Note 8 — THE ATONEMENT.

It has been shown by Robertson Smith and others that the Hebrews thought of sacrifice not as a gift to appease Jehovah but as a sharing of a common meal with him. Such a lofty view of sacrifice is surely not primitive. When sacrifice had come to be thought of, as of a common meal, it had already been purified and transformed by centuries of development and the heightening presupposes a series of unnamed prophets before the list of great revealers whose names we know. In the earliest stages religion is only very slightly ethical. The moralization of religion is one of the most tremendous facts of human history.