Those who, like myself, believe rather in the subjective side, the emotional effect of religion, would hold that the idea of sacrifice is certainly a primal human instinct, but that the true interpretation has been put upon it by the teaching of Christ.  I should myself feel that the idea of sacrifice belonged wholly to the old dispensation.  That man, when he began to form some mental picture of the mysterious nature of the world of which he found himself a part, saw that there was, in the background of life, a vast and awful power, whose laws were mysterious and not, apparently, wholly benevolent; that this power sometimes sent happiness and prosperity, sometimes sorrow and adversity; and that though to a certain extent calamities were brought about by individual misconduct, yet that there were innumerable instances in the world where innocence and even conscientious conduct were just as heavily penalized as guilt and sin.  The apparently fortuitous distribution of happiness would alarm and bewilder him.  The natural instinct of man, thus face to face with a Deity which he could not hope to overcome or struggle with, would be to conciliate and propitiate him by all the means in his power, as he would offer gifts to a prince or chief.  He would hope thus to win his favour and not to incur his wrath.

But the teaching of the Saviour that God was indeed a Father of men seems to me to have changed all this instantaneously.  Man would learn that misfortune was sent him, not wantonly nor cruelly, but that it was an educative process.  If even so he saw cases, such as a child tortured by agonizing pain, where there seemed to be no personal educative motive that could account for it, no sense of punishment which could be meant to improve the sufferer, he would fall back on the thought that each man is not isolated or solitary, but that there is some essential unity that binds humanity together, and that suffering at one point must, in some mysterious way that he cannot understand, mean amelioration at another.  To feel this would require the exercise of faith, because no human ingenuity could grasp the method by which such a system could be applied.  But there would be no choice between believing this, or deciding that whatever the essential nature of the Mind of God was, it was not based on human ideas of justice and benevolence.

The theory of religion would then be that the crude idea of propitiatory and conciliatory sacrifice would fall to the ground; that to use the inspired words of the old Roman poet—­

        “Aptissima quaeque dabunt Di. 
    Carior est illis homo quam sibi;”

and that the only sacrifices required of man would be, on the one hand, the sacrifice of selfish desires, evil tendencies, sinful appetites; and, on the other hand, the voluntary abnegation of comfortable and desirable things, in the presence of a noble aim, a great idea, a generous purpose.