ATONEMENT 107 



living germ of truth capable of fructifying into noble and 

 worthy thoughts of God, When some of these Arab 

 tribes forsook their nomadic life and settled down to 

 agriculture and commerce, the tribesmen began to 

 acquire private property, and the flocks and herds which 

 had at one time belonged to the tribe as a whole, began 

 to belong to individual members of those tribes. And 

 so the thought developed that Baal had his private 

 property and the sacrifice became a gift or bribe 

 to BaaL 



And, later still, when a sense of sin developed and 

 became strong, the sacrifice became a bribe to propitiate 

 an offended deity. Thus do we see that the advent of 

 private property corresponded to a degradation of 

 religious thought. 



Now, it is easy to see that all such expiatory ideas 

 associated with the rite of sacrifice were utterly false and 

 degrading, and, as we should expect, we find the Old 

 Testament full of magnificent protests by prophets 

 and psalmists, against such unworthy thoughts of God — 

 *' Will the Lord be pleased,'' says Micah, ** with 

 thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of 

 oil ? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, 

 the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul ? ** And 

 then he appeals to the common-sense of his hearers. 

 ** He hath shown thee O man, what is good, and what 

 doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, to love 

 mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God ? ** 



And yet, strange as it may seem, these expiatory 

 ideas have dominated Christian theology ever since the 

 days of Augustine, and we are only just beginning 

 to shake ourselves free from them, and to realise how 

 much we have dishonoured God by attributing to Him 

 anything so utterly derogatory to His character. It 

 seems the more surprising that these unworthy thoughts 

 should have crept into Christian theology when we 



