+The Day of Atonement.+--There was one great day in the Jewish religious year called the Day of Atonement, when a special ritual was gone through and special offerings made to God on account of the sins of the people as a whole. The ceremonial was very elaborate and the occasion was observed with great solemnity by the whole nation. As described in the Old Testament the prescriptions for this Day of Atonement, the Good Friday of the Levitical system as it has been called, probably owe a good deal to Babylonian influences. It should be remembered that the outstanding event in later Jewish history was the carrying away of the flower of the nation by Nebuchadnezzar into Babylon, where they remained for more than two generations. It is quite likely that, in spite of their exclusiveness and their hatred of their conquerors, the Jews may have borrowed some of their religious ritual from the Babylonians, but, whether they did or not, the ideas underlying their respective modes of worship were much the same. Primitive religious sacrifice among Semitic peoples appears to have been mainly of a joyous character; worship and sacrifice went hand in hand. The worshippers were accustomed to offer to their gods sacrifices of everything which the votaries themselves valued,--the fruits of the earth, their material possessions, their flocks and herds, the prisoners they had taken in war, and occasionally even the children of their own body. It was only on great and solemn occasions, such as the necessity for staying a pestilence, or averting defeat in war, that the offering of the more terrible kinds of sacrifice was made. It would be instructive, therefore, for us to inquire what were the underlying ideas assumed in Semitic religious sacrifice.