Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/291

exceed all that we can understand, but likewise all that we could desire or imagine.

In the course of successive generations, traditions gradually became changed and obscured in the memory and understanding of men. God, in his infinite wisdom, did not permit that all remembrance of these great biblical traditions should be effaced; but in the midst of the ceaseless agitation in which the nations were plunged who were always at war with each other, and who all lay prostrate at the feet of their 1dols, these reminiscences became more and more indistinct, until they were nothing more than uncertain and confused impressions. It was then that, from the vague idea of a primitive fault transmitted through the blood, men deduced the consequence that it was necessary to offer the blood of man as a sacrifice to God. Then sacrifice ceased to be symbolical and became real; but as in the divine design, the sacrifice of the Redeemer was alone efficacious, so these human sacrifices were of no avail. These sacrifices, however, imperfect and inefficacious as they were, virtually comprised, on the one hand, the dogmas of original sin and of its transmission, with the dogma of solidarity, and on the other hand, the dogma of reversibility and that of substitution—although their unworthiness prevented them from symbolizing either the true substitution or the true substitute.

When the ancients sought an innocent and spotless victim, and conducted it to the altar crowned with flowers, in order that by its death it might appease the divine wrath, and thus be offered in satisfaction for the sins of the people; when they did this, they expressed by such an act much more of truth than error. They confessed by these sacrifices that the divine justice re-