en taken by the earlier
prophets,[1907] but is emphasized in the psalms in the face of the later
opinion that the sacrificial ritual was of divine ordination (so in
Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers). In the Gospels the sacrificial ritual is
practically ignored. In India the Brahmanic and Buddhistic movements
toward rational conceptions of religion showed themselves as early as
the sixth century B.C. Thus, over a great part of the civilized world
intellectual and moral progress took the form of protest against the old
idea of sacrifice.

+1054+. Yet old customs are long-lived, and the ancient theories, as is
remarked above, still have a certain power. The crudest of them--that
the deity may be propitiated by gifts--shows itself in the belief that
ill-doing may be atoned for by the support of charitable and religious
institutions--by the building of churches and hospitals, by the
maintenance of religious worship, and by aid to the poor. Society has
benefited largely by this belief, especially in medieval Europe and to
some extent in Buddhistic and Moslem communities; it has formed a
transition to higher conceptions, by which it has now been in great
measure replaced. The same thing is true of ascetic observances. The
idea of sacrificial substitution, which has been prominent in organized
Christianity from an early period (though it has no support in the
teaching of Jesus), might seem to be prejudicial to religion for the
reason that it tends to depress the sense of individual responsibility
by relegating the reconciliation with the deity to an external
agency--and such has often been its effect; but this unhappy result has
been more and more modified, partly by the natural human instinct of
moral responsibility and the ethical standard of the Christian
Scriptures, partly by the feeling of gratitude and devotion that has
been called forth by the recognition of unmerited blessing. The third
theory of sacrifice, according to which its essence is union with the
divine, has passed gradually from the sphere of ritual to that of moral
culture. In mystical systems, Christian and Moslem, it has lent itself
sometimes to immorality, sometimes to a stagnant, egoistic, and
antisocial quietism; but in the main it has tended to avoid or abandon
mechanical and mystical features, and confine itself to the conception
of sympathetic and intelligent cooeperation with what may be regarded as
the divine activities of the world.

+1055+. _Further e