sufficient clearness the character of the primitive idea. (2) Further, the man who offers the sacrifice tries to identify himself with his victim. This he does in some places in symbolic fashion, by drawing the skin of the victim over his head.1 It is possibly in connexion with this latter idea that the notion of atonement-which is spread widely over the nations of the world is most easily explained. The life of the animal stands in place of the life of the man, and the ritual emphasizes this. But the primary idea of sacrifice is communion, and the notion of atonement is a somewhat late development from it. We may note in passing that the Jewish sacrificial system illustrates both these points, but, as is usual in the case of Judaism, what is crude and low in pagan religions, so far as it was admitted at all, is spiritualized and purified.2 Those sacrifices in which a portion is burnt or given to the priest, and the rest consumed by the worshipper and his friends, are parallel to those all over the world through which man has sought communion with his god. Yet it is not suggested that Jehovah consumed the sacrifice. Again in the ritual for the Day of Atonement the high priest lays his hands upon the head of the scape-goat and confesses over it the sins of himself and the people: and so they are borne away into the wilderness. That the notion of communion through sacrifice was consciously present to the minds of men is surely proved by S. Paul's comments on the duty of Christians as regards idol-feasts. They would be, if they attended them, partakers of the table of devils (1 Cor. x. 21), and this should be impossible to those who partake of the Body of the Lord.

1 Cf. A. Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, vol. ii. pp. 73, 106. 2 Cf. S. Aug., c. Faust. xviii. 6. Ea (sacrificia) magis perverso populo congruenter imposita, quam Deo desideranti oblata.

The facts brought forward in the last few pages, for which, as we have said, ample evidence is to be found in books dealing specially with the subject, are fully sufficient to prove the persistence in religion, as far back as we can trace it, of the two factors which we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Religion, so far as it is historically known, aims at satisfying the metaphysical desire of man to explain the world, as well as his moral instinct. The history of Judaism and Hellenism shows how far these two elements have fallen apart in actual practice.

B. We must now turn to the more difficult aspect of this portion of our investigation, and inquire what exactly it is which is involved in these two primary factors in religion? What expectations do they imply on the part of man? Briefly, we may answer at once as follows: The metaphysical impulse in religion implies an expectation that the world is a coherent and ordered whole the moral interest implies an expectation that God is to be found and known in nature and in human life. How much or how little these two expectations are expressed in thought or word it does not concern us to inquire. It is necessary, however, to make out that these are the elements of truth which run through religious phenomena from end to end.

I. Man expects to find the world a coherent whole. This expectation is the fundamental motive of all intellectual speculation. There is no portion of experience to which it does not apply. All science and all ordinary knowledge result from the operation of this single motive, or perhaps we might better call it, this necessary law. A simple illustration will show more clearly than anything else the importance of it as

a principle. Man has five senses. admits him into a different world.

1

Each one of these

The world of sight

is not the same as the world of sound, or the world of sound as the world of smell. But man's capacity to live and utilise his experience depends upon his being able at will to translate the reports of one sense into terms of another, and to feel himself certain of the truthfulness of his results. The eyes report the presence of certain objects to a man as he walks along-trees, houses, men, etc. By a process of inference too familiar and rapid to be noticed he thinks of them as different in size as well as in colour. The stile in front of him is an obstacle which he can easily surmount, and the wall by its side one which would be difficult or impossible. That means that the man in question has rapidly translated the reports of his eyes into the language of another sense, viz. touch. Now if his senses are in their normal state, his inference will be right, and he will act easily, without conscious reflection, just as if there were no inference or possibility of error in the matter at all. And yet his inference is not altogether free from uncertainty. Strictly speaking, his eyes report one set of facts and his sense of touch another; and there is no absolute necessity that the two sets of facts should harmonize. When in a certain condition of atmosphere at the sea-side we see a distant ship upsidedown in the air, no one dreams of supposing that it is so: that is, no one dreams of supposing that if he went out and examined it, he would find the reports of his other senses in harmony with those of his eyes. And yet there is no reason to blame the eyes as though they

1 Cf. Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, ed. i. vol. ii. pp. 356, 357.

had given a false report. They have reported what they saw, and the rest of experience warns us to beware in such a case of trusting them too literally. Now that which is certainly true in the case described might conceivably have been true throughout. It might conceivably have been true that the reports of no one sense could be expressed in terms of another, that man, therefore, would have been in presence of five worlds instead of one. It is needless to say that if this were so, his experience would be a chaos. He would have no right and no power to deal with it as a whole, his expectation that it would be coherent would be simply a delusion. This, then, is the value for thought of the expectation we have mentioned. Unless man can form it and act upon it, he can do nothing safely. His whole intellectual outlook depends upon its truth; if it is not true he is wandering, as it were, amongst the phantoms of a dream. We now proceed to trace its significance in religion.

In the first place, the early efforts of undeveloped man to explain nature to himself embody, consciously or unconsciously, this doctrine. He observes certain uniform movements, certain recurring sequences of phenomena, and he interprets them on the analogy of his own action. The changes in the world around him, for which he is responsible, he effects by the exercise of his own will, and he not unnaturally assumes that the far more elaborate changes for which he is not responsible are due to the operation of much more powerful wills. That they do not occur by accident or without meaning he is firmly convinced. His intuition falls short in that he does not see the difficulty of assuming a separate existence to account for each separate effect. The host

of deities which he imagines, conflict in their interests and in the region of their activity, and so the unity and certainty which their presence was to produce vanishes into confusion and chaos. The savage, however, does not know this, and is, doubtless, perfectly happy with his philosophy. But it cannot always be so. As men grow in knowledge, and in grip over their experience, they become dissatisfied with this casual and unscientific method of dealing with the world. The search for unity of principle becomes conscious and definite, and the old mythology vanishes under the criticism of an enlightened philosophy. Thus arises the desire for a metaphysical explanation of things-an account of them which traces them all to some one force, or principle, or cause, such as shall appear in various degrees and shapes in all the multiform variety of experience. Hitherto we have spoken of very elementary manifestations of this fundamental expectation of man in regard of his experience, we must now investigate some far more elaborate attempts in the same direction. In so doing, we shall not confine ourselves to pre-Christian speculation, for the impulse after a unification of experience by no means ceased with the appearance of Christ Incarnate. Men are still as anxious as ever to prove that nature is uniform, or, what is the same problem under another guise, that God exists.

We have said that man expects to find the world a coherent whole, and illustrated this position by instances of the way in which he combines the reports of his various senses. He has, of course, much more to do in

Not only does

the interpretation of the world than this. he want to feel sure that he may count on things being as he sees them, he also wants to know that they will