and must often be treated as specimens of sacerdotal imagination, like the Biblical descriptions of the rites performed in the Tabernacle during the wanderings of the Israelites.  But making all allowance for priestly enthusiasm, it still remains true that the intellect of India, so far as it is preserved in literature, was occupied during two centuries or so with the sacrificial art and that philosophy had difficulty in disentangling itself from ceremonies.  One has only to compare Greek and Sanskrit literature to see how vast are the proportions assumed by ritual in India.  Our information about the political institutions, the wars and chronology of ancient Greece is full, but of the details of Greek worship we hear little and probably there was not much to tell.  But in India, where there are no histories and no dates, we know every prayer and gesture of the officiants throughout complicated sacrifices and possess a whole library describing their correct performance.

In most respects these sacrifices which absorbed so much intellect and energy belong to ancient history.  They must not be confounded with the ceremonies performed in modern temples, which have a different origin and character.  A great blow was struck at the sacrificial system by Buddhism.  Not only did it withdraw the support of many kings and nobles (and the greater ceremonies being very costly depended largely on the patronage of the wealthy), but it popularized the idea that animal sacrifices are shocking and that attempts to win salvation by offerings are crude and unphilosophic.  But though, after Buddhism had leavened India for a few centuries, we no longer find the religious world given over to sacrificing as it had been about 600 B.C., these rites did not die out.  Even now they are occasionally performed in South India and the Deccan.  There are still many Brahmans in these regions who, if they have not the means or learning to perform the greater Vedic ceremonies, at any rate sympathize with the mental attitude which they imply, and this attitude has many curious features.

The rite of sacrifice, which in the simple form of an offering supposed to be agreeable to the deity is the principal ceremony in the early stages of most religions, persists in their later stages but gives rise to clouds of theory and mystical interpretations.  Thus in Christianity, the Jewish sacrifices are regarded as prototypes of the death of Christ and that death itself as a sacrifice to the Almighty, an offering of himself to himself, which in some way acts as an expiation for the sins of the world.  And by a further development the sacrifice of the mass, that is, the offering of portions of bread and wine which are held to be miraculously transformed into the body and blood of Christ by the manipulations of a qualified priest, is believed to repeat every day the tragedy of Calvary.  The prevalence of this view in Europe should make us chary of stigmatizing Hindu ideas about sacrifice as mental aberrations.  They represent the fancies of acute intellects dealing with ancient ceremonies which they cannot abandon but which they transform into something more congenial to their own transitional mode of thought.