ut reason; and that, as he is
powerful, so also he is just to his worshippers, and merciful.

But though occasional offerings, and sacrifices made in trouble to
gods who are conceived to be a very help in time of trouble, continue
to be made, until a relatively late period in the history of religion,
we also find that there are recurring sacrifices, annually made. At
these annual ceremonies, the offerings are food-offerings. Where the
food-offerings are offerings of vegetable food, they are made at
harvest time. They are made on the occasion of harvest; and that they
should be so made is probably no accident or fortuitous coincidence.
At the regularly recurring season of harvest, the community adheres to
the custom, already formed, of not partaking of the food which it
offers to its god, until a portion has been offered to the god. The
custom, like other customs, tends to become obligatory: the
worshippers, that is to say the community, may not eat, until the
offering has been made and accepted. Then, indeed, the worshippers may
eat, solemnly, in the presence of their god. The eating becomes a
solemn feast of thanksgiving. The god, after whom they eat, and to
whom they render thanks, becomes the god who gives them to eat. What
is thus true of edible plants--whether wild or domesticated--may also
hold true to some extent of animal life, where anything like a 'close
time' comes to be observed.

As sacrificial ceremonies come to be, thus, annually recurring rites,
a corresponding development takes place in the community's idea of its
god. So long as the sacrificial ceremony was an irregularly recurring
rite, the performance of which was prompted by the occurrence, or the
threat, of disaster, so long it was the wrath of the god which filled
the fore-ground, so to speak, of the religious consciousness; though
behind it lay the conviction of his justice and his mercy. But when
the ceremony becomes one of annual worship, a regularly recurring
occasion on which the worshippers recognise that it is the god, to
whom the first-fruits belong, who gives the worshippers the harvest,
then the community's idea of its god is correspondingly developed. The
occasion of the sacrificial rite is no longer one of alarm and
distress; it is no longer the wrath of the god, but his goodness as
the giver of good gifts, that tends to emerge in the fore-ground of
the religious consciousness. Harvest rites tend to become feasts of
thanksgiving and