I. The true hope of the world is a priest.

The idea of priesthood is universal.  It has been distorted and abused; it has been made the foundation of spiritual tyranny.  The priest has not been the teacher nor the elevator of the people.  All over the world he has been the ally of oppression and darkness, he has hindered and cramped social and intellectual progress.  And yet, in spite of all this, there the office stands, and wherever men go, by some strange perversity they take with them this idea, and choose from among themselves those who, being endowed with some sort of ceremonial and symbolic purity, shall discharge for their brethren the double office of representing them before God, of representing God to them.  That is what the world means, with absolute and entire unanimity, by a priest—­one who shall be sacrificer, intercessor, representative; bearer of man’s worship, channel of God’s blessing.  How comes it, that, in spite of all the cruelties and lies that have gathered round the office, it lives, indestructible, among the families of men?  Why, because it springs from, and corresponds to, real and universal wants in their nature.  It is the result of the universal consciousness of sin.  Men feel that there is a gulf betwixt them and God.  They know themselves to be all foul.  True, as their knowledge of God dims and darkens, their conscience hardens and their sense of sin lessens; but, as long as there is any notion of God at all, there will be a parallel and corresponding conviction of moral evil.  And so, feeling that, and feeling it, as I believe, not because they are rude and barbarous, but because, though rude and barbarous, they still preserve some trace of their true relation to God, they lay hold upon some of their fellows, and say, ’Here! be thou for us this thing which we cannot be for ourselves—­stand thou there in front of us, and be at once the expression of our knowledge that we dare not come before our gods, and likewise, if it may be, the medium by which their gifts may come on us, unworthy.’

That is a wide-spread and all but universally expressed instinct of human nature.  Argue about it as you like, explain it away how you choose, charge the notions of priesthood and sacrifice with exaggeration, immorality, barbarism, if you will—­still the thing remains.  And I believe for my part that, so far from that want being one which will be left behind, with other rude and savage desires, as men advance in civilisation—­it is as real and as permanent as the craving of the understanding for truth, and of the heart for love.  When men lose it, it is because they are barbarised, not civilised, into forgetting it.  On that rock all systems of religion and eminently all theories of Christianity, that leave out priest and sacrifice, will strike and split.  The Gospel for the world must be one which will meet all the facts of man’s condition.  Chief among these facts is this necessity of the conscience, as expressed by the forms in which for thousands of years the worship of mankind has been embodied all but everywhere—­an altar, and a priest standing by its side.