dissolving all distinctions. The most elaborate expression of this type of sacrifice was perhaps the Dionysian cult. In contrast with this, the Zebach, or sin-offering, involves the killing of an animal, the shedding of blood; and it is significant that with this latter sacrificial custom the father image seems to have been habitually associated.

Freud, moreover, doubtless errs in thinking of the origin of the blood sacrifice as an actual event. It need have been no more than a wish commonly felt, which came to be expressed in symbolic form. But the sacrifice, as we shall see later, is a method of reconciliation of antipathy to the father, with a wish to be like him-one with him. We are often told that the sacrifice is designed to propitiate the Father by the giving up of something to him. There is more in it than this. It is a "mystery," a dreadful and solemn rite. The Hebrews in the great sin offering at "Yom Kippur" slew a bull, and the bull was, in all probability, once the symbol of Jehovah, the Father. It is said that "without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin." When we contemplate the Christian idea of the sacrificial death of Christ, it is significant that the Christ of the

Fourth Gospel says, "I and my Father are one." The eating of the bread and the drinking of the sacramental wine are still spoken of as partaking of the body and the blood of the Lord. Surely there are elements in this sacramental rite which must be very old, and stand as symbols of things in us which do not emerge into the believer's full consciousness.

As the primitive father passes in the course of human progress out of actual experience and a more ideal father image stands as an appreciation of deity, the cruder forms of sacrificial ceremony tend to be discontinued. But though reconciliation with the father through sacrificial ritual persists, more inward and "spiritual" modes of reconciliation are sought. The primitive wish for the death of the father, and for his continued existence as renewal of life and strength in the sons, recedes into the dim background of forgotten racial tradition. Only vestiges of the idea remain to give traditional setting to the ever-present wish for reconciliation to an image which is necessary for orientation to this world, yet is reminiscent of many emotional conflicts. What the religious interest strives to do is to preserve intact an infantile image of the ideal father, perfect and "pure"

and sinless, and at the same time render this image tolerant and "forgiving" of the exist ence in the believer of the very "sinful nature" in himself which his infantile egoism struck out of the image of the perfect one. Hence, psychologically speaking, reconciliation with the father means reconciliation of our infantile jealousy with the fact of our own maturity.

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V

Sin and Redemption

ECONCILIATION with the father image is the great quest of the religious spirit. St. Paul speaks of the Christian Gospel as a "ministry of reconciliation," knowing well that his Corinthian readers would recognize the longing for which he brought them a message of satisfaction. The story of the "prodigal son" returning to his father's house has universal appeal, and the figure of the Christ on the cross offering his life for the sins of the world, that men might be reconciled to the father, is a symbol of the central fact of religious experience, Christian and non-Christian alike. The psyche, having created for itself the ideal father image, seeks a return to a lost sense of peace and love from which it feels itself shut off by the contrast between the "purity" of the restored infantile ideal of the parent and the facts of its own nature. Hence the natural man is "at enmity" with God.

The reconciliation so sought appears to consciousness as the need of the Father's love. Unconsciously, it is a need which arises out of the believer's own difficulty in loving his father. This fact sometimes appears in the "confessions" of religious people who say that before conversion they did not love God and were miserable.

"I was a wandering sheep,

I did not love the fold;

I did not love my Shepherd's voice,
I would not be controlled."

Beneath this conflict with the father image we have discovered the conflict between the infantile ego to which return is sought and the mature self-feeling. The former contains impulses and desires which the latter has learned to repress because they are anti-social; they have been given the "bad conscience." The latter is in conflict with the father ideal which the religious interest revives and uses as a symbol of Deity. Out of this conflict grows the sense of sin. The function of religion is therefore escape from sin.

From the standpoint of psychology we may regard Christianity as first of all a device for ridding the ego of that feeling of inferiority