10. Now the very essence of Religion implies Sacrifice. For the perfection of Divine Worship is found in the submissive and reverent acknowledgment that God is the Supreme Lord of all things, by Whose power we and all our belongings exist. This constitutes the very nature of Sacrifice, which, on this account, is emphatically called a "thing Divine." If Sacrifices are abolished, Religion can neither exist nor be conceived. The Evangelical Law is not inferior, but superior, to the Old Law. It brings to perfection what the Old Law had merely begun. But the Sacrifice of the Cross was prefigured by the sacrifices of the Old Covenant long before the Birth of Jesus Christ; and after His Ascension, the same Sacrifice is continued by the Eucharistic Sacrifice. They greatly err, therefore, who reject this doctrine, as if it diminished the reality and efficacy of the Sacrifice which Christ offered on the Cross. He "was offered once to exhaust the sins of many"(Heb. ix., 28). That atonement for the sins of men was absolutely complete: nor is there any other atonement besides that of the Cross in the Eucharistic Sacrifice. As Religion must ever be accompanied by a sacrificial rite, it was the Divine counsel of the Redeemer that the Sacrifice of the Cross should be perpetuated. This perpetuity is in the most Holy Eucharist, which is not an empty similitude or a mere commemoration, but the very Sacrifice flows from the death of Christ: "For from the rising of the sun even to the going down, my name is great among the Gentiles, and in every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to my name a clean oblation: for my name is great among the Gentiles" (Mal. i. 2).