THE MEANING OF SACRIFICE.
From the beginning men have felt, even when they have not comprehended, the necessity of sacrifice. They have misunderstood and distorted its significance; they have even reversed its meaning and interpreted it as an arbitrary requirement of God, who exacted from His creatures that which He was not willing to do for them; they have stained countless altars with blood, and painfully elaborated systems of thought to make the reversal of the divine fact of sacrifice comprehensible and creditable. But in ritual and creed religion has instinctively fastened upon this great idea as central and fundamental in the relations of the human with the divine, and silently, in every age, sacrifice has shown its true nature. A few spirits in every time have discerned that it is not an arbitrary requirement, but the very heart of that divine process of growth which we call life, the beautiful and constant witness of the divine sonship of the race. And in the fulness of time God appeared among men in a human form; not as supreme and sovereign, with angels about Him, and nature breaking into songs of recognition, and men reverent and obedient and worshipful; but acquainted with grief, rejected, bruised, smitten, and crucified; the sublime revelation, which could never have issued from the mind of man, of a suffering God, redeeming the race, not from His own wrath, but from its sins, by the eternal sacrifice.