But there is another mode of sacrifice, superposed upon this, and gradually tending to be more or less identified with it, which yet, if I am right, had a quite different origin in the artificial production of gods about which I have written at considerable length in the last three chapters. The human or animal victim, thus slaughtered in order to make a new god or protecting spirit, came in time to be assimilated in thought to the older type of mere honorific offerings to the dead gods; and so _gave rise to those mystic ideas of the god who is sacrificed, himself to himself, of which the sacrament of the Mass is the final and most mysterious outcome_. Thus, the foundation-gods, originally killed in order to make a protecting spirit for a house or a tribal god for a city or village, came at last to be regarded as victims sacrificed to the Earth Goddess or to the Earth Demons; and thus, too, the Meriahs and other agricultural {320}victims, originally killed in order to make a corn-god or a corn-spirit, came at last to be regarded as sacrifices to the Earth, or to some abstract Dionysus or Attis or Adonis. And since in the last case at least the god and the victim were still called by the same name and recognised as one, there grew up at last in many lands, and in both hemispheres, but especially in the Eastern Mediterranean basin, the mystic theory of the sacrifice of a god, himself to himself, in atonement or expiation, which forms the basis of the Christian Plan of Salvation. It is this secondary and derivative form of sacrifice, I believe, which is mainly considered in Professor Robertson Smith’s elaborate and extremely valuable analysis.