Section LXXVIII. The Inner Revelation and the Conscience. (Concl'd) · SECTION CXVII.

2. The negating and rather virtual phase of the service of God, is the actual or symbolical manifesting of the real or conditional of earthly things and relations, as contrasted with God or with the God-loving, pious state of the heart, namely, in sacrifice, the essence of which is self-denial or renunciation. In the unfallen state of man sacrifice consists essentially simply in a free giving-up of that which is naturally pleasurable, out of regard to the divine will and far the sake of the higher good, the moral end; hence it consists in the subordinating and giving up of earthly desire. The appropriating of the divine requires the rejection of all that is ungodly, and therein the person accomplishes, at the same time, a high moral culture of himself.

As contrasted with the highest good and with God, every thing finite appears as relatively empty and void; the actual manifesting of this nullity, out of love to the divine, is sacrifice,—a notion that is fundamental to all religions, and that constitutes the focal point of all religious life, and which is still recognizable even in the most utter perversions of the truth. There is no love without sacrifice; the higher the love, so much the higher the readiness to sacrifice for the sake of the beloved; sacrifice is the test of love; maternal love sacrifices repose and enjoyment for the sake of the child; this is not figurative language,—the sacrifice is real and true. As God’s highest love expresses itself in the giving up of his Son, so man’s love to God is manifested in the sacrificing of that to the enjoyment of which man has in general a right. As, however, in the sinless state of humanity, there would exist no really untrue and vain object from which man would have actually to turn away in moral abhorrence, but only a merely relatively such, namely, the merely natural and transitory as in contradistinction to the spiritual, hence in this case sacrifice would not consist in the destruction of an entity, but in the renunciation of an enjoyment, an abstaining from the merely . In the interest of his spiritual freedom, of his moral growth, man is not to give himself over to nature, but must by obedience renounce some degree of the enjoyment of nature and of his personal discretion. He is to sacrifice whatever tempts him from God, whatever binds him to the merely natural or to the non-divine; also of unfallen man it was required that he should realize his spiritual freedom by the free renunciation of a merely natural enjoyment. Christ’s fasting in the wilderness was not a part of his self-sacrifice, and yet it was a sacrifice on the part of the Son of man, even as was also required of unfallen man. In yielding himself to enjoyment without moral discrimination, man loses hold on the spiritual; lie must renounce in order to be free. In the unfallen state sacrifice has essentially an educative end and a symbolical form. God certainly did not forbid man to eat of the designated tree because it was a bad tree, for to sinless beings there could be nothing evil in the entire circle of God-made nature; but in his educative wisdom, God required of man a sacrifice, for the simple reason that no moral life is possible without self-restraint, no religious life without sacrifice. Man stands in the presence of nature and God, both are good; but nature is a created object and may not be placed on an equal footing with God. When man enjoys nature for its own sake and without reference to God, he sins; for he ought to belong, not to nature, but to God. Hence he should recognize, and manifest in moral acts, the truth that nature per se is not the true being and the true goal of moral aspiration, namely, the highest good, but only a means to this end. Hence his moral relation to nature and to the sensuous, is, as in contrast to his relation to God, of a negative character. This “no” in regard to nature, man pronounces morally when he subordinates his relation to nature to his higher relation to God, when he says to sensuous desire: “Thou mayest not, shalt not absorb and dominate my thinking and willing;” he must freely hold in check the merely sensuous, for the sake of the spiritual,—must restrain himself from the former in order that he may possess and perfect himself as a moral spirit, and that he may rise to spiritual-mindedness.

It is the antagonism of the spirit to the flesh that lies at the basis of sacrifice; in the interest of the spiritual, the spirit sacrifices the fleshly. Also man as normal and not yet sinful, had to crucify his flesh with the affections and lusts thereof [Gal. v, 24], although this flesh and its desires were not yet immoral; but to have sought the flesh as an end, as a good, would have been sinful; and God put upon him a requirement of abnegation in order that he might recognize and actually learn this fact,—that he might break away from the merely sensuous, and develop in himself the image of God. Simple obedience to this requirement, without a why or , was the purest and best of sacrifices. This Paradisaical germ of all sacrifice is, therefore, self-denial in obedience to God, a renouncing not a destroying, a giving up, out of love to the spirit, of that which is dear to the flesh; and this idea pervades all forms of sacrifice, even the emphatic sin-offering; only that which is dear to man can be to him a sacrifice; and because of the simple fact that the first man would not bring the light sacrifice required of him, it became necessary for him afterward to make severer ones; and from the hour of the fall and thenceforth the morally-religious consciousness of humanity finds satisfaction only in a series of progressively more violent and more terrible sacrifices, culminating in the offering of human victims, and that too not merely among the rude, but even among the most civilized of nations.

In the idea of sacrifice it is always implied that that which the person gives up is per se good and right, that primarily lie has a right to its enjoyment, but that he gives it up for the sake of a higher end; to give up that which is per se bad, is not to sacrifice; the offering that was presented to Jehovah had to be pure and spotless; and the worth of the sacrifice rises with the worth of the object offered. Thus, sensuous enjoyment is per se good, but it must be restrained and limited, and often refused, in order that not it but the rational spirit may be the master. But man has also to bring, in the interest of the moral, purely spiritual sacrifices. It was not the sensuous per se that was the temptation to Eve, but the representation made to her that the tree would render her “wise;” it was her duty, as it is the duty of man in general, to renounce the desire of obtaining from the creature that wisdom which only God can impart—which can be learned only in believing obedience to God.

The sacrifice that was required of unfallen man implied in its renunciation at the same time, a confession, namely, to God as the highest good and the highest love, and this again implied thankfulness for the love received in communion with God. Inasmuch as every good gift is from God hence the thank-offering of the believer can only be symbolical, expressive of his readiness to give up in the interest of the eternal even that which is dearest of all to him, in the consciousness that in the communion with God for whom it is given up, the real and true life is in fact preserved; in the none is to appear empty [Exod. xxiii, 15; xxxiv, 20].

Sacrifice appears in the Old Testament in its more definite form as early as in the case of Cain and Abel; we find no indication of its express institution by God; and we might therefore regard it as an immediate and natural expression of the religious consciousness; however, a positive divine prescription is the more probable. It is certainly not probable that sacrifice was first made from a consciousness of guilt; the offerings of Cain and Abel, consisting of the products of the field and of the flock, seem rather to be thank-offerings than sin-offerings; Abel’s bloody offering is expressly designated [Gen. iv, 4] by the word minchah (present, gift) by which are subsequently designated the bloodless thank-offerings in contradistinction to the bloody, and, for the most part, offerings, namely, the sebachim; the offering of Noah appears expressly as a thank-offering [viii, 20] The burning up of the material of the sacrifice signifies the renunciation and the eradication of the earthly desires of him who sacrifices; the pure heavenward-mounting sacrificial flame symbolizes the exaltation of the heart from the earthly to the heavenly,—the union with God. Thus sacrifice becomes a symbol of the alliance of man with God; and in the case of Noah and the patriarchs, a sign of the , and hence also a sign of the union of the Israelites who escaped from Egypt, into one people [Exod. iii, 12]. And, therefore, subsequently in the fully-developed sacrificial service of a sinful people, the essence of the sacrifice was in fact not placed in the outward rite, but in the submission of the heart, in the renunciation of an earthly self-seeking mind, in the complete giving up of all earthly love for God’s sake [Gen. xxii, 16]; obedience is better than [outward] sacrifice; God-pleasing sacrifices are a broken spirit and a heart, and “to do justice and judgment is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice” [1 Sam. xv, 22; Psa. xl, 6; 1, 8-15; li, 16, 17, 18; Hos. vi, 6; Eccl. iv, 17; Prov. xxi, 3, 27; Isa. i, 11; Jer. vi, 20; comp. Matt. ix, 13; xii, 7; Mark xii, 33]. In the case of the very first sacrifices God warns man against the error of supposing that the essence of the sacrifice lies in the outward act; Abel’s offering He graciously accepts, that of Cain He disregards. Sacrifice is an appropriating of the divine, inasmuch as in the turning away from the non-divine there is necessarily implied a turning to the divine.