vaders as they were able to seize. It is noteworthy that, in most cases, sacrifices of captives were employed as a means of divination and of ascertaining the issue of the war, as is related of the Lusitanians, the Britons, and the inhabitants of Mona (or Anglesey), the Cimbri, the Prussians, and others.

The custom of sacrificing prisoners of war probably gave rise, among many tribes, to the idea of killing in honour of the gods strangers rather than natives; for foreigners and enemies were extensively held to be equivalent terms. The sacrifice of shipwrockod strangers by the Scythians in Tauris at the shrine of Diana, has become celebrated by the descriptions of historians and poets. Foreigners were offered by the Hindoos, by the Egyptians in honour of Typhon, by the Ethiopians, who are said to have periodically seized two strangers to slaughter them for the welfare of the community, and frequently by the old Germans. From this point it is not difficult to traco

3. THE GRADUAL ABOLITION of human sacrifices.

For when men accustomed themselves to consider strangers as oblations pleasing to the gods, they imperceptibly strove to substitute them for their own countrymen and relatives. They thus satisfied their deepest feelings of religion by presenting a human sacrifice, and yet avoided the tormenting conflict into which such sacrifico might bring them with thoir natural sympathies. But evon this first stop was not nehioved without a severe struggle. It was by men of a fanatic or enthusiastic croed regarded as a cowardly ovasion of the most sacred of roligious duties. As the Phoenicians and those who adopted their faith believed their eldest sons rightfully to belong to Moloch, the childless among them, to evince their holy zeal, were from early times wont to buy the sons of poor persons and to present them to the god; the mother was required to be present at the sacrifice; but if she shed a tear or uttered a sigh, she lost the purchase money, without saving her offspring. Such precedents induced rich parents secretly to purchase boys and to sacrifice them as their own. The detestable practice seems, in later times, to have obtained to a considerable extent. Therefore, when the Carthaginians were defeated by Agathocles, they supposed that the disaster had been sent by Saturn wroth at being deprived of his duo honours; they appeased him by a speedy offering of 200 boys of the best families; and 300 adult persons joined in the sacrifice spontaneously.

The next advance towards mitigating the terrors of human sacrifices was to slaughter mon who by the laws of the land had forfeited their lives, especially condemned criminals. In Maabar, in India, the

Q

culprit sentenced to die usually sacrificed himself in honour of some particular idol, and the readiness evinced in the act was by the people rogarded as ominent piety. At Athens, malefactors were kept and fed at the public expense, sometimes for many years, to be offered as expiatory sacrifices at the festival of the Thargolia, at imponding or actual public misfortunes, such as postilenco, war, or famine. The same usage prevailed in Rhodus, where primitively a pious man, and afterwards a criminal, was sacrificed at the festival of Saturn; it obtained on the island of Leucas, and in Romo where it was acted upon in the worship of Jupitor Latialis considerably later than the commencement of the Christian era; among the Cimbri, the Frieses, and the Gauls, who went so far as to look upon the sacrifice of delinquents, especially thieves and robbers, as peculiarly agreeable to the gods, and offered innocent men only when convicts were not at hand. In Dahomey, the victims are either foreigners, especially captives of war, or if natives criminals and dressed as such. In fact, a modern traveller received the assurance from king Gololo himself, that "many victims would be released, and that those exocuted would be only the worst of criminals and malignant war-captivos."

Blood, the symbol of life, being generally regarded as the chief and most important element in sacrifices, thoughtful men, urged moreover by considerations of humanity, held it to be unnecessary to kill the human victim, and declared that the gods are effectually propitiated provided some of the man's blood flowed in their honour. Thus another and a very decided stop towards a less revolting form of human sacrificos was made. In Sparta, the image of Artemis Orthia, supposed to have been that once taken away by Orestes and Iphigenia from Tauris, was for a long time worshipped by human victims, but this sacrifice was later, it is asserted by Lycurgus, changed into the flagellation of boys, so that the image of the goddess was sprinkled with their blood; and at Alea in Arcadia, Dionysos was similarly honoured at an annual festival by the scourging of women. In Elis, a libation of blood was offered at the grave of the dead as an expiation. The priests of Phoenicia and Syria, especially of Baal, those of Hierapolis, of the Greeks in later periods, and chiefly those of Bramah and Buddha, were in the habit, on certain fostivals or serious occasions, of cutting themselves with knives and lancets "till the blood gushed out upon them"; the same practice sprang up in Rome where it was observed by the priests and priestesses of Bellona; and it prevails still among the Dorvishes of Turkey and Persia. The Carian settlers in Egypt, when on the great festival of Isis at Busiris the sacrifice had been performed in honour of Osiris, "cut their faces

with their knives." In Rome, the image of Jupiter Latiaris was every year sprinkled with the blood of a gladiator who had been wounded in the public games, and this custom was maintained up to the second and third century after Christ. When the Romans rigorously interdicted human sacrifices among the Gauls, the latter, as a substitute for their ancient rites, scratched the skin of the devoted person, and offered to the deity the blood so obtained. And the Incas in Peru prosented cakes sprinkled over with human blood.

A further progress was manifest in the growing belief that tho intention of offering a human being is as pleasing to the gods as the actual oblation. Not sufficiently enlightened to perceive the abomination of human sacrifices, and yet too merciful to slaughter their fellow-creatures if it could possibly be avoided, some tribes resorted to the most curious devices to overcome the harassing dilemma. They not only connived at but facilitated the escape of the intended victim. In Orchomenos, the maiden appointed to be sacrificed to Dionysos was allowed to save herself by flight from the very altar. The eldest member of the family of Athamas, doomed to die if he entered the Prytaneum of his native town, was permitted to seek refuge in another country. On the island of Leucas, a man was annually, at the festival of Apollo, precipitated into the sea as an expiation for the people; but various kinds of wings wore attached to his body, and evon birds susponded at his person to lighton by their fluttering the fall or the leap; below, many persons were stationed around in small fishing boats to receive him, to proservo his life if possiblo, and to carry him boyond tho boundary of the country. The Ethiopians placed the two foreigners whom they seized from time to time as a national atonement, in a strong vessel, furnished them with provisions for six months, and ordered them to sail on in a southward direction till they came to a blooming island, where a hospitable reception awaited them: the safe arrival of the men on the island was by the Ethiopians considered as a pledge that the country would, during the period of 600 years, enjoy peace and prosperity. So ancient a work as the Vodas commanded, as a symbolical rite, to tie to posts the persons devoted to death in honour of the goddess Kali, then, after the recital of the hymn on the allegorical immolation of Narayana, to release them unhurt, and finally to make oblations of butter on the sacrificial fire. Later, the multiplied conditions, under which human sacrifices were permitted in India, rendered their frequent occurrence impossible. Gradually, by the softening influence of the Brahmans and the wisdom of Gautama, they consod entirely, and wore in lator writings forbiddon by the threat of eternal

punishment in hell. In a similar manner, they were rejected and denounced in other countries, as better notions regarding the nature of the deity and of atonement prevailed. From early times, there was, in spite of the cosmic character of paganism, among more civilized tribes a tendency towards that end. Not unfrequently animals, considered as legitimate and acceptable representatives, were sacrificed instead of devoted men. It was incompatible with the national character of the Greeks to suffer long the atrocity of human sacrifices utterly abhorrent to the nature of Hellenism. Homer mentions indeed the immolation of men in honour of Patroclus, but not the tradition of Iphigenia's sacrifice. The horrid custom seems to have been brought into Greece by foreign contact and as a foreign element. Though it is true as we have abundantly shown that "we find traces of it throughout almost the whole Hellenic world, in the cultus of almost every god, and in all periods of their independent history", it is certain that it was from the fifth century openly donounced as an unholy and godless practice repugnant to the spirit of the national laws. Tho substitution of animals for mon is related in logonds rouching back oven into pro-historic times; though not alluded to in the Homeric pooms, it was primitively sunctioned in several religious systems; it is implied in the story of Iphigenia intended for a sacrifice to Diana but replaced by a stag, and in the narrative of Abraham offering a ram instead of his son Isaac. Phryxus, devoted by the oracle to die in honour of Zeus Laphystios, received from his mother Nephele a ram with a golden. fleece, on which he was carried to Colchis, and which he there offered instead of himself. A youth was, at Potniao in Bocotia, to be sacrificed every year to Dionysus, because the inhabitants had slain one of the priests of the god; but "a few years later", the youth was replaced by a kid of the goats. The people of Tenedos, in later times, offered to the same deity, instead of a child, a new-born calf to which they attempted to give a human appearance by providing its feet with cothurni, while they nursed the cow that had thrown the calf like a woman after childbirth, and obliged the man who had sacrificed the calf to flee, probably because in former periods the person who had sacrificed the child was equally persecuted. The human victim periodically offered at Salamis to Minerva and Diomedos, was by Diphilus, king of Cyprus, roplaced by a slaughtered ox. Pelopidas, invited in a dream, the night before the battle of Louctra, by the shades of the "virgins of Leuctra" and their father, to expiate their murder by the sacrifice of a fair-haired virgin, believed he satisfied the request of the vision by slaughtering a light-coloured colt which had strayed from the herd and

ran through the camp; and in a similar manner Agesilaus, when staying over night in Aulis and admonished by a dream to sacrifice a man in commemoration of Agamemnon and Iphigenia, offered a stag. And at Laodicea, in Syria, a virgin was, for some time, offered every year, but later a stag.

However, sometimes not animals but symbolical figures were substituted instead of men, and this must be regarded as another advancoment in religious notions. The Egyptian king Amasis offered at Heliopolis wax-images instead of the human beings formerly sacrificed. The Hindoos shaped the form of a man in butter or dough, and burnt it to the destructive goddess Kali. An ancient oracle ordered the old Italic tribes, "Offer heads to Hades, and to his father (Saturn) a man", and this command was for some time acted upon: but when Hercules passed through Italy with the hord of Geryon, he is said to have persuaded the people to offer images of human hoads instead of real ones, and torches instead of men. Again, it was customary on the festival of the Compitalia celebrated on the cross-ways, to offer sacrifices in honour of the Lares and their mother the goddess Mania; but Junius Brutus induced the people to present garlic and poppy-heads instead of human heads. Every year, on the ides of May, during the festival of the Lemuralia celebrated for the souls of the departed, 24 or 30 figures of men made of bulrushes wero, for the propitiation of Saturn, by the chief priests and the Vestal virgins thrown from the Sublician bridge into the Tibor, as substitutes for the human victims which had onco been killed on the samo day; and this usage, the origin of which is likewise attributed to Hercules, was maintained at least to the time of Augustus. The vows of the "sacred spring", which the Romans had adopted from the old Italic tribes, were later confined to the cattle alone, or if the children were also included, they were not killed, but in the spring of their twentieth or twenty-first year, they were led out of the boundaries of the land, provided with arms, and directed to establish colonies wherever they might chance to find a resting place; and indeed many settlements, and among them those of the Picentines and the Mamertini in Sicily, owe their origin to the emigration of devoted persons.

But human sacrifices were too deeply rooted in the life of the ancient world to be easily eradicated; they lingered for long periods, even after more rational views had been diffused and adopted; and their suppression required the continuous and zealous efforts of public teachers and reformers. They were kept up in the Roman empire with incredible tenacity. Darius Hystaspis, king of Persia, is said to have forbidden the Carthaginians "to offer human sacrificos and to cat dog