will he be pleased with thee, or accept thy person? saith the Lord of hosts." A few verses later he recurs to the sorrow felt by Jehovah at such insults. "And ye bring that which is robbed, and the lame, and the sick; thus ye bring an offering: should I accept this of your hand? saith the Lord. But cursed be the deceiver, which hath in his flock a male, and voweth and sacrificeth unto the Lord a bad female." It would be difficult to find the theory of God's resemblance to man expressed in a cruder form. Even as a governor will show the greatest favor to those who approach him with the costliest gifts, so the mouthpiece of the Hebrew deity declares in his name that he must have the pick of his servant's flocks—the males, not the females, the sound and the perfect, not the sickly or the maimed. In a precisely similar spirit, it is enjoined in one of the sacred books of the Buddhists that no spoilt victuals or drinks may be used in sacrifice (Wassiljew, p. 211).
Men's notion of their god was often derived, like Malachi's, not only from human nature, but from those who were by no means the best specimens of human nature,—the rulers. The religious emotion, imbued with this conception of its deities, shrank through a sense of piety from the irreverent, and, as it seemed, sacrilegious act of presenting them with anything but the best. But there was another reason which, doubtless, had its weight. Not only must the offering be of a kind acceptable to the god to whom it was given; it must also impose some cost upon the worshiper. Religious sentiment imperatively required that there should be an actual sacrifice of something which the owner valued, and the surrender of which imposed a burden upon him. This seemed to be involved in the very notion of sacrifice. Its sense and purpose was, that the devotee, coming to his god, and desiring to obtain some favor from him, should show the high importance he attached to it by parting with some portion of his possessions. And plainly this portion must be such as to indicate by its character the esteem and reverence felt by the worshiper for the being whom he worshiped. To indicate this, it must be something which he would unwillingly resign but for his religious feelings. Hence a special part of the fruits of the soil would be an appropriate offering. It would involve a real diminution in the wealth of
