Sacrifices were primarily meals offered to the spirits of the dead. It is not hard to understand how they arose. The Hindoos who placed upon the grave of an English officer the brandy and cheroots which he loved in life in order to propitiate his spirit illustrated a prominent aspect. Just as men were appeased with gifts, usually of substances which minister to life, so were spirits supposed to be, and the general form which the offering took was something in the shape of what the Americans call a square meal. The Romans never sat down to eat without placing a portion aside for the Lares and Penates. Professor Smith, in his _Lectures on the Religion of the Semites_, gives abundant evidence that the early sacrifices of the Semitic people were animals offered at a meal partaken by the worshippers. The sacrifice, he holds, was originally a nourishing of the common life of the kindred and their god by a common meal. The primary communion with deity was communion of food. This may not be very poetical, but it is natural and true. Eating and drinking together were primarily signs of fraternity. Only to his own kin did early man own duty, and his god was always of his own kin. Jehovah was, as we are often told, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He was their father and their king. When Ruth said to Naomi, "Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God," the exclamation showed that taking up new kindred involved a change of worship. Professor Smith says: "It cannot be too strongly insisted on that the idea of kinship between gods and men was originally taken in a purely physical sense." The modern Christian's explanations of biblical anthropomorphisms may be dismissed as unfounded assumptions. The story in Genesis of the sons of God going with the daughters of men is one of the remnants of early myths unexplained by later editors.