leave no room for poverty and riches, and the process of
propitiating the supernatural powers is as well within the means
of the least of the members as within those of the headman, yet
when commercial civilization arrives, and capitalism divides the
people into a few rich and a great many so poor that they can
barely live, a movement for religious reform will arise among the
poor, and will be essentially a movement for cheap or entirely
gratuitous salvation. To understand what the poor mean by
propitiation, we must examine for a moment what they mean by
justice.


THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ATONEMENT AND PUNISHMENT

The primitive idea of justice is partly legalized revenge and
partly expiation by sacrifice. It works out from both sides in
the notion that two blacks make a white, and that when a wrong
has been done, it should be paid for by an equivalent suffering.
It seems to the Philistine majority a matter of course that this
compensating suffering should be inflicted on the wrongdoer for
the sake of its deterrent effect on other would-be wrongdoers;
but a moment's reflection will show that this utilitarian
application corrupts the whole transaction. For example, the
shedding of innocent blood cannot be balanced by the shedding of
guilty blood. Sacrificing a criminal to propitiate God for the
murder of one of his righteous servants is like sacrificing a
mangy sheep or an ox with the rinderpest: it calls down divine
wrath instead of appeasing it. In doing it we offer God as a
sacrifice the gratification of our own revenge and the protection
of our own lives without cost to ourselves; and cost to ourselves