CHAP. VI.] MAN. 145 



This practice is represented as having originated in the gross 

 notion of actually feeding the gods with flesh, or at 

 least in the idea of the spirit of such flesh serving 

 as food to the spiritual beings to whom it was offered, and not 

 in the modern notion of sacrifice. Mr. Tylor says :* &quot; The 

 mere fact of sacrifice to deities, from the lowest to the highest 

 levels of culture consisting of the extent of nine-tenths or 

 more of gifts of food for sacred banquets, tells forcibly against 

 the originality of the abnegation theory.&quot; But, I ask, Why 

 so ? If food in the earliest period was the thing to sacrifice 

 which constituted the greatest self-denial easily practised, 

 then, on natural grounds only, we might conclude that such 

 a practice would arise and that the habit, being once formed, 

 continued and became widely diffused. But elsewhere, in 

 deed, he concedes a great deal, and admits f that &quot;we do 

 not find it easy to analyse the impression which a gift makes 

 on our own feelings, and to separate the actual value of the 

 object from the sense of gratification in the giver s good will 

 or request, and thus we may well scruple to define closely 

 how uncultured men work out this very same distinction in 

 their dealings with their deities.&quot; This remark is excellent ; 

 and how distinctly a real and unmistakably expressed ethical 

 conception really accompanies such practices in some tribes 

 he himself shows us in another passage. In a Zulu prayer 

 quoted by him,J we find : &quot;If you ask food of me which you 

 have given me, is it not proper that I should give it to you ?&quot; 

 As he truly says: &quot;The Phoenicians sacrificed the dearest 

 children to propitiate the angry gods, &c.&quot; But, in fact, 

 early sacrifice contained at the least implicitly, potentially, 

 vaguely and in germ, all that which later became actually 

 developed and distinctly expressed. It is not possible for 

 Mr. Tylor, || or for any one else, to prove that it did not do 



* Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p. 360. f Hid. p. 357. 



% Ibid. p. 333. Ibid. p. 361. 



|| Mr. Tyler s judgments as to ancient religion must be received with 

 caution, when we observe the curious and hasty remarks into which he is 

 occasionally betrayed as to the religion of to-day. He tells us that ; Si. 

 Lazarus, patron saint of lepers and their hospitals, and from whom the 



