This idea, I take it, is not primitive. Sin must be regarded as a late ethical intruder into the domain of religion. Early man for the most part takes his gods joyously. He is on the best of terms with them. He eats and drinks and carouses in their presence. They join in his phallic and bacchanalian orgies. They are not great moral censors, like the noble creation of the Hebrew prophets, “of purer eyes than to behold iniquity.” They are creatures of like passions and failings with himself,--dear ancestors and friends, ever ready to overlook small human frailties like murder or rapine, but exercising a fatherly care for the most part over the lives and fortunes of their descendants or tribesmen. Angry they may be at times, {348}no doubt; but their anger as a rule can be easily assuaged by a human victim, or by the blood of slaughtered goats and bulls. Under normal circumstances, they are familiar housemates. Their skulls or images adorn the hearth. They assist at the family and domestic feasts; and they lick up the offerings of blood or wine made to them with a smiling countenance. In short, they are average members of the tribe, gone before to the spirit-world; and they continue to share without pride or asceticism in the joys and feasts and merry-makings of their relatives. Thus the idea of expiation, save as a passing appeasement for a temporary tiff, did not probably occur in the very earliest and most primitive religions. It is only later, as ethical ideas begin to obtrude themselves into the sacred cycle, that the notion of sin, which is primarily that of an offence against the established etiquette of the gods, makes itself slowly visible. In many cases, later glosses seem to put a piacular sense upon what was in its origin by obvious analogy a mere practical god-making and godslaying ceremony. But in more consciously philosophic stages of religion this idea of atonement gains ground so fast that it almost swallows up the earlier conception of communion or feasting together. Sacrifice is then chiefly conceived of as a piacular offering to a justly offended or estranged deity; this is the form of belief which we find almost everywhere meeting us in the hecatombs of the Homeric poems, as in many works of Hellenic and Semitic literature.