lysses: Agamemnon, king of men, has sent me to bring back thy daughter
Chryses, and to offer a sacred hecatomb for (yper) the Greeks, that we
may _propitiate_ (ilasomestha) the king, who now sends woes and many
groans upon the Argives" (442 sqq.).--Tyler, "Theology of Greek Poets,"
pp. 196, 197.]

We do not deem it needful to discuss at length the question which has
been so earnestly debated among theologians, as to whether the idea of
expiation be a primitive and necessary idea of the human mind, or
whether the practice of piacular sacrifices came into the post-diluvian
world with Noah, as a positive institution of a primitive religion then
first directly instituted by God. On either hypothesis the practice of
expiatory rites derives its authority from God; in the latter case, by
an outward and verbal revelation, in the former by an inward and
intuitive revelation.

This much, however, must be conceded on all hands, that there are
certain fundamental intuitions, universal and necessary, which underlie
the almost universal practice of expiatory sacrifice, namely, _the
universal consciousness of guilt, and the universal conviction that
something must be done to expiate guilt_, to compensate for wrong, and
to atone for past misdeeds. But _how_ that expiation can be effected,
how that atonement can be made, is a question which reason does not seem
competent to answer. That personal sin can be atoned for by vicarious
suffering, that national guilt can be expiated and national punishment
averted by animal sacrifices, or even by human sacrifices, is repugnant
to rather than conformable with natural reason. There exists no
discernible connection between the one and the other. We may suppose
that eucharistic, penitential, and even deprecatory sacrifices may have
originated in the light of nature and reason, but we are unable to
account for the practice of piacular sacrifices for substitutional
atonement, on the same principle. The ethical principle, that one's own
sins are not transferable either in their guilt or punishment, is so
obviously just that we feel it must have been as clear to the mind of
the Greek who brought his victim to be offered to Zeus, as it is to the
philosophic mind of to-day.[138] The knowledge that the Divine
displeasure can be averted by sacrifice is not, by Plato, grounded upon
any intuition of reason, as is the existence of God, the idea of the
true, the just, and good, but on "tradition,"[139] and t