear occasionally;
but they could not do this without a sense of guilt, and some
fear of vengeance from the great Bear-spirit. So they
ate the slain bear at a communal feast in which the
tribesmen shared the guilt and celebrated their community
with their totem and with each other. And since they could
not make any reparation directly to the slain animal itself
AFTER its death, they made their reparation BEFORE, bringing
all sorts of presents and food to it for a long anterior period,
and paying every kind of worship and respect to it. The
same with the bull and the ox. At the festival of the Bouphonia,
in some of the cities of Greece as I have already
mentioned, the actual bull sacrificed was the handsomest
and most carefully nurtured that could be obtained; it
was crowned with flowers and led in procession with
every mark of reverence and worship. And when--as I
have already pointed out--at the great Spring festival, instead
of a bull or a goat or a ram, a HUMAN victim was immolated,
it was a custom (which can be traced very widely over the
world) to feed and indulge and honor the victim to
the last degree for a WHOLE YEAR before the final ceremony,
arraying him often as a king and placing a crown
upon his head, by way of acknowledgment of the noble
and necessary work he was doing for the general
good.

What a touching and beautiful ceremony was that--belonging
especially to the North of Syria, and lands where
the pine is so beneficent and beloved a tree--the mourning
ceremony of the death and burial of Attis! when a
pine-tree, felled by the axe, was hollowed out, and in the hollow
an image (often itself carved out of pinewood) of the
young Attis was placed. Could any symbolism express more
tenderly the idea that the glorious youth--who represented
Spring, too soon slain by the rude tusk of Winter--
was himself the very human soul of the pine-tree?[1] At
some earlier period, no doubt, a real youth had been sacrificed
and his body bound within the pine; but now it was
deemed sufficient for the maidens to sing their wild songs
of lamentation; and for the priests and male enthusiasts
to cut and gash themselves with knives, or to sacrifice
(as they did) to the Earth-mother the precious blood offering
of their virile organs--symbols of fertility in return
for the promised and expected renewal of Nature and
the crops in the coming Spring. For the ceremony, as
we have already seen, did not end with death and lamentation,
but led on, perfectly naturally, after a day or
two to a festival of resurrection, when it was discovered--
just as in the case of Osiris--that the pine-tree coffin
was empty, and the immortal life had flown. How strange
the similarity and parallelism of all these things to the
story of Jesus in the Gospels--the sacrifice of a life
made in order to bring salvation to men and expiation of
sins, the crowning of the victim, and arraying in royal
attire, the scourging and the mockery, the binding or nailing to
a tree, the tears of Mary, and the resurrection and the empty
coffin!--or how not at all strange when we consider in what
numerous forms and among how many peoples, this same
parable and ritual had as a matter of fact been celebrated,
and how it had ultimately come down to bring
its message of redemption into a somewhat obscure Syrian
city, in the special shape with which we are familiar.

[1] See Julius Firmicus, who says (De Errore, c. 28): "in sacris
Phrygiis, quae Matris deum dicunt, per annos singulos arbor pinea
caeditur, et in media arbore simulacrum uvenis subligatur. In
Isiacis sacris de pinea arbore caeditur truncus; hujus trunci
media pars subtiliter excavatur, illis de segminibus factum
idolum Osiridis sepelitur. In Prosperpinae sacris caesa arbor in
effigiem virginis formaraque componitur, et cum intra civitatem
fuerit illata, quadraginta noctibus pIangitur, quadragesima vero
nocte comburitur."


Though the parable or legend in its special Christian form
bears with it the consciousness of the presence of beings
whom we may call gods, it is important to remember that in many
or most of its earlier forms, though it dealt in 'spirits'--the
spirit of the corn, or the spirit of the Spring,
or the spirits of the rain and the thunder, or the spirits
of totem-animals--it had not yet quite risen to the idea
of gods. It had not risen to the conception of eternal
deities sitting apart and governing the world in solemn
conclave--as from the slopes of Olympus or the recesses
of the Christian Heaven. It belonged, in fact, in its
inception, to the age of Magic. The creed of Sin and
Sacrifice, or of Guilt and Expiation--whatever we like to call
it--was evolved perfectly naturally out of the human mind
when brought face to face with Life and Nature) at
some early stage of its self-consciousness. It was essentially
the result of man's deep, original and instinctive
sense of solidarity with Nature, now denied and belied
and to some degree broken up by the growth and conscious
insistence of the self-regarding impulses. It was
the consciousness of disharmony and disunity, causing
men to feel all the more poignantly the desire and the
need of reconciliation. It was a realization of union
made clear by its very loss. It assumed of course,
in a subconscious way as I have already indicated, that the
external world was the HABITAT of a mind or minds similar
to man's own; but THAT being granted, it is evident
that the particular theories current in this or that place about
the nature of the world--the theories, as we should say,
of science or theology--did not alter the general outlines
of the creed; they only colored its details and gave
its ritual different dramatic settings. The mental attitudes,
for instance, of Abraham sacrificing the ram, or of the
Siberian angakout slaughtering a totem-bear, or of a modern
and pious Christian contemplating the Saviour on the Cross
are really almost exactly the same. I mention this because
in tracing the origins or the evolution of religions it is
important to distinguish clearly what is essential and
universal from that which is merely local and temporary.
Some people, no doubt, would be shocked at the comparisons
just made; but surely it is much more inspiriting and
encouraging to think that whatever progress HAS been
made in the religious outlook of the world has come about
through the gradual mental growth and consent of the peoples,
rather than through some unique and miraculous event
of a rather arbitrary and unexplained character--which
indeed might never be repeated, and concerning which
it would perhaps be impious to suggest that it SHOULD
be repeated.

The consciousness then of Sin (or of alienation from
the life of the whole), and of restoration or redemption
through Sacrifice, seems to have disclosed itself in the human
race in very far-back times, and to have symbolized itself
in some most ancient rituals; and if we are shocked
sometimes at the barbarities which accompanied those
rituals, yet we must allow that these barbarities show
how intensely the early people felt the solemnity and
importance of the whole matter; and we must allow too
that the barbarities did sear and burn themselves into
rude and ignorant minds with the sense of the NEED of
Sacrifice, and with a result perhaps which could not have
been compassed in any other way.

For after all we see now that sacrifice is of the very
essence of social life. "It is expedient that ONE man
should die for the people"; and not only that one man
should actually die, but (what is far more important) that
each man should be ready and WILLING to die in that
cause, when the occasion and the need arises. Taken
in its larger meanings and implications Sacrifice, as conceived
in the ancient world, was a perfectly reasonable
thing. It SHOULD pervade modern life more than it does.
All we have or enjoy flows from, or is implicated with, pain
and suffering in others, and--if there is any justice in
Nature or Humanity--it demands an equivalent readiness
to suffer on our part. If Christianity has any real
essence, that essence is perhaps expressed in some such
ritual or practice of Sacrifice, and we see that the dim
beginnings of this idea date from the far-back customs
of savages coming down from a time anterior to all recorded
history.
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The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan W.S. Gilbert Category: Plays Sections: 50 What's this? Table of Contents		Fiction Non Fiction Short Stories Poetry Plays Sci Fi Philosophy Biography