234 
In nations retaining no original religious documents, it 
is no wonder that ancestral worship alone remains. ‘These 
matters, to be properly understood, need to be brought still 
more fully into the light of actual history, and cannot be 
solved by speculations. History will reverse the conclusion 
to which Professor Max Miiller and many others have come ; 
as, for instance, that ‘‘a thoughtful look on nature led to 
the first perception of bright gods, and in the end of a god of 
light, as love of our parents was transfigured into piety and a 
belief in Immortality,” &c.* History wiil be seen to teach 
that God’s first name was light, but that He was forgotten in 
the symbol; and that man’s first belief, as to himself, was in 
Immortality, but was degraded into ancestral and saint 
worship. 
Another most interesting and suggestive study is that of 
the monuments ‘and characteristic observances of religions, 
most, if not all, of which can be traced back to a unity in the 
far past, which must speak of a common purpose in their 
origin. We take, for instance, the sacrificial aspect of all 
ancient religions. Itis the fashion to regard the sacrificial 
system as a mark of religious evolution from the first germ of 
ghost-worship that we have heard so much about ; fear of the 
Deity, which had at last grown out of this ghost, led men 
naturally to think of appeasing a god by offering him “ the 
best ” a man possessed—hence the first step is sacrifice of the 
first-born, as the best a man has to give, supposed to be 
illustrated in the offering of Isaac by Abraham ; the next is a 
“commutation ” by animal sacrifices; the next a supplanting 
of blood sacrifices altogether, and any idea of substitution, by 
self-sacrifice in almsgiving and moral obedience, as in the 
case of the Buddhists. This is the view taken by, amongst 
others, Mr. Moncure Conway, as in an article in the May 
number of the Nineteenth Century for 1880, on Shylock’s 
bond, the “ Pound of Flesh.’”? He attributes the idea of sacri- 
fice, and its whole history, to the struggle in all ages and 
races between “the principle of retaliation and that of for- 
giveness,” on purely human grounds. But, to say nothing 
of the difficulty of satisfactorily tracing through history the 
working of such principles, look at a question more imme- 
diately prominent on the face of sacrifice, the method of pro- 
pitiation. What is there in human nature to suggest to man 
the idea of propitiating an angry, or mysterious, god by an 
offering in blood? Men do not so propitiate each other ; 
%* Max Muller, India, p. 243. 
