with wine in order to strengthen their oath. Herodotus tells of a similar practice among the Lydians, Medes, and Babylonians; and Tacitus among the Armenians. Pliny records that in the year of the city 657 (B. C. 97) a decree forbidding human sacrifice was passed by the Senate; from which time the practice ceased in public, and for some time altogether. According to Macrobius, human sacrifices were offered at Rome down to the time of Brutus (B. C. 44), who abolished them upon the establishment of the republic. But long after this time the rite was resorted to in exceptional cases to propitiate the gods; for it is an historic fact that in the time of Augustus, 100 knights were sacrificed by his orders at Perusia; and as late as A. D. 270 a similar immolation occurred in the time of the Emperor Aurelian. Nero, frightened by a comet, offered human sacrifices. Heliogabal had the children of the most distinguished families in all Italy gathered together in order to sacrifice them in the Syrian Mysteries; and the Church-Fathers assure us that human sacrifices were offered at Rome to Jupiter latialis in the 4th cent. A. D. The ancient Germans, Gauls, the Dacians, Scythians, Caledonians, Celts, Goths, the ancient Prussians, and others, all, according to the best authorities, propitiated their angry gods in the same sanguinary manner. 2

In some parts of India, the custom has survived almost to our own day. Among the Khonds of Orissa, one of the ancient kingdoms of Hindustan, human sacrifices were constantly practiced up to the year 1836, when the attention of the British government, having been directed to it by one of its agents, took the most strenuous means to break it up.3

In 1866, the press reported a terrible public sacrifice in Dahomey in which the king had 200 victims slaughtered in order to win the favor of the gods in the war which he was about to wage against the Aschantis. This was the third atrocity of the kind in the same year. In Kumassi there is a place always wet with human blood.

Prescott writes concerning the Aztecs, "Human sacrifices have been practiced by many nations, not excepting the most polished nations of antiquity, but never by any on a scale to be compared to those in Anahuac. The amount of victims

Pliny: Bk. 30, ch. 3.

2 Tacitus: Manners of the Germans, chs. 9-39; Annals Bk. 14, ch. 31. Pliny, Bk. 7, ch. 2; Davies, British Druids, pp. 462-466.

3 Lieut. McPherson: Trans. Asiatic Soc., 1841.

immolated on its accursed altars would stagger the faith of the least scrupulous believer."1 Scarcely any author pretends to estimate the yearly sacrifices throughout the empire at less than 20,000 and some carry the number as high as 50,000.

Their mode of sacrificing, as described by Biart, shows a diabolic cruelty, unparalleled by that of any other people. "Once in possession of a victim, these executioners (the priests) carried him naked to a grand altar (techcatl), on which they extended him, having first indicated to the assistants the idol to which they were about to offer sacrifice, so that they might adore it. Four of the priests then held the unhappy being still by the legs and arms, while another kept him from moving his head with the aid of an instrument of wood or stone, made in the form of a horseshoe, and sometimes representing a curved serpent. The stone of the altar being convex, the body was bent in an arch, with the breast and stomach prominent, and the victim could make no resistance. The Topiltzin (chief priest) then approached, and, with a knife of jasper or chalcedony, in accordance with the rite, opened the breast of the prisoner, tore out his heart, offered it palpitating to the sun, and then threw it to the feet of the idol to burn it and contemplate its ashes with veneration. If the idol was large and hollow, they placed the bleeding heart in its mouth with the aid of a golden spoon, and daubed its lips with the blood. When the victim was a prisoner-of-war they cut off his head to preserve it for the Tzompatli, and the body was then thrown on the lower step of the temple. There the officer or soldier who had captured him siezed the prey, carried it away, had it cooked and served to his friends at a banquet. They ate only the thighs, the arms and the breast. As to the trunk, it was reduced to ashes, or given as food to the animals of the royal menagerie. The Otomites quartered the victim, and sold the remains in the market. Among the Zapotecs, men were sacrificed to the gods, women to the goddesses, and children to the inferior deities." 2

Tylor mentions many instances of the ancient custom of propitiating the deity by the immolation of human victims upon the founding of a city. "So late as 1843, in Germany, when a new bridge was built at Halle, a notion was abroad among the people that a child was wanted to be built into

1 Conquest of Mexico, Vol. 1, ch. 3. 2 The Aztecs, pp. 162-163.

the foundation.”1 The wall of Copenhagen, legend says, sank as fast as it was built; so they took an innocent little girl, set her on a chair at a table with toys and eatables, and, as she played and ate, twelve master masons closed a vault over her; then, with clanging music, the wall was raised, and stood firm ever after." 2

Similar rites were practiced throughout Europe, and among many of the Asiatic and African peoples. Joshua evidently refers to this custom when he says, "Cursed be the man that riseth up and buildeth this city Jericho: he shall lay the foundation thereof in his firstborn, and in his youngest son shall he set up the gates of it."

Instances of human sacrifices might be multiplied almost ad infinitum, but our list is already too long.

The above consideration of the pathological effects resulting from an abnormal relation of the different emotions to the total religious experience justifies, in the opinion of the writer, the following generalizations.

First. Religion, like all other human products, such as art, science, philosophy, government, etc., is subject to the laws of evolution and degeneration, and is modified and colored by the general state of mental and physical health and degree of development of the individuals composing a tribe or race. Different types of individuals and different eras must of necessity give birth to different types of religion. God or nature has created a variety of types of individuals and each type has created a God in its own image.

Second. The religion of a people can never rise above its source, i. e., the stage of their mental and moral development. The religion of a religious genius, though it may be accepted by the masses is rarely, if ever, their own religion in the truest sense of the word. Our meaning will be made clear when we say that after a lapse of twenty centuries of unparalleled development there are but few Christians even to-day. Also, the difference between the Christianity of the third century and of the twentieth is proportional to the difference in the mental and moral development of the two centuries. Likewise, the religion of the savage and of the child of civilized parents is and always must be inferior to that of

1 Primitive Culture, Vol. 1, pp. 104-110.

2 I am indebted for the majority of the above references to Schaaffhausen, Anthropolog. Studien.; and W. H. Gardner, Human Sacrifices, Open Court, Vol. 8, pp. 3991 ff. and 4000 ff.

the cultured adult. It is as impossible to make them suddenly rise to the heights of a religion which has taken the most progressive nations centuries upon centuries to evolve as it is to hasten the growth of a tree by pulling it up. All attempts to do so have proven most injurious to the mental and physical health of the savage and the child. The true pedagogical method, so long ago recognized and put in use by the Buddhists, and the first great and successful missionary, St. Paul is, it is encouraging to note, at last being more and more appreciated by our own religious teachers and missionaries, who are now endeavoring to teach the child and the primitive peoples religions which they can understand and readily assimilate, religions which fit their stages of development and satisfy their needs.

Third. A religion cannot be judged by its theology alone, for while beliefs undoubtedly influence conduct they are themselves frequently products of conduct, i. e., explanations and justifications of conduct, and conduct itself is merely an outward expression of deep-lying emotions, tendencies, habits, and instincts which the interplay of countless physical, physiological, and psychical factors have evolved through the ages. In order, therefore, to understand the religion of an individual or a race it is not sufficient to know his or its creed; we must know the whole story of his or its life and environment, past and present.

Fourth. Arrested peoples have naturally enough arrested forms of religion. These religions cannot be called superstitions because superstitions, as we understand them, are unknown to these peoples. Their beliefs and practices, absurd and childish as they seem to us, are congruous with their stage of development and are as truly religious as are those of more advanced peoples. Unless they injure the mental, moral, and physical health of their adherents they cannot be considered pathological. But when these same beliefs and customs persist among a people who have reached a stage of development which is not compatible with them, they become, like rudimentary organs, useless and dangerous.

Fifth. We have seen to what a large extent religion draws upon the emotions. Indeed, in the light of what has preceded we have no hesitancy in saying with Jonathan Edwards that true religion consists so much in the affections

1 See 1 Cor. 3:1-2.

that there can be no true religion without them.

One may

be a philosopher, critic, and even a theologian and still be non-religious; and on the other hand he may be none of these to any marked degree and be extremely religious. "And though I have the gift of prophecy," says Paul," and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity (love, kindness, sympathy, pity, etc.), I am nothing." At least, so far as religion is concerned. It is "out of his strongest feelings,'' as Mr. Fielding writes, that "man has built up his faiths, "'2 and a cold intellectual religion is an anomaly.

Sixth. While the emotions are a prime essential of religion, as rivers are of fruitful valleys, and while in every normal religious consciousness each has its own proper and harmonious expression, the most disastrous results follow whenever any of them is inordinately exaggerated or intensified; whenever the river, so to speak, overflows its banks and spreads over alien areas. The danger here is especially great because of the close connection between the emotions and bodily states. It is impossible, of course, to determine with mathematical accuracy beyond what point the expression of an emotion becomes abnormal; the gradations from the normal to the abnormal are imperceptible. In the above cases, however, there can be no doubt that the phenomena are positively pathological, for in every instance the intellectual, moral, or physical development of the individual, the tribe, or the race has been seriously interfered with.

Lastly, we have seen the close relationship between the emotions and conduct. Disordered religious emotions lead to grotesque and pathological deeds, and vice versa. This is especially true when the individual is a member of a crowd. Man is an organism, no part of which can be injured or deranged without its influencing other parts and the whole. In religion, as in all things, sophrosune,' or the harmonious subordination of the parts to the whole, is the healthy and normal condition to be striven for. Narrowness, onesidedness, crystallization, bigotry, fanaticism, and intolerance, these have always been the curses of humanity. Modern education, secular as well as religious, has still much to learn from the ancient Greeks who considered sophrosune' or

11 Cor. 13:2.

6

2 The Hearts of Men, p. 308.