The Child in Human Progress

by George Henry Payne

“In reference to the disposition (Gemueth) and organization of the nervous system: the Semite possesses a deep, easily excitable disposition, and is capable of mighty feelings; he is, therefore, lively, mobile, easily excited, passionate, quickly enthused for an idea, active and enterprising, flexible and adapting, easily finding himself at home in strange relations and circumstances, accommodating himself to them without difficulty, without, however, allowing of being absorbed by them.”

While, therefore, some of the Israelites developed in humanitarianism and poetry and religion, under the favourable conditions in Canaan, others, under various other influences, reverted to former practices. Among these practices was that of sacrificing the first-born child.

To understand better how the people who gave to the world the Child’s Friend retained so late the habit of sacrificing children, the scope of the custom must be understood.

The sacrifice of human beings to the gods, says Grimm,[196] rested on the supposition that human food was agreeable to the gods and not until man had advanced did the idea come that substitutes might be offered. In the cannibalistic stage of development these sacrifices were eaten by the sacrificers, thus establishing a connecting link between the humans and the invisible gods whom they hoped to appease.

The whole theory of sacrifice will be better understood if we grasp the fact that it was born of fear. When a nation sacrificed out of gratitude or in apparent joyous exultation, it was in memory of days when they suffered and their gratitude was as much a propitiation as anything else. Born in fear, the next step in the development of sacrifice was to economize “without impairing efficiency.”[197] The result of this second effort is seen in ingenious devices by which the burden on the worshipper is lightened by his substituting something less valuable than what he is supposed to offer, or what the god is supposed to want, but which the worshipper believes will be acceptable. These substitutions are always made when the forces of nature are treating man more kindly and when his attitude toward his gods is less fearful, for the mind of man in time of plenty and security has always presupposed that time to be when the gods are more or less drowsy.

With some primitive peoples, the sacrifice began as an offering of a meal to the ancestor who had gone before, but as with all primitive peoples the determining factor in religion is fear rather than affection, it became a method of soliciting favours for the future, and such were the sacrifices among the Greeks and Romans, the Hebrews, the Aryans, and the Chinese.[198]

Primitive man, when unwelcome children were born, found easy excuse for getting rid of them by offering them as a sacrifice to the impatient and fearful gods. That at some stage in the development of the parental instinct the excuse that the gods must be propitiated was needed to quiet the awakening mother love, is more than likely. And surely, no more crushing answer could there be to the request to allow a child to live than that the gods were angry and had to be propitiated.

Another reason given for offering children was that, having just come from the other world, they were nearer to the gods and freer of sin and therefore more acceptable. Such reasoning argues a stage far in advance of the cannibal who ate his own children under the idea that he was propitiating an angry god. “The institutions of man develop with considerable uniformity all over the globe, although as races advance, they naturally diverge more or less under the influence of different climate, food, and other conditions.”[199] Cannibalism was one of the earliest stages to which we are able to trace many of the customs even of today, and the idea of sacrifice of children undoubtedly had its origin in primitive cannibalistic feasts, “ceremonies that were softened by the rise of civilization as well as migration to more fertile land and an abundance of food sufficient to make the substitution of an animal for a human possible.”[200]

Among primitive people the sacrifice of children is common. In most cases there is some specific result that is desired when the child is sacrificed. In the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific, the sacrifice of the child is called nawgia and strangling is the method adopted, whenever it is found that the ordinary cures do not affect some sick parent. It is said that the natives watch the ceremony of strangling with much pity but that they feel it is better “to sacrifice a child who is at present of no use to society, and perhaps may not otherwise live to be,” than to allow a sick chief to die.[201] On one occasion when the gods had been offended the native priests decreed that the child of Toobo Toa, the chief, should be sacrificed, “on such occasions the child of a male chief being always chosen as being worthier than others,” and a two-year-old child was strangled against the protests of its mother, who tried to conceal it.[202]