butchered to make a Roman holiday,
or the tournays of the middle ages, but in the prize-ring fights and public executions by ax or guillotine, of the age that is just passing away. The thousands who perished for religious ideas by means of the Holy Roman Inquisition should not be overlooked by the Spanish writers who are so indignant that Montezuma and his priests sacrificed tens of thousands under the claims of a heathen religion. The very day on which we write these words, August 18th, is the anniversary of the last sentence for beheading passed by our House of Lords. By that sentence three Scottish "Jacobites" passed under the ax on Tower Hill, where their remains still rest in a chapel hard by. So lately as 1873, the Shah of Persia, when resident as a visitor in Buckingham Palace, was amazed to find that the laws of Great Britain prevented him from depriving five of his courtiers of their lives. They had just been found guilty of some paltry infringement of Persian etiquette. During the last generation or the previous one, both in England and Scotland, the country schoolmaster on a certain day had the schoolroom cleared so that the children and their friends should enjoy the treat of seeing all the game-cocks of the parish bleeding on the floor one after another, being either struck by a spur to the brain, or else wounded to a painful death. When James Boswell and others regularly attended the spectacles of Tyburn and sometimes cheered the wretched victim if he "died game," the philosopher will not wonder at the populace of some city of ancient Mexico crowding round the great temple and greedily watching the bloody sacrifice done with full sanction of the priesthood and the king.
The primitive religions were derived from sunworship, and as fire is the nearest representative of the sun, it seemed essential to burn the victim offered as a sacrifice. At Carthage, the great Phenician colony, children were cruelly sacrificed by fire to the god Melkarth of Tyre. "Melkarth" being simply Melech Kiriath (i. e., "King of the City"), and therefore identical with the "Moloch" or "Molech" of the Ammonites, Moabites, and Israelites. In the earliest prehistoric age the children of Ammon, Moab, and Israel were apparently so closely akin that they had practically the same religion and worshiped the same idols. The tribal god was originally the god of Syria or Canaan. In more than a dozen places of the Old Testament we find the Hebrews accused of burning their children or passing them through the fire to the sun-god, but the ancient Mexicans did not burn their victims, and in no case were the victims their own children. The victims were captives taken in war, or persons convicted of crime; and thus the Mexicans were in atrocity far surpassed by those races akin to the Hebrews who are much denounced by the sacred writers, e. g.:
Josiah ... defiled Topheth that no man might make his son or his daughter to pass through the fire to Molech (2 Kings xxiii, 10).
They have built also the high places to burn their sons with fire for burnt-offerings (Jer. xix, 5).
Yea, they shed innocent blood, even the blood of their sons and of their daughters, whom they sacrificed unto the idols of Canaan (Ps. cvi, 37).
That a father should offer his own child as a sacrifice to the sun-god or any other, would to the mild and gentle Aztec be too dreadful a conception. It is the enormous number who were immolated that shocks the European mind, but to the populace enjoying the spectacle the victims were enemies of the king or criminals deserving execution.
Perhaps it is a more difficult problem to explain how so civilized a community as the Aztec races undoubtedly were could look with complacency upon any one tasting a dish composed of some part of the captive he had taken in battle. It is not only repulsive as an idea, but seems impossible. Yet much depends on the point of view as well as the atmosphere. According to archeologists, all the primeval races of men could at a pinch feed on human flesh, but after many generations learned to do better without it. We may have simply outgrown the craving, till at last we call it unnatural, whereas those ancient Mexicans, with all their wealth of food, had refined upon it. Let us again refer to the Old Testament:
Thou hast taken thy sons and thy daughters and these hast thou sacrificed to be devoured (Ezek. xvi, 20).
... have caused their sons to pass for them through the fire, to devour them (Ezek. xxiii, 37).
We may therefore infer that to the early races of Canaan (including Israel), as well as to the primeval Aztecs, it was a privilege and religious custom to eat part of any sacrifice that had been offered.
There can be little doubt, to any one who has studied the earliest human antiquities, that all races indulged in cannibalism, not only during that enormously remote age called Paleolithic, but in comparatively recent though still prehistoric times. "This is clearly proved by the number of human bones, chiefly of women and young persons, which have been found charred by fire and split open for extraction of the marrow." Such charred bones have frequently been preserved in caves, as at Chaleux in Belgium, where in some instances they occurred "in such numbers as to indicate that they had been the scene of cannibal feasts."
