es. This is "the joy
of thy Lord"[228] into which the faithful servant enters, significantly
followed by the statement that He was hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, a
stranger and in prison, in the helped or neglected children of men. To
the free Spirit to give itself is joy, and it feels its life the more
keenly, the more it pours itself forth. And the more it gives, the more
it grows, for the law of the growth of life is that it increases by
pouring itself forth and not by drawing from without--by giving, not by
taking. Sacrifice, then, in its primary meaning, is a thing of joy; the
Logos pours Himself out to make a world, and, seeing the travail of His
soul, is satisfied.[229]

But the word has come to be associated with suffering, and in all
religious rites of sacrifice some suffering, if only that of a trivial
loss to the sacrificer, is present. It is well to understand how this
change has come about, so that when the word "sacrifice" is used the
instinctive connotation is one of pain.

The explanation is seen when we turn from the manifesting Life to the
forms in which it is embodied, and look at the question of sacrifice
from the side of the forms. While the life of Life is in giving, the
life, or persistence, of form is in taking, for the form is wasted as it
is exercised, it is diminished as it is exerted. If the form is to
continue, it must draw fresh material from outside itself in order to
repair its losses, else will it waste and vanish away. The form must
grasp, keep, build into itself what it has grasped, else it cannot
persist; and the law of growth of the form is to take and assimilate
that which the wider universe supplies. As the consciousness identifies
itself with the form, regarding the form as itself, sacrifice takes on a
painful aspect; to give, to surrender, to lose what has been acquired,
is felt to undermine the persistence of the form, and thus the Law of
Sacrifice becomes a law of pain instead of a law of joy.

Man had to learn by the constant breaking up of forms, and the pain
involved in the breaking, that he must not identify himself with the
wasting and changing forms, but with the growing persistent life, and he
was taught his lesson not only by external nature, but by the deliberate
lessons of the Teachers who gave him religions.

We can trace in the religions of the world four great stages of
instruction in the Law of Sacrifice. First, man was taught to sacrifice
part of his material