Next to Veneration as a religious function proceeding from the Idea of God comes Sacrifice. If you will look at your own mind and see how the idea of Sacrifice arises in it you will discover that there is in that suggestion essentially the motive of offering a gift; _after_ that (not before it) there may also be a motive of propitiation. There may also come a motive, perhaps, sooner or later, of direct ritual connection between cause and effect: the feeling that a Sacrifice made by you will have a spiritual result. At any rate, the main motive is certainly _offering_. It is so with Sacrifice made for the sake of human beings whom we love or venerate. Still more is it so with Sacrifice to and for the Supreme Power: “I owe you all things: so take back this, yours though it is, in gratitude.” Now, this is a noble and generous emotion; why in Mr. Wells’s account do we only hear of its perversions and especially of its beastliest perversions? The very primitive races among us enjoy that very feeling of owing gratitude; we enjoy it in the full light of revelation. Many men continue to sacrifice all day long. The better they are, the more they do it. It is an essential factor in religion, subsidiary to and derivative from the Idea of God. Now let us proceed to the survival of man after death. It is not true that all primitive men everywhere have been (or are) equally conscious of survival after death and of the immortality of the human spirit. It is still less true to-day that all men in our refined and fatigued civilization are conscious of it. But it is true that some consciousness of it is almost universal in unspoilt men, and that, wherever it exists, it is accompanied by certain natural and almost necessary acts. We find these acts, on examining our own emotions, to be often rather symbolic than positively religious; but they are intricately bound up—whether symbolic (such as putting flowers on a grave or objects into it) or actively religious (such as prayers for and to the dead)—with the conception of survival. If you find that a particular set of men bury their dead with care, deposit with them loved or valuable objects, or objects with which their lives were associated, or even sink to the superstition of sacrificing companions to accompany them into the other world, you may be certain that these people believed in the survival of man.