Sacrifice (religion)

“ Thus we must recognise in the Mosaic sacrifices—the most complete and typical form of the sacrificial idea—the twofold aspect which corresponds to the twofold effect of sin on the human race. There is the offering, sometimes the bloodless offering, by which was typified simply man's dependence on God, his submission to Him, his life derived from Him and therefore rendered back to Him. From this point of view the sacrifice culminated, not in the slaying and offering of the victim, but in the sprinkling of the blood, the 'principle of life,' upon the altar. ”

“ Sacrifices involving slaughter, whether of domestic animals or of human beings, mean more, for they imply that suffering and death are essentially pleasing to Deity. Even when such gross ideas are removed and religion has been purified, the symbolization of sacrifice in most cases takes the place of sacrifice itself. The conception may and often does remain as an actually vital part of religious doctrine that pleasure is offensive to the Supreme Power and pain pleasing. ”

“ They offer up human sacrifices as sin offerings. Whenever the gospel shall be revealed to them they will very easily understand the doctrine of the atonement. They demand a sacrifice or an atonement for almost everything which they consider as an injury. Human sacrifices are offered for the death of their friends, whether they are slain in battle or die a natural death. Their eating human flesh has its origin in superstition. They pay great attention to all the ceremonies of their religion, and are very much afraid of offending their god. ”

“ The essence of religion is sacrifice. St. Paul summed it up in his own inimitable fashion when he said, "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service." ”

“ The origin and meaning of sacrifices constitute a central problem of ancient religion. It links indeed the stronghold of orthodox Christianity—its doctrine of the Atonement—with the most barbarous customs of primitive savages. When we hear of the Lamb slain for sinners, the very phrase takes us back to the time when sins were formally placed upon the heads of unconscious animals that they might be held accursed instead of man; and to the yet older notion of human sacrifice as a most acceptable offering to the gods. ”

“ Thus, sacrifice differs from acts of self-sacrifice such as continence, abstinence, martyrdom, even when they are offered in honor of God, for the direct and proper end of these acts is some other virtue than that of religion. The act of sacrifice may have no purpose except worship, but other virtuous acts have their own ends to make them praiseworthy, even when they are used as acts of worship. ”

“ A Sacrifice is an exterior or visible offering made by a lawful minister to God alone, in testimony of his supreme dominion. Our absolute dependence upon God, and the homage we owe him, render sacrifice essential to religion. ”

“ For when all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort, deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into our only permanent positions of repose. Now in those states of mind which fall short of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an imposition of necessity, and the sacrifice is undergone at the very best without complaint. In the religious life, on the contrary, surrender and sacrifice are positively espoused: ”

“ The propitiatory value, therefore, of the sacrifice of Christ lay in His absolute obedience, in His willing acceptance of suffering which was thereby acknowledged as the due reward of sin, and in the death which was the essential form of both, for death is the culminating point of the alienation from God, which is both sin and its punishment. ”

“ This conception of sin in its twofold aspect of alienation and of guilt, and this idea of sacrifice as effecting man's restoration to union with God, and also as expiating his guilt by suffering, correspond to what the human conscience, when deeply and sincerely investigated, declares to be its inmost secret. ”

“ Here let us notice, as we pass, that no religion is worth the name that has not its sacrifice through which the worshipper expresses his devotion. And in Christian religion the sacrifice is the consecration of the man and of his life to God's service in Christ. ”

“ First, then, I assert that the spirit of sacrifice is necessary. God requires it of us. On this point I think some people make a mistake. They seem to think that a willingness to make sacrifices for God is one of the ornamental or heroic parts of religion, and that everyday people are not required to have it. But this is not so. The Spirit of Sacrifice is required of everyone. I infer this from the fact that an external sacrificial worship is necessary. ”

“ A Sacrifice is that first and highest act of Religion, in which a duly authorized person offers to God some sensible thing which is visibly immolated either physically or mystically, in token and acknowledgment of God's supreme dominion over all things and of our total dependence on Him. ”

“ And every sacrifice His religion calls us to make is designed to secure that enlargement and fulness of spiritual individuality in the exercise of which we shall truly serve God and our fellows. Does God require sacrifice? Yes, unquestionably—the sacrifice which every reasonable being must make in order that the mind, the soul may be strong and free, sacrifice of the lower for the higher, sacrifice of pleasure for truth, of comfort for duty, of the life that is earthly and temporal for the life that is heavenly and eternal. ”

“ The means of that identification without which the prayers of the community would be ineffectual is sacrifice. The earliest form of sacrifice may probably be taken to be the sacrifice of an animal, followed by a sacrificial meal. Later, when the god has a stated place in which he is believed to manifest himself,—tree or temple,—then the identification may be effected by attaching offerings to the tree or temple. ”

“ The appearance of the sacrifice idea in any religion unfailingly detracts from the higher efficacy of true prayer in that men seek to substitute the offerings of material possessions for the offering of their own consecrated wills to the doing of the will of God. ”

“ Deliver me from blood, O God, Thou God of my salvation: and my tongue shall extol Thy justice.
O Lord, Thou wilt open my lips: and my mouth shall declare Thy praise.
For if Thou hadst desired sacrifice, I would indeed have given it: with burnt offerings Thou wilt not be delighted.
A sacrifice to God is an afflicted spirit: a contrite and humble heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.
Deal favourably, O Lord, in Thy good will with Sion: that the walls of Jerusalem may be built up. ”

“ All work, for the Christian, is raised to the level, to the dignity of sacrifice. Once and for all we must rid ourselves of that idea which has wrought so much mischief, that sacrifice necessarily connotes pain, loss, death. Essentially our sacrifice is what essentially Christ’s sacrifice was, the joyous dedication of the will to God, the Source and Light of all our being. ”

“ The scriptural idea, then, of a sacrifice is the offering to God of one life in behalf of another that has been forfeited by sin—the life of the innocent beast instead of the life of the guilty offerer. ”

“ And on the ordinarily accepted view of the origin of sacrifice—which regards it as a gift to propitiate a superior being—this can be easily understood as the avoidance of the worshipper of taking what belongs especially to the god, the essence of the victim’s life, the blood. ”

“ For, however absurd it may seem to us, it is a very widespread custom to sacrifice to a divinity his living representative or incarnation, whether in animal or human form. It is believed in such cases that the victim's spirit, released by sacrifice, forthwith finds a home in another body. ”

“ The barbarous heathen sacrificed their children to their idol-gods, not living, but slain sacrifices: but God will have mercy, and not such sacrifice, though life is forfeited to him. A living sacrifice, that is, inspired with the spiritual life of the soul. It is Christ living in the soul by faith that makes the body a living sacrifice, Gal. ”

“ If these sacrifices, so insignificant, so valueless, and to the eye of man so powerless, were effective for their purpose,—shall not that most marvellous wonder in the whole history of the Godhead, the sacrifice of the Son of God, be effective for His? ”

“ The mercy of God projects the redemption of man from this cruel bondage and oppression; and a sacrifice is appointed for the occasion by God himself, to be offered with particular and significant rites and ceremonies, all of which represent the passion and death of our blessed Lord, and the great end for which he became a sacrifice, viz., the redemption of a lost world from the power, the guilt, and the pollution of sin, etc. ”

“ Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.... To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the Lord. I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts, and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats. When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand? (Is. 1 : 13, 11, 12.)
God Forbids Human Sacrifice. ”

“ The historical sacrifice was a burning-glass which focused the diffused rays of the Sun of righteousness and made them effective in the melting of human hearts. The sufferings of Christ take deepest hold upon us only when we see in them the two contrasted but complementary truths: that holiness must make penalty to follow sin, and that love must share that penalty with the transgressor. ”

“ It is as a sacrifice, a mode of 'mortification,' that obedience is primarily conceived by Catholic writers, a "sacrifice which man offers to God, and of which he is himself both the priest and the victim. By poverty he immolates his exterior possessions; by chastity he immolates his body; by obedience he completes the sacrifice, and gives to God all that he yet holds as his own, his two most precious goods, his intellect and his will. The sacrifice is then complete and unreserved, a genuine holocaust, for the entire victim is now consumed for the honor of God." ”

“ They have been deeply colored by mythology and by the crude ideas of primitive sacrifice. They start, not with the idea of God which Christ has revealed, but with a capricious sovereign, angry at sorely tempted, sinning man, and forgiving only after a sacrifice has satisfied Him. They treat sin not as a fact of experience, but as the result of an ancestral fall, which piled up an infinite debt against the race. ”

“ I believe that immeasurable mischief has been wrought by the ceaseless repetition for the last two thousand years of the formula: "Not through any merit of mine shall I enter heaven, but through the sacrifice of Christ."—Not through the sacrifice of Christ, nor any other sacrifice, shall any one attain strength, save in so far as he takes the spirit and the purpose of the sacrifice into his own life and lives it. ”

“ In view of one of its prominent features in the more highly developed cults, sacrifice is usually regarded as a gift to the deity, and the various meanings that a gift may have are then simply held to apply to sacrifice itself. Accordingly, the purpose of sacrifice is limited either to disposing the god favourably toward the sacrificing individual or community, or to obtaining forgiveness for committed sins. ”

“ Because it is sacred, and death for it is akin to the sacrifice on Calvary, following far off but constant to that divine example, in every generation our best and bravest have died. Sometimes in our grief we cry out foolish and unthinking words: "the sacrifice is too great." ”

“ But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance again made of sins every year. For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins. Wherefore, when he cometh into the world, he saith: Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared me: in burnt-offerings and sacrifices for sin thou hast had no pleasure. ”

“ Man had sinned, had fallen, and was shut up in the prison-house of sin. His sins [358] were of such a nature that no sacrifice was adequate but the sacrifice of Him to whom the Father had said, “Let us make man.” The death of an angel was not sufficient. He only who engaged with the Father in the formation of man, constitutes a sufficient sacrifice to open the door of hope by which he might find pardon, and be saved. ”

“ Thus man himself, consecrated in the name of God, and vowed to God, is a sacrifice in so far as he dies to the world that he may live to God. For this is a part of that mercy which each man shows to himself; as it is written, "Have mercy on thy soul by pleasing God." [387] Our body, too, is a sacrifice when we chasten it by temperance, if we do so as we ought, for God's sake, that we may not yield our members instruments of unrighteousness unto sin, but instruments of righteousness unto God. ”

“ When one was drowned or died of cold, a feast was called, and the soft parts of the corpse were cut from the bones and burned to conciliate the personal god, while the women danced and chanted a melancholy strain. Here one sacrifice was to curry favor with the gods, another to soothe their anger, and the third was a rite, not a sacrifice, but done for a religious end, whose merit was specific performance. ”

“ An offering made to God. In strictness of speech, there has been but one sacrifice, once offered, and never to be repeated, the sacrifice of the death of our Lord Jesus Christ. He suffered death upon the cross for our redemption, and there, by the one oblation of himself, once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world, was once made, and once for all. (See Covenant of Redemption.) But, figuratively speaking, all Divine worship was anciently called a sacrifice—a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving ”