scharge for their brethren the double office of representing
them before God, of representing God to them. That is what the world
means, with absolute and entire unanimity, by a priest--one who shall be
sacrificer, intercessor, representative; bearer of man's worship,
channel of God's blessing. How comes it, that, in spite of all the
cruelties and lies that have gathered round the office, it lives,
indestructible, among the families of men? Why, because it springs from,
and corresponds to, real and universal wants in their nature. It is the
result of the universal consciousness of sin. Men feel that there is a
gulf betwixt them and God. They know themselves to be all foul. True, as
their knowledge of God dims and darkens, their conscience hardens and
their sense of sin lessens; but, as long as there is any notion of God
at all, there will be a parallel and corresponding conviction of moral
evil. And so, feeling that, and feeling it, as I believe, not because
they are rude and barbarous, but because, though rude and barbarous,
they still preserve some trace of their true relation to God, they lay
hold upon some of their fellows, and say, 'Here! be thou for us this
thing which we cannot be for ourselves--stand thou there in front of us,
and be at once the expression of our knowledge that we dare not come
before our gods, and likewise, if it may be, the medium by which their
gifts may come on us, unworthy.'

That is a wide-spread and all but universally expressed instinct of
human nature. Argue about it as you like, explain it away how you
choose, charge the notions of priesthood and sacrifice with
exaggeration, immorality, barbarism, if you will--still the thing
remains. And I believe for my part that, so far from that want being one
which will be left behind, with other rude and savage desires, as men
advance in civilisation--it is as real and as permanent as the craving
of the understanding for truth, and of the heart for love. When men lose
it, it is because they are barbarised, not civilised, into forgetting
it. On that rock all systems of religion and eminently all theories of
Christianity, that leave out priest and sacrifice, will strike and
split. The Gospel for the world must be one which will meet all the
facts of man's condition. Chief among these facts is this necessity of
the conscience, as expressed by the forms in which for thousands of
years the worship of mankind has been embodied all but everywhere--an
al