Ancestor-worship is not encouraged; family rites continued, but the worship was wider than the family, and was not restricted to particular places. The ideas connected with sacrifice are not indeed very lofty. Sacrifice is, in the first place, barter. Gifts are provided for the gods, that they may give in their turn. In the second place it is a social function in which the god and the worshipper both take part. The food, and especially the soma, strengthens the god, and man and god are thereby drawn into close sympathy. But in the third place sacrifice was a piece of magic. The mere accurate performance of the rite had a mystic efficacy. It was believed to help to uphold the order of the world; without it the gods would grow weak, the ordinances of nature would fail, and man would relapse to the state of savagery. The gods themselves first sacrificed; from sacrifice they themselves were born, so that sacrifice is an essential principle of the universe, was so in the beginning, and must always be so. The Vedic leaders of religion, therefore, were not merely champions of enlightenment in religion; they were also ritualists, the rite was to them an end in itself; the proper performance of sacrifice was their principal object. This side of their work had, as we shall see, grave consequences. But the Rigveda did a great work for India in cultivating gods who were moral, and to whom man was drawn by higher than selfish motives. Gods who are just and who watch man's conduct, and do not fail to reward him according to his deeds, must quicken the conscience of those who believe in them, and gods who are able to help the weak and to forgive the penitent must make their people also merciful. In all the aberrations of Indian religion the high moral standard set by the Vedic gods is never lost sight of.