PRAYER.) (b) Sacrifice.—Sacrifice springs from a deep-rooted impulse of the religious nature. It plays a part in early religion, and is present in some form in all the higher religions. The purpose of sacrifice is to maintain and strengthen, or to restore, fellowship with divine powers, and it takes a central place in the cultus. In the burnt-offering the sacrifice is wafted to the gods. In the bloody offering the victim, through contact with the altar, be comes charged with the sacred, and its sprinkled blood has aton ing virtue. The idea of substitutionary atonement is later and is due to reflection. In sacrifices of purification and atonement there is an ethical element which may lead to the higher development of religion. Just as with prayer, however, sacrifice may evolve in a way which is detrimental to the religious relation. What lifts sacrifice to an ethical and spiritual level is the conception of the righteousness of God. Where this obtains it is the inner side of the sacrificial act which is emphasised, the offering of the contrite heart and the obedient will. (See SACRIFICE.) The ritual aspect of religion tends to grow with the increasing complexity of the social order. When this tendency prevails religion takes on the specific character of legal observance.
(I) Religions of Observance and Law.—The idea of fixed ob servances or rules binding on the faithful develops where the idea of ritual purity is emphasised. The roots of the conception of the clean and unclean go back to primitive ideas of the sacred and of the dangerous with the associated apotropaic rites of expul sion. The growth of a sacral system leads to the fuller definition of the clean and unclean, and rules and forms are prescribed to preserve purity and remove impurity. In many higher religions there are detailed methods and a ritual of cleansing. In Roman religion we have lustration, which combined cathartic and apo tropaic rites, and in Greece cathartic rites were specially con nected with Apollo, the god of ritual purity. It is, however, in later Persian religion that rites of purification receive the most comprehensive and detailed expression, and nowhere is the notion of purity so dominant and pervasive. To all the numerous defile ments that are possible correspond stated cleansings, and the Vendidad itself has been described as a kind of sin-codex. With this we may compare the laws of purity and impurity in the book of Leviticus, a book which embodies the cathartic ritual of post Exilic Judaism. When a higher religion has developed a compli
cated system of ritual observance it brings the sense of the sacred into close and constant relation with the varied details of life. On the other hand, the religion itself is exposed to great dangers. The magical beliefs, which are a heritage of older religion, always tend to reassert themselves, and the religious rites readily degen erate to a mechanical performance which has intrinsic efficacy. When this happens the way to spiritual development is closed, and the later Persian and Jewish religions did not wholly escape the danger.
(2) Prophetic Religion.—Religion as piety has its centre within. The prophetic spirit proclaims this principle, and is itself the issue of personal and moral conviction. The prophet turns from the formal and external side of religion to emphasize its inner life, and when such a movement appears within a national religion it involves a loosening of religion from the social and political system. Great religious reforms and renewals arise from an indi vidual or individuals for whom religion has become an intense and personal concern. Such a prophetic figure was Zarathustra. As we picture him from the Gathas he was a man of burning convic tion, for whom Ahura Mazda was a supreme and moral deity whose cause is the right as against the lie. In this conflict the prophet calls men to fight and freely to choose the good. A like intense moral conviction and faith in the righteousness of Jahveh appears in the eighth century prophets of Israel linked with an even greater stress on the inner side of piety. The same note recurs in the teaching of Jesus that the vision of God is for the pure in heart.
It is curious to find an emphasis on the inner side of religion appearing within Hinduism. It emerges in the doctrine of Bhakti which has its classical expression in the Bhagavad Gita. Here we have the doctrine that trust and devotion, faith and love, to the divine power are a means of salvation. Religion assumes a personal colour. With Buddha this principle appears in the form of an extreme subjectivism. Within man himself lies the secret of salvation.
The work of the prophetic spirit makes possible the high stages of spiritual religion. Apart from its vivifying influence institu tional religion tends to grow formal and fixed, and its inner life to ebb. "Where there is no vision the people perish." The up rising of the prophet is a token that a religion which seems dead has still within it the springs of life.