Pagan and Christian Creeds [48]
the recesses of the Christian Heaven. It belonged, in fact, in its inception, to the age of Magic. The creed of Sin and Sacrifice, or of Guilt and Expiation--whatever we like to call it--was evolved perfectly naturally out of the human mind when brought face to face with Life and Nature) at some early stage of its self-consciousness. It was essentially the result of man's deep, original and instinctive sense of solidarity with Nature, now denied and belied and to some degree broken up by the growth and conscious insistence of the self-regarding impulses. It was the consciousness of disharmony and disunity, causing men to feel all the more poignantly the desire and the need of reconciliation. It was a realization of union made clear by its very loss. It assumed of course, in a subconscious way as I have already indicated, that the external world was the HABITAT of a mind or minds similar to man's own; but THAT being granted, it is evident that the particular theories current in this or that place about the nature of the world--the theories, as we should say, of science or theology--did not alter the general outlines of the creed; they only colored its details and gave its ritual different dramatic settings. The mental attitudes, for instance, of Abraham sacrificing the ram, or of the Siberian angakout slaughtering a totem-bear, or of a modern and pious Christian contemplating the Saviour on the Cross are really almost exactly the same. I mention this because in tracing the origins or the evolution of religions it is important to distinguish clearly what is essential and universal from that which is merely local and temporary. Some people, no doubt, would be shocked at the comparisons just made; but surely it is much more inspiriting and encouraging to think that whatever progress HAS been made in the religious outlook of the world has come about through the gradual mental growth and consent of the peoples, rather than through some unique and miraculous event of a rather arbitrary and unexplained character--which indeed might never be repeated, and concerning which it would perhaps be impious to suggest that it SHOULD be repeated.
The consciousness then of Sin (or of alienation from the life of the whole), and of restoration or redemption through Sacrifice, seems to have disclosed itself in the human race in very far-back times, and to have symbolized itself in some most ancient rituals; and if we are shocked sometimes at the barbarities which accompanied those rituals, yet we must allow that these barbarities show how intensely the early people felt the solemnity and importance of the whole matter; and we must allow too that the barbarities did sear and burn themselves into rude and ignorant minds with the sense of the NEED of Sacrifice, and with a result perhaps which could not have been compassed in any other way.
For after all we see now that sacrifice is of the very essence of social life. "It is expedient that ONE man should die for the people"; and not only that one man should actually die, but (what is far more important) that each man should be ready and WILLING to die in that cause, when the occasion and the need arises. Taken in its larger meanings and implications Sacrifice, as conceived in the ancient world, was a perfectly reasonable thing. It SHOULD pervade modern life more than it does. All we have or enjoy flows from, or is implicated with, pain and suffering in others, and--if there is any justice in Nature or Humanity--it demands an equivalent readiness to suffer on our part. If Christianity has any real essence, that essence is perhaps expressed in some such ritual or practice of Sacrifice, and we see that the dim beginnings of this idea date from the far-back customs of savages coming down from a time anterior to all recorded history.
VIII. PAGAN INITIATIONS AND THE SECOND BIRTH
We have suggested in the last chapter how the conceptions of Sin and Sacrifice coming down to us from an extremely remote past, and embodied among the various peoples of the world sometimes in crude and bloodthirsty
The consciousness then of Sin (or of alienation from the life of the whole), and of restoration or redemption through Sacrifice, seems to have disclosed itself in the human race in very far-back times, and to have symbolized itself in some most ancient rituals; and if we are shocked sometimes at the barbarities which accompanied those rituals, yet we must allow that these barbarities show how intensely the early people felt the solemnity and importance of the whole matter; and we must allow too that the barbarities did sear and burn themselves into rude and ignorant minds with the sense of the NEED of Sacrifice, and with a result perhaps which could not have been compassed in any other way.
For after all we see now that sacrifice is of the very essence of social life. "It is expedient that ONE man should die for the people"; and not only that one man should actually die, but (what is far more important) that each man should be ready and WILLING to die in that cause, when the occasion and the need arises. Taken in its larger meanings and implications Sacrifice, as conceived in the ancient world, was a perfectly reasonable thing. It SHOULD pervade modern life more than it does. All we have or enjoy flows from, or is implicated with, pain and suffering in others, and--if there is any justice in Nature or Humanity--it demands an equivalent readiness to suffer on our part. If Christianity has any real essence, that essence is perhaps expressed in some such ritual or practice of Sacrifice, and we see that the dim beginnings of this idea date from the far-back customs of savages coming down from a time anterior to all recorded history.
VIII. PAGAN INITIATIONS AND THE SECOND BIRTH
We have suggested in the last chapter how the conceptions of Sin and Sacrifice coming down to us from an extremely remote past, and embodied among the various peoples of the world sometimes in crude and bloodthirsty