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SAVIORS.

In the first chapter of Matthew, at the twenty-first verse, you will find these words, "Thou shalt call his name Jesus," "Jesus" translated means Savior,-" for he shall save his people from their sins."

But, as

All nations, all religions, have had their Saviors. we study them, we find that the beliefs concerning what men need to be saved from, and how this salvation is to be accomplished, have been widely divergent. We find still further that, even in the same religion concerning the same supposed Savior, the same ideal has not continued. The thought of the people has changed concerning the nature, the office, the work of the Savior, in accordance with the intellectual, moral, and spiritual development of the people. We shall find this point clearly illustrated when a little later we come to consider what people have believed concerning Jesus.

From the beginning of the world, as men have looked over human life, the evils that afflict us have been patent and observable. Men have suffered from physical pain; they have had mental sorrows. There have been hunger and want of every kind,— disease, vice, crime, death. These have always existed; and men have always of necessity had some theory in the light of which they have accounted for them.

It is inevitable that men should have asked: "Why do I suffer? Why do pain and sorrow and moral evil, want and vice and crime, exist?" And, when we consider the mental condition of early men, the answer which they gave to their own questions was the most natural one in the

world; and yet it was a magical, a supernatural answer. Men believed, and they could not have believed otherwise, that they were surrounded on every hand by invisible beings who were able to help or hurt them as they pleased. And they have supposed that these beings were some of them friendly, some of them hostile, some of them perhaps fickle and changeable, now on good terms with them and now opposed, according to conditions. And they have believed that all these evils were brought upon them by these invisible powers.

A study of early man, for example, shows us what we should not have supposed before that study, that death itself even has never been regarded as a natural thing. It has been hard for them to believe that men must die. And, when a man has died, instead of supposing that it was the necessary result of some inevitable, natural cause, they have always believed that some enemy has killed him. If that enemy was not visible, then invisible,- some spiritual being. This in illustration of the universal fact that they have attributed the existence of all these evils to hostile spirits in the Unseen.

Now you will readily see that the method by which they would attempt to be free from these evils would naturally be determined by their theory as to the cause of them. They were caused by the enmity of invisible beings. The thing to do then, of course, is to win the friendship, the good will, of these invisible people.

No other method would even occur to them; for they knew nothing of what we mean by nature, natural forces, natural laws. How, then, would they proceed? Naturally, they would proceed as we know they did. They attempted to bring to these invisible beings such offerings as they supposed they would desire, that they might win their regard. And as the first great want of man pressing upon him with a force in those early times that it is impossible for us now to conceive — was the satisfaction of hunger. And we

know that they believed that these invisible spirits needed food. They ate the spiritual counterpart of the visible thing which was the supply of their own needs. And so modern research has revealed to us what has been known but for a little while, that the earliest idea of sacrifice was that of a common meal partaken of by the god and his worshippers together. They brought some animal, sacrificed it, poured out the blood upon the altar; and it was believed that the god communed with them as a partaker in this common meal.

And just as you find among the Arabs, for example, to-day, that, if they have eaten with even an enemy, they feel held in bonds of amity for at least a time, so it was supposed by these early ancestors of ours that, when they ate with the god, it was a sacrament by which they were bound to obedience and service; and the god was equally bound to friendship and protection. This was the early idea of sacrifice.

But change comes over all these ideas as men themselves change and develop. So by and by, instead of its being simply a common meal, it was a gift to the god; and they came not only to bring him food, but anything else which they supposed he might desire. And then there entered in at last, not simply the offering of a gift, but the sacrificial deed. It was a victim, offered to please or placate the supposed anger of the invisible Being; and, naturally, this underwent a transformation until people came to feel that the finer, the more precious the victim, the more power over the invisible deities. And so there arose not only the offering of food, gifts of one kind and another, not only the slaying of animals, but human sacrifice,- not originating, as you might suppose, in human cruelty, but simply in the desire of the worshipper to bring to his god the most precious victim that he could imagine, supposing thus that he would obtain special favor from the deity.

We find this illustrated in that wonderful poem of Tenny

son's, which I advise you all to read, "The Victim." There is an effort on the part of the priests to find out which is dearer to the king, the wife or their son; for the dearest must be slain. And at last he shows such devoted love for his wife that the priests make up their mind that she is the more precious offering, and seize upon her and offer her to the gods. So the idea of human sacrifice arose out of this thought that, the more precious the victim, the more power over the god. So in every nation all over the world you will find sacrificed Saviors. Our own Christ is not by any means the only one. In ancient India, Krishna, and Vishnu; in ancient Greece, Prometheus; in Egypt, Osiris; in countries of this world, among the primitive peoples here on this new continent, everywhere out of the same natural ideas have sprung this natural growth.

Not only human sacrifices, but by and by, in the case of Prometheus, Osiris, and Vishnu, divine or semi-divine beings offered, sometimes to appease the wrath of the gods, sometimes a willing victim, testifying to the love of him who was devoted to humanity.

But by and by, as civilization advances, ideas of this sort are more or less outgrown; and we see the great religions of the world develop. Among the people, in the popular religion, all these ideas that I have spoken of still holding the imaginations of the heart, but at the same time philosophical schemes as to the meaning of the universe, the origin, and condition of man, and his needs, growing up. As, for instance, merely to point them out as I pass, in China we find the work of Confucius. Confucius does not claim to know anything about the gods or any other world. He says frankly, "Why, when I do not know the meaning of this, should I try to explain any other?" But he teaches that men are naturally good, and that it is only conditions, environments, that call out and develop evil in them. So he says, If we only have before us fine models, if we keep alive the traditions of the