XII.

Death in Sacrifice.

God, whose almighty will created thee,
And me, and all that hath the breath of life,
He is our strength; for in His name I speak,
And when I tell thee that thou shalt not shed,
The life of man in bloody sacrifice,

It is His holy bidding which I speak."

SOUTHEY.

THE custom of sacrifices, at first a divine institution, preserved itself in almost every region, under almost every perversion of the primeval truth. When, for successive generations, the corruption of man had so suppressed the light, that it became deep darkness, and the knowledge of the true God had been gradually supplanted by dreams of deities who were but personifications of human vices, it was at last suggested that such deities might hold in highest acceptance the altar on which the blood of man was the offering. Once indeed, one, and he the father of the faithful, was commanded from heaven to slay his son in sacrifice. But he knew that his son, in whom was the promise of such future blessings for all men, must be preserved, even though it were by a resurrection; and that the act, if it had not been commanded, would have been the most tremendous presumption and enormity. When some of his descendants caused their children to pass through the fire, the Most High denounced such cruelty as a thing which, emphatically, He "had not commanded,

neither came it into his heart.” But if the thought was not from the Creator, it was from the tempter; for, to take life, when it is not a duty, is the chief of crimes.

These sacrifices were practised amongst the Canaanites and the neighbouring nations of Syria. Princes and magistrates, amongst the Phoenicians, in times of public calamity, offered the dearest of their offspring to those whom they feared as avenging deities. The Ethiopians sacrificed boys to the sun, and girls to the moon. Those gloomy oaks, which overshadowed the rites of Scythian superstition, were sprinkled with the blood of every hundreth prisoner. Red-haired men were sacrificed by the Egyptians at the tomb of Osiris; and they were accustomed, it is said, to fling a young and beautiful virgin into the Nile. The Chinese histories record the self-oblation of the monarch Chingtang, to avert great calamities from his subjects. Human victims. were immolated in Persia by the sword, or buried alive. The dread rite was known to the ancient people of Hindostan; and in various forms, has been practised even till our day, with the consent or by the act of the victim. In the heart of a wood, the Druids slew their captives in sacrifice; and in Gaul, they set up an immense wicker figure of a man, in which a hundred victims were enclosed, to be consumed by fire. The Greek states, in their early history, offered human sacrifices before their troops went on an expedition. A man was sacrificed every year by the Athenians. The custom existed amongst the Romans, even after it was forbidden by law, and scarcely ceased before the overthrow of Paganism. It existed amongst the Goths, amongst the Arabians, and with peculiar atrocity, amongst the Carthaginians. In the north of Europe,

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it prevailed till Christianity came in; and the grove of Upsal and the island of Rugen were made memorable by such horrors. Amongst certain tribes of the Mahrattas, victims distinguished by their bloom and beauty are fattened for the altars. The African kings slaughter many prisoners in sacrifice to some fetish: sometimes infants are exposed to the sharks; and in the funeral rites of Congo and Ashantee at the burial of princes, hundreds of their wives and attendants have been destroyed. Such sacrifices, too, were found in the Pacific islands.

It was in America, however, that the number of victims, elsewhere not very large, swelled to an annual sum of many thousands. The Peruvians, when they offered solemn prayers for their princes, slew children in great companies. But in Mexico, human sacrifice most outraged the eye of Heaven, till it drew down the retribution of

“Th' heroic Spaniard's unrelenting sword.”

The yearly victims in the capital were estimated at twenty thousand; and the accursed high places of slaughter arose in the other cities of the empire. Seventy thousand human beings are said to have perished at the dedication of one great temple. The skulls of such sufferers were preserved in certain edifices, in one of which a hundred and thirty-six thousand were counted by the companions of Cortez. Stretched on a block of stone, the victim was held fast by several priests; while one, in a scarlet mantle, opened his breast with a sharp knife, and, tearing from it the palpitating heart, held it towards the sun, and then threw it at the feet of the idol. He who was intended for this, in some in

stances, had been splendidly arrayed and attended, and every luxury had been heaped around him, for a certain. period before the fatal day; in other instances, the most exquisite tortures had first been inflicted. In Mexico, as often elsewhere, the sacrifice was associated with the cannibal repast.

As few, perhaps, since tradition said that these bloody rites had been introduced into Mexico but two centuries; as few, perhaps, as a single million may have been the whole multitude of human sacrifices in America; and, although the nations in which such customs have had sway must have been without cultivation or history, yet, in the absence of estimates, should we reckon those. of the elder continent at another million, it would seem a large conjecture. But if the sacrifice of Iphigenia, told in poetry or on the canvass, has drawn such tender tears; if the supposed fate of the daughter of Jephthah has aroused the indignant sympathy of all ages; if no eye ever read unmoved the story of Isaac on the mountain of Moriah; how must thought recoil from that mass of anguish which has thus been heaped upon the altars of the spirits of evil.

XIII.

Death by Suicide.

"The term of life is limited,
Nor may a man prolong nor shorten it:
The soldier may not move from watchful sted,
Nor leave his stand until his captain bid.'
Who life did limit by almighty doom,'

Quoth he, knows best the terms established;
And he that points the centinel his room,
Doth license him depart at sound of morning drum.'

SPENSER.

By the same physical power which can destroy the life of another, man can fix a sudden period to his own. If at any time he become so weary of his present state, and so hopeless for the future, that he prefers the uncertainties, or imagines that he prefers the certainties of death, the temptation to suicide may be at hand, unless repelled by higher sentiments of duty. These sentiments may be overpowered by frenzy, supplanted by selfishness, silenced by pride, or extinguished by atheism; and then the man may be his own destroyer.

Both Abimelech and Saul were already wounded to death, when they besought their attendants to give the finishing blow. Ahithophel, rejected as a counsellor, and despairing of a wicked cause, went and hanged himself; a mode of death, which, possibly because the horror of bloodshed was wanting, has always been a ready suggestion. Such was the death of the traitor Iscariot, when the full anguish of his guilt burst upon him, and