[Footnote 250: See Moore, _loc. cit._ col. 4229 _sqq._] It is said that, according to early ideas, "it did not essentially concern divine justice that the punishment of faults committed should fall precisely on the guilty; what did concern it was that it should fall on some one, that it should have its accomplishment."[251] Men, we are told, could not fail to discern that a transgression produces suffering as its consequence, and, seeing this, they "associate suffering with the expiation of sin, and, in atoning for their transgressions, they mark their contrition by the suffering which they inflict vicariously on the victim. They argue thus: 'I have broken a law of God. God exacts pain as a consequence of such a breach. I will therefore slay this lamb, and its sufferings shall make the atonement requisite.'"[252] But, so far as I can see, this interpretation of the idea of vicarious expiation is not supported by facts. The victim whose suffering or death is calculated to appease the wrathful god is not anybody {68} at random, whosoever he may be. He is a representative of the community which has incurred the anger of the god, and is accepted as a substitute on the principle of social solidarity. So, also, according to the Western Church, Christ discharged the punishment due to the sins of mankind and propitiated the justice of his Father, in his capacity of a man, as a representative of the human race; whereas in the East, where it was maintained that the _deity_ suffered (though he suffered through the human nature which he had made his own), the idea of substitution could hardly take root, since, as Harnack remarks, "the dying _God_-man really represented no one."[253] The Greek Church regarded the death of Christ as a ransom for mankind paid to the devil, and this doctrine was also accepted by the most important of the Western Fathers, although it flatly contradicted their own theory of atonement.[254] There can be no doubt that expiatory sacrifices are frequently offered as ransoms, in other words, that the god or demon is supposed to be appeased, not by the suffering of the victim, but by the gift. Among men it often occurs that the offended party is induced by some material compensation to desist from avenging the injury--in many societies such placability is even prescribed by custom,--and something similar is naturally believed to be the case with gods. From this point of view, of course, it is not necessary that the victim should be a person who is connected with the offender by ties of social solidarity, although he may still be regarded as in a way a substitute. He may be an alien or a slave; or animals or inanimate things may be offered to expiate the sins of men. Among the Dacotahs, "for the expiation of sins or crimes a sacrifice is made of some kind of an animal."[255] Of the Melanesian sacrifices, says Dr. Codrington, "some are propitiatory, substituting an animal for the person who has