The sense of the necessity for appeasing justice reveals itself in
sacrifices. There are sacrifices which are merely offerings of
gratitude, and freewill gifts of love. But when you see the blood of
animals flowing in the temples, and not seldom human blood gushing forth
upon the altars, you will be unable to escape the conviction that man,
in presenting himself before the Deity, feels constrained to appease a
justice which threatens him.

The sense of the need of help shows itself in prayer; and this must be
the especial object of our study, because it is in the fact of religious
invocation that we shall encounter the idea, obscure perhaps, but real,
of the goodness of the First Cause of the universe.

Prayer is a fact of the universal religion. Whence is it that we derive
a large part of what knowledge we have of the ancient civilizations of
India and Egypt? From ruins: and the chief of these ruins are the ruins
of temples, that is to say, of houses of prayer. Would we go further
back than these monuments of stone? I interrogate those pioneers of
science who are searching for the traces of antiquity in old
languages,--in the ruins of speech. I inquire, for example, of my
learned fellow-countryman, M. Adolphe Pictet: "You who have studied,
with patient care, the first origins of our race--what have you
discovered in the way of religion?" He replies: "When I have gone as far
back as historical speculations can carry us by the aid of language, it
appears to me that I no longer see temples built by the hand of man,
but, beneath the open vault of heaven, I see our earliest ancestors
sending up together the chant of prayer and the flame of
sacrifice."[174]

And now, from this remote antiquity, I come down to the paganism, in