purchase his favour and the good things he had to give. But the inference, which, when properly limited, has some truth in it, becomes misleading when put forward as being the whole truth. Unless there were some truth in it, the rite of sacrifice could never have developed into the form which was denounced by the Hebrew prophets and mercilessly exposed by Plato. But had that been the whole truth, the rite would have been incapable of discharging the really religious function which it has in its history fulfilled. That function has been to place and maintain the society which practises it in communion with its god. Doubtless in the earliest stages of the history of the rite, the communion thus felt to be established was prized and was mainly sought for the external blessings which were believed {207} to follow from it, or, as a means to avert the public disasters which a breach of communion entailed. Doubtless it was only by degrees, and by slow degrees, that the communion thus established came to be regarded as being in itself the end which the rite of sacrifice was truly intended to attain. But the communion of the worshippers with their god was not a purpose originally foreign to the rite, and which, when introduced, transformed the rite from what it at first was into something radically different. On the contrary, it was present, even though not prominent or predominant, from the beginning; and the rite, as a religious institution, followed different lines of evolution, according as the one aspect or the other was developed. Where the aspect under which the sacrificial rite was regarded was that the offering was a gift made to the deity in order to secure some specified temporal advantage, the religious value of the rite diminished to the vanishing point in the eyes both of those who, like Plato, could see the intrinsic absurdity of pretending to make gifts to Him from whom alone all good things come, and of those who felt that the sacrificial rite so conceived did not afford the spiritual communion for which they yearned. Where even the {208} sacrificial rite was regarded as a means whereby communion between the worshipper and his god was attained or maintained, the emphasis might be thrown on the rite and its due performance rather than on the spiritual communion of which it was the condition. That is to say, with the growth of formalism attention was concentrated on the ritual and correspondingly withdrawn from the prayer which, from the beginning, had been of the essence of the rite. By the rite of sacrifice the community had always been brought into the presence of the god it worshipped; and, in the prayers then offered on behalf of the society, the society had been brought into communion with its god. From that communion it was possible to fall away, even though the performance of the rite was maintained. The very object of that communion might be misinterpreted and mistaken to be a means merely to