Should no one around us tell what this element is, we must go back to the past. The first Commandment, in its positive form, is: “The Lord thy God thou shalt adore, and him only shalt thou serve.” In what essentially does this adoration and service consist?
If we open the two oldest books we have—the Bible, record of a people who preserved their faith in God; Homer, describing the life of a nation fallen so early into idolatry that it preserved no tradition of the time when the unity of God was acknowledged—if we open these to see what in the earliest ages constituted divine worship, we find the answer clear and plain—Sacrifice.
Leave the shores of the Mediterranean, strike to India, China, the islands of the Pacific, and ask what constitutes public worship, the answer still is, Sacrifice. Reach the western shores of America, question every tribe, from the more savage nomads of the north and south to the more cultured Aztecs, to the subjects of the Incas, and the answer never varies; it is, Sacrifice.
Cross the Atlantic as you crossed the Pacific, the Celts of the Isles and of Gaul, Scandinavian and [pg 325] German, repeat the burden, Sacrifice, till you come again to the tents of the patriarchs on the plains of the Euphrates or Jordan.
And what was sacrifice? A rite cruel, repugnant to all our ideas—one that could not spring from man himself. It was the offering of an inferior life to the offended Deity as a substitute for man's life forfeited by sin—a substitute deriving its value from a human life that was one day to appease the Almighty absolutely.
The whole system is strange, yet the whole is universal. Before man slew the beasts of the field for food, he slew them on the altar. Not Cain, unaccepted of God, offers this bloody sacrifice. Doubly the type of sinful man—sinful by descent and by act—Cain offers the fruits of the earth—badge of sin and toil and sweat of brow; while Abel, pure and gentle, slays the lamb that gambols affectionately around him—slays it to find favor with a God of love. It could not have entered into the heart of man to conceive this. Nothing less than a primitive revelation and command can explain sacrifice—that offering of domestic animals as a type of the great atoning sacrifice of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.
No matter how widely removed from the original seat of the race, no matter how low in the grade of civilization, every known tribe on earth has a worship and has sacrifices. The red men of our own land were long considered as an anomaly in this respect; but they really had the whole idea of sacrifice. One example will show it. When F. Jogues, the pioneer priest of New York, was taken by the Mohawks in 1642, and reduced to the condition of a slave, he attended a hunting party of the tribe. Ill success in war and hunt had befallen the Mohawks, and, ascribing it to their offended deity, they offered to this demon Aireskoi two bears with this prayer: “Justly dost thou punish us, O demon Aireskoi!... We have sinned against thee, in that we ate not the last captives thrown into our hands; but if we shall ever again capture any, we promise to devour them as we now consume these two bears”—recognizing the idea of substitution and the efficacy of human blood as the great means of reconciliation. And the missionary, to his horror, saw two women sacrificed and eaten in fulfilment of this vow.
While the temple of Jerusalem stood, the Greek, the Roman, the Egyptian, the Gaul, and the German would, on entering, have seen naught removed from their ideas in the sacrifice offered. They might have wondered at the size and beauty of the temple, the rich vestments of the sons of Aaron; they might have been filled with awe at the absence of the image of the deity worshipped there so grandly; but in the great rite of sacrifice, there was nothing that was not familiar to them. In this the pagan nations were still in harmony with the divine institution; and in default of the Mosaic revelation, its appositeness could be proved by the common consent of mankind in a matter inexplicable except on the supposition of a primitive revelation.
The nearer and more striking the resemblance between the pagan sacrifices and those of the people of God, the greater the evidence they bear to corroborate it. Error may be old, but truth is older.
What, then, is the meaning of [pg 326] this ancient worship? The answer is plain: “Jesus Christ, yesterday and to-day and for ever”—“the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world,” whose death was, when once accomplished in act, to be thenceforward shown forth until he came.