LECTURE IV.

In passing from the ethnic religions, ancient or modern, into Christianity, or in advancing to it from the more rubrical system of the Hebrews, it seems impossible not to feel that we come suddenly into a freer and more spiritual conception of that personal duty of man toward God which is expressed by the tender and lordly historical word Worship; and when we remember how closely and how largely this is related to the mental and moral advancement of mankind, to what an extent the highest spiritual life of the world is determined or modified by its energetic educating force, it certainly will not seem that the change thus accomplished is insignificant. Indeed, I think that the more we reflect on it the more deeply shall we feel how profound, radical, far-extending it is, and how much it implies concerning the religion to which it is due; what a light it casts on the sovereign authorship of that system of Faith which came by Jesus. I would not exaggerate anything here, more than elsewhere; but to me there appear profound significance and incalculable importance in the change thus inaugurated. looks, at least, like a wholly new and sublimer force breaking in upon the previous context of history, to quicken and lift, in a method and a measure both unparalleled, the moral activity and life of mankind.

It

It is manifest, at once, that Christianity insists, as strongly as any religion in the world, on the duty of man to offer a true worship to God. Whatever indifference there may have been toward this on the part of philosophers, as we know there was much both in the Greek and the Roman society, there was none whatever on the part of the earliest teachers of Christianity Whatever carelessness of it there was among the peoples, in whom faith in the gods had largely decayed-to whom customs

of worship had often become a matter of fashion, of civil regu lation, of artistic pleasure, of family festivity, or sometimes of riotous debauch-there was no reserve, and no incredulity, about the supreme function of worship, in the small assemblies of Christian disciples gathered by the first preaching of their re ligion. The testimony of Christians, and of the adherents to antagonist rituals, agree on this point; and the younger Pliny's report to Trajan, forty years after the death of St. Paul, shows how widely, in villages as in cities, what he regarded as a depraved and excessive superstition had gathered its companies and developed its cultus.

To those accustomed to the sumptuous and sounding pageants of heathenism it may easily have seemed that the Christian disciples, meeting privately before the dawn to sing hymns to the Christ, and to partake in the breaking of bread, had no appropriate or significant worship. To those long trained in the Hebrew economy-with its annual feasts, its sacrifices and processions, its girdled, mitred, and breast-plated priests—it might seem as if those who professed the new Faith had left not the ancient ritual only, but all commanding forms of worship, and had gone into fellowship with Pyrrhonic philosophers, or with the rude and careless rabble. Traces of such impressions are not wanting in the first Christian centuries; and it may have been an incredulity of this sort, quite as much as a ribald scorn, which was expressed in the ancient graphite scratched on the wall of a vault on the Palatine-if the reference of it to the Christ be conceded-representing the Lord as a crucified man, with an ass's head, and the words beneath, in rude characters, "Alexamenos worships his God." But Christians knew the realness of their worship, as well as its object; and both Hebrew and heathen discovered their mistake when all the authority of ruler and priest, with the desperate and continuing violence of the empire, proved unavailing to break up the assemblies in which the disciples communed and adored.

To offer this worship was not with them a mere duty of obe dience to external precepts, though these were not wanting. It was still more an instinct of the heart: an instantaneous and necessary impulse of their entire Christian consciousness. And

if the gospels were now lost from our knowledge, we might almost reproduce them from the primitive customs of the disciples so far as to put again into the sovereign lips of the Lord those kingly words, 'Worship God! Worship Him, in spirit and in truth!' As fully as either words or example can impress any duty on man, the whole scheme of Christianity impresses the duty of devout adoration to the Most High. If any fail to accept this duty, they stand outside its impulse and rule.

But, evidently, there are important particulars in which the worship commanded by Christianity, and by which it was distinguished in the world, differs from any which had preceded it; and except as we apprehend these differences, and feel the vital consequence of them, we shall not see what a work it accomplished in this direction, or what prophecies are in it of the future spiritual culture of man. At the very beginning, it recognized no further need on man's part for the offering of sacrifice, of bird, or beast, or the fruits of the earth-that by this he might appease the gods or win their favor, or that by it he might fulfil the law which had come to the Hebrews through their fathers. Nothing more radical, apparently revolutionary, can well be conceived than this immense and startling liberation by the new religion, of all its disciples, from the solemn ancestral ritual of Sacrifice. This, at least, can hardly have been suggested by any calculations of human prudence, or any impulse of a trained and responsive Jewish sensibility. It traversed all custom, appeared to dishonor the most sacred memories, to contradict the very instinct of penitence, if not to contradict God himself in what the Hebrews had revered as His law. It seemed intended to launch men forth into unknown spaces of spiritual experience, with none of the helps, guidances, stimulations, which had been familiar. It seemed, almost, to sever the world from Him who had made it; or to bar before men the natural way of access to Him.

The idea of sacrifice, as a necessary means of approaching with acceptance supernal Powers, seems to have been imbedded from the outset in the timid but aspiring human heart. Whether it came from a primitive revelation, and had drifted down among diverging tribes, to take Coleridge's word about Plato

as 'a plank from the wreck of Paradise,'* or whether it was a deep native impulse of the soul which felt itself out of moral sympathy with the Powers above this has been a question, I need not remind you, keenly discussed; the discussion of which is not at all ended. But whatever the answer to this may be, and equally whether it be one or the other, the fact remains, that sacrifices were offered in the earliest times of which records remain, and were only offered more abundantly among the wealthier and haughtier peoples. They were regulated by God, according to the Hebrew understanding of things, with careful precision, in the law which they recognized as coming from Him. But they were by no means then introduced: for the earliest glimpse we have of Noah, emerging from the ark, is when he builds an altar to Jehovah, and takes of every clean beast or fowl to offer his sacrifice.† Indeed, the first glimpse

we have of men, after the gates of Paradise are shut, is of their differing offerings to the Lord. Suppose these legends, myths, allegorical pictures: they certainly belong to a time very early, and they show the impression of the men of that time that sacrifice to the unseen Powers had been known on the earth before themselves, before all other authentic history, from the beginning. So it is everywhere, in human annals. Nations had sometimes democratic beginnings, the pastoral tribe becoming organized by degrees into the unity and strength of a state; and sometimes, at the outset of their annals, a conquering monarch marches before us, with his army and captains, having already his capital and councillors. But always at the outset of history, whatever else is there or is not, the altar is there, the officiating priest: and the first approach which man makes to the gods is through the solemn appeal of sacrifice.

Buddhism is the chief form of religion, which has prominently and long existed, in which rites of sacrifice have not been known. This comparatively recent reactionary system excluded such offerings, by its nature: as being really a scheme of metaphysics, not a moral or spiritual law; as contemplating deliver.

*Works: New York ed., 1853: Vol. I., p. 134 (note).

Genesta viii. 20.

Genesis iv. 3, 4.

ance from the miseries of life, not from sin; as knowing no God, and placing unconsciousness at the summit of aspiration; and as offering, in the words of a lucid and learned expositor, 'a salvation which each man could gain for himself, and by himself, in this world, during this life, without any the least reference to God, or to gods, either great or small.'* Combine with this constitution of Buddhism that doctrine of the sacredness of animal life according to which the worm under one's foot might become in the end a supreme Buddha, and the result is natural that it should stand singularly apart from other religions, as being without a cultus of sacrifice.

We cannot always certainly define the moral significance of the different forms of ethnic offering, since our knowledge of them is not complete. But in the Mosaic system, and probably in others, they had in part an expiatory meaning, as offered in atonement for acknowledged transgression; some had a dedi catory intent; and some, the more affectionate office of manifesting gratitude for particular gifts, with the desire to enter into personal communion with him from whom such gifts were conceived to have come. This was the delightful significance of the peace-offering among the Hebrews. It is at least not improbable that the altar at Athens of which Paul spoke, 'To an unknown God,' had been raised, as many were, in such an impulse of gratitude to an undiscovered benefactor, esteemed Divine. How largely the strictly expiatory idea, of giving possessions or the fruit of the body for the sin of the soul, obtained among peoples outside of Palestine, we cannot perhaps be wholly sure. Probably it always became more distinct as the personal or public sense of transgression became more acute after some extraordinary and frightful offence, or when national calamities appeared to be the answering punishment for public iniquities. But the eucharistic aspect of sacrifice, which makes it a thank-offering, the dedicatory, and that which presents it as a form of supplication,-undoubtedly these prevailed at large, as we know that they did among the Hebrews; and always as a

* Rhys Davids: "Indian Buddhism": New York ed., 1882, p. 29.