EVOLUTION OF CEREMONIAL GOVERNMENT. 35 



oblations to a deity and presents to a person. The original identity 

 is well shown by the words of Guhl concerning the Greeks : "Gifts, as 

 an old proverb says, determine the acts of gods and kings ; " and it is 

 equally well shown by a verse in the Psalms (Ixxvi. 11) : " Vow and 

 pay unto the Lord your God : let all that be round about him bring 

 presents unto him that ought to be feared." Moreover, we shall find a 

 parallelism in the details that is extremely significant. 



Food and drink, which constitute the earliest kind of propitiatory 

 gift to a living person, and also the earliest kind of propitiatory gift 

 to a ghost, remain everywhere the essential components of an obla- 

 tion to a deity. As, where political power is evolving, the presents 

 irregularly and then regularly sent to the chief, at first consist main- 

 ly of sustenance ; so, where ancestor-worship, developing, has expand- 

 ed the ghost into a god, the offerings, becoming habitual, have as 

 elements common to them in all plaoes and times, things to eat and 

 drink. That this is so in low societies at large, no proof is needed ; 

 and that it is so in higher societies is also a familiar fact, though a 

 fact ignored where its significance is most worthy to be marked. 

 If a Zulu slays an ox to secure the good-will of his dead relative's 

 ghost, who complains to him in a dream that he has not been fed 

 if among the Zulus this private act develops into a public act 

 when a bullock is periodically killed as " a propitiatory offering to 

 the spirit of the king's immediate ancestor " we may, without im- 

 propriety, ask whether there do not thus arise such acts as those of 

 an Egyptian king who by hecatombs of oxen hopes to please the ghost 

 of his deified father ; but it is not supposable that there was any kin- 

 dred origin for the sacrifices of cattle to Jahveh, concerning which such 

 elaborate directions are given in Leviticus. When we read that among 

 the Greeks " it was customary to pay the same offices to the gods which 

 men stand in need of the temples were their houses, sacrifices their 

 food, altars their tables " it is permissible to observe the analogy be- 

 tween these presents of eatables made to gods and the presents of 

 eatables made at graves to the dead, as being both derived from like 

 presents made to the living ; but that the presentation of meat, bread, 

 fruits, and liquors, to Jahveh had a kindred derivation, is a thought not 

 to be entertained not even though we have a complete parallel be- 

 tween the cakes which Abraham bakes for the refreshment of the Lord 

 when he comes to visit him in his tent on the plains of Mamre and the 

 showbread kept on the altar and from time to time replaced by other 

 bread fresh and hot. Here, however, recognizing these parallelisms, it 

 may be added that though in later Hebrew times the original and gross 

 interpretation of sacrifices became obscured, and though the primitive 

 theory has since undergone gradual dissipation, yet the form survives. 

 The offertory of our Church still retains the words, "accept our alms 

 and oblations ; " and at her coronation Queen Victoria offered on the 

 altar, by the hands of the archbishop, " an altar-cloth of gold and an 



