eans of sacrifice, that their gods are
approached by all men, beginning even with the jungle-dwellers of
Chota Nagpur, who sacrifice fowls and offer victims, for the purpose
of conciliating the powers that send jungle-fever and murrain. The
sacrificial rite is the occasion on which, and a means by which, the
worshipper is brought into that closer relation with his god, which he
would not seek, if he did not--for whatever reason--desire it. As
bearing on the idea of God, the spiritual import, and the practical
importance, of the sacrificial rite is that he who partakes in it can
only partake of it so far as he recognises that God is no private idea
of his own, existing only in his notion, but is objectively real. The
jungle-dweller of Chota Nagpur may have no name for the being to whom,
at the appointed season and in the appointed place, he sacrifices
fowls; but, as we have seen, the gods only come to have proper,
personal names in slow course of time. He may be incapable of giving
any account, comprehensible to the civilised enquirer, of the idea
which he has of the being to whom he offers sacrifice: more
accomplished theologians than he have failed to define God. But of the
reality of the being whom he seeks to approach he has no doubt. It is
not the case that the reality of that being, by whomsoever worshipped,
is an assumption which must be made, or a hypothesis that must be
postulated, for the sake of providing a logical justification of
worship. The simple fact is that the religious consciousness is the
consciousness of God as real, just as the common consciousness is the
consciousness of things as real. To represent the reality of either as
something that is not experienced but inferred is to say that we have
no experience of reality, and therefore have no real grounds for
inference. We find it preferable to hold that we have immediate
consciousness of the real, to some extent, and that by inference we
may be brought, to a larger extent, into immediate consciousness of
the real.

Of the reality of Him, whom even the jungle-dweller of Chota Nagpur
seeks to approach, it is only possible to doubt on grounds which seek
to deny the ultimate validity of the common consciousness on any
point. With the inferences which men have drawn about that reality,
and the ideas those inferences have led to, the case is different.
What exactly those ideas are, or have been, we have, more or less, to
guess at, from such facts as the