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quently, on the theory in question, could not be the animating principle, as, however, it confessedly is, of pagan worship. In the very earliest times, as far back as the very dawn of history, sacrifices were offered to the elements and to the heavenly bodies. What connection could the idea of a vicarious death, a transference of punishment, have with such sacrifices? And still further, a theory which is so plainly the offspring of reflection as the vicarious theory, would seem incapable of having existed among nations addicted to nature-worship, who lived so exclusively in and with external nature, whose mode of religious thought was wholly cosmical, rather than ethical and religious. Antiquity, in a word, knew nothing of any process of punishment, a judicial execution on the altars of the gods. The life of an individual being was surrendered to the divinity, the original fountain of all life, in order to derive life again from the god, to live henceforth in vital fellowship with him. This is sacrifice in the conception of pagans; and with this, the idea of vicarious punishment is entirely at variance.

Let it be borne in mind, that the idea of atonement in natural religion is altogether different from that which prevails in the Mosaic religion. Sacrifices occur in paganism which are designed to appease, in a certain sense, the anger of the divinity, while such is not the design of any of the Mosaic sacrifices, except on the vicarious theory. At the same time, it is not the design of pagan sacrifices to avert punishment in the usual ethical meaning of that word. The divinity, whose anger is meant to be pacified, is only a power of nature, not a righteous, personal God, whose anger expresses itself merely in the form of natural evil in consequence of the violation of a natural law. Its anger is turned away by means of the death of some being highly valued by those who are enduring the evil. But nowhere is such a sacrifice represented as a punishment, in the proper sense of that term, by which satisfaction is rendered to divine justice.

Finally, there are particular features of pagan sacrifices

which seem decidedly antagonistic to the vicarious theory. The sacrificial victim, it is said, suffers the death due to the sinner, bears his sins. Hence, instead of being regarded as something pure and holy, he becomes in consequence of this imputation of sin, impure, an odious, execrable object. But among the pagans the victim sacrificed is regarded in a very different light. According to Hindoo conceptions, the animals and even the plants used in sacrifice underwent in that act a process of deification, and in the future life were most highly exalted. Especially was this the fact with human sacrifices. So far from speaking of the victim in such terms as would be fitting if sin had been imputed to it and it was thereby accursed, it was addressed in terms like these: "O best of men, most fortunate, who art an aggregate of all celestial virtues, grant to me thy protection. O most excellent, mayest thou reach the highest felicity." His death is never represented as a curse. Instead of the victim's becoming morally odious in consequence of sin imputed to it, the vilest transgressor is, when used as a sacrifice, freed from all moral taint; his blood is transmuted into ambrosia; his brows were encircled with garlands; no symbol certainly of sin and punishment, but of life and the highest honor.

On the whole, one may well ask, with surprise, how an argument for the vicarious theory of sacrifice could be found in heathen usages? Still there are certain passages in the writings of the ancients to which appeal is sometimes made and which therefore must not be altogether overlooked. One such passage, for instance, is found in the account given by Herodotus of the Egyptian modes of worship. The custom prevailed of cutting off the head of the victim in the case of a sacrifice offered with the design of removing a public calamity, and of saying over it these words: "Let the evil now menacing the land of Egypt, or the individual sacrificing, be all turned on this head;" on which the head was either cast into the river or sold to a stranger. But this statement of Herodotus loses much of its force as an argument, when one

remembers that the animals to which he refers are Typhonic animals, objects of peculiar dislike in the mind of an Egyptian, and which he would by no means allow to be considered as a representative of himself. It would be difficult, besides, to prove that the Egyptians had any idea of even a figurative transfer of sin from one being to another, and the infliction of the punishment on such a substitute. This perhaps may serve as an adequate specimen of the amount of support which any particular theory of sacrifice finds in classical writings.

[The exposition which has been given in this Article of certain theories of the origin and meaning of Jewish sacrifices, will not be useless if it shall stimulate any mind to more earnest reflection on that theory which prevails among ourselves, and which, in our judgment, is a most essential element of a correct religious belief. A comparison of this theory with such theories as conflict with it can have no other effect than to disclose in a clearer manner the strength of the foundation on which the former reposes. This comparison we hope to make in a subsequent Article].

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ARTICLE VIII.

LITERARY INTELLIGENCE.

A. EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE. — SANCHONIATHO IN COURT.

In a work by Sir John Lubbock, on the Primitive Condition of Man, lately republished by D. Appleton and Company, New York, the author, at the 119th page, quotes from the "Generations" of Sanchoniatho, as contained in a work by De Brosses on the "Culte de Dieux Fetiches.”1 Thirteen Generations are quoted. It is my object to point out and explain the singular peculiarities of this alleged quotation from Sanchoniatho's Generations. But first, a word respecting the fragments of Sanchoniatho's history. Every scholar knows that Philo, a native of Byblus, one of the Phenician cities, published what he offered as a Greek translation of a history written in the Phenician language by Sanchoniatho, a native of that country. Fragments of this history, about all we have, were copied by Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, in Palestine, into his work, called "Preparatio Evangelica." These fragments of the alleged history of Sanchoniatho were, at one time, not only considered genuine, but of the .greatest value; at a more recent period, they were despised as contemptible forgeries of Philo; at the present time, notwithstanding Dr. William Smith (no independent authority), in his Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, and Rawlinson, the present Professor of Ancient History at Oxford, pronounce them a forgery, and though that profound and sagacious critic Lobeck, in his Samothracia, declares that there are united in them all the indications of forgery, Ernest Renan says that M. Movers has changed his views of them, conforming to those of Ewald and Bunsen, by whose efforts the dominant belief in Germany is now that they are genuine; and Renan himself supports that view, by a criticism that will compel any candid unbeliever to reconsider his ground. To establish their genuineness, however, they are shorn of some of their first pretensions; but enough is left for use, such as it is, as will presently appear. Premising, then, that the fragments of Sanchoniatho embrace, at least, two distinct collections, the first named the "Cosmogony," with its Epilogue, the second the "Generations," I now quote the first, the second, and part of the third Generations, so called, as Sir John gives them in English, from De Brosses's work, placing beside them the actual first, second, and part of the third Generations of Sanchoniatho:

1 It is quoted, at least in the American reprint, as by "De Brosse."

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The True Generations of Sanchoniatho.

1. Of the wind Colpia and his wife Baau were begotten Æon and Protogonus, two mortals, so called, and Eon found out the food from trees.

2. Those begotten of these were called Genus and Genea, and dwelt in Phenicia; but when great droughts came they stretched forth their hands to Heaven, towards the sun, for they recognized him as God, the only Lord of Heaven, calling him Beelsamin.

3. Afterwards, from Genus the son of Protogonus and on, were begotten mortal children, whose names were Phos, Pur, and Phlox.

A comparison shows a serious difference in the two third Generations, and an omission, in Sir John's second, of a few words at the beginning of the true second, and at its close; but the two first have nothing in common. Here follows the original of Sir John's first Generation, taken not from the Generations, but from the Epilogue to the Cosmogony:

"These men first consecrated the plants of the earth, and considered as gods, and worshipped those things on which themselves lived, and those following them, and all those before them; and they made libations and sacrifices."

The italics in this passage are mine; and observe particularly, in Sir John's first Generation, the change of the words these men first, which is the true meaning of the Greek, to these first men, and the suppression of the rest in italics. I proceed, now, to inquire what is the object of these substitutions, alterations, and suppressions. The design of Sir John Lubbock's book is to prove that the primitive type of man was more degraded than any known type, and, probably, he believes that man is an accidental brute development. Now, Sir John is a person of high social position; he is in the very first rank of English mathematicians, associated in reputation with Airy, De Morgan, Herschel, and Hamilton; therefore, and notwithstanding he is also vice-president of the English Ethnological Society, and quotes De Brosses in a very ambiguous manner, thus, at the 119th page: "Since the above was written, my attention was called, by De Brosse's Culte de Dieux," etc., which language seems to claim, what it does not really claim, previous entire ignorance of Sanchoniatho's fragments, I will allow that this ignorance is possible; and, also, Charles de

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