lain as part of the general splendid unreality of the Greek saga,
but sober historians of the fifth century B.C. express the same spirit.
Thucydides is by nature no reveller, yet religion is to him, in the
main, a rest from toil. He makes Pericles say of the Athenians:
Moreover we have provided for our spirit very many opportunities
of recreation, by the celebration of games and sacrifices throughout
the year.[1]

[Footnote 1: Jane Harrison: _Prolegomena to Greek Religion_, p. 1.]

Sacrifice may become spiritualized, as it is in Christianity,
"instead of he-goats and she-goats, there are substituted offerings
of the heart for all these vain oblations." The sacrificial
heart has at all times been accounted germane to nobility.
There is something akin to religion in the laying down of a
life for a cause or a country or a friend, in surrendering one's
self for others. It is this power and beauty of renunciation
that is the spiritual value behind all the rituals of sacrifice
that still persist, as in the sacraments of Christianity. It is
the tragic necessity of self-negation that haloes, even in secular
life, the sacrificial attitude:

But there is in resignation a further good element. Even real
goods when they are attainable ought not to be fretfully desired.
To every man comes sooner or later the great renunciation. For
the young there is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with
the whole force of a passionate will, and yet unattainable, is to them
not credible. Yet by death, by illness, by poverty, or, by the voice
of duty, we must learn, each one of us, that the world was not made
for us, and that, however beautiful may be the things we crave,
Fate may nevertheless forbid them. It is the part of courage, when
misfortune comes, to bear without repining the ruin of our hopes,
to turn away our thoughts from vain regrets. This degree of submission
to power is not only just and right; it is the very gate of wisdom.[1]

[Footnote 1: Bertrand Russell: _Philosophical Essays_, p. 65.]

The spiritual meaning and value of sacrifice is thus seen to
lie in self-surrender. The human being, born into a world
where choices must be made, must make continual abnegation.
And when the temporary good is surrendered in the
maintenance of an ideal, sacrifice becomes genuinely spiritual
in character.

Prayer, also, becomes genuinely spiritual in its values when
one ceases to believe in its practical efficacy and comes to
think