“Terrible was the prestige of the priesthood of Mexico. The greater the State grew, the larger were the hecatombs of human victims. Almost every god had to be propitiated in the same way; but above all must the war-god be for ever glutted with the smoking hearts of slain captives. Scarcely any historian, says Prescott, estimates the number of human beings sacrificed yearly throughout the Empire at less than 20,000, and some make it 50,000. The Franciscan monks computed that 2,500 victims were annually sacrificed in the town and district of Mexico alone. Of this doomed host, Huitzilopochtli had the lion’s share; and it is recorded that at the dedication of his great new temple A.D. 1486 [that is to say, nearly 1,500 years after God was pleased to reveal Himself definitely to mankind] there were slain in his honour 70,000 prisoners of war, who had been reserved for the purpose for years throughout the Empire. They formed a train two miles long, and the work of priestly butchery went on for several days.”[28]
“At every festival of the God there was a new hecatomb of victims, and we may conceive how the chronic spectacle burnt itself in on the imagination of the people.... And then the horror of the sacrificial act! In the great majority of the sacrifices the victim was laid living on the convex stone and held by the limbs, while the slayer cut open his breast with the sacred flint (or rather obsidian) knife—the ancient knife used before men had the use of metals, and therefore most truly religious—and tore out the palpitating heart, which was held on high to the all-seeing sun, before being set to burn in incense in front of the idol, whose lips, and the walls of whose shrines, were devoutly daubed with blood.”
“In connection with one annual festival of Tezcatlipoca, the Creator and ‘soul of the world,’ who combined the attributes of perpetual youthful beauty with the function of the God of Justice and Retribution, as the Winter Sun, there was selected for immolation a young male captive of especial beauty, who was treated with great reverence for a whole year before being sacrificed.... When all was over the priests piously improved the occasion, preaching that all this had been typical of human destiny, while the aristocracy sacramentally ate the victim’s roasted limbs.”
“They [Christians] mystically eat the body of the slain God. Now, this very act was performed by the Mexicans, not only literally as we have seen, but in the symbolic way also; and they connected their sacraments with the symbol of the cross.”
“That the Mexicans were no longer cannibals by taste is shown by the fact that in the great siege by Cortez they died of starvation by thousands. They never ate fellow citizens: only the sacrificially slain captive.”
“The strangest thing of all is that their frightful system of sacrifice was bound up not only with a strict and ascetic sexual morality, but with an emphatic humanitarian doctrine. If asceticism be virtue, they cultivated virtue zealously. There was a Mexican Goddess of Love, and there was of course plenty of vice; but nowhere could men win a higher reputation for sanctity by living in celibacy. Their saints were numerous. They had nearly all the formulas of Christian morality, so-called. The priests themselves mostly lived in strict celibacy; and they educated children with the greatest vigilance in their temple schools and higher colleges. They taught the people to be peaceful, to bear injuries with meekness, to rely on God’s mercy and not on their own merits; they taught, like Jesus and the Pagans, that adultery could be committed by the eyes and the heart; and, above all, they exhorted men to feed the poor. The public hospitals were carefully attended to, at a time when some Christian countries had none. They had the practice of confession and absolution, and in the regular exhortation of the confessor there was this formula: Clothe the naked and feed the hungry, whatever privations it may cost thee; for remember their flesh is like thine, and they are men like thee; cherish the sick, for they are the image of God. And in this very same exhortation there was further urged on the penitent the special duty of instantly procuring a slave for sacrifice to the deity.”
The Mexican believed in the resurrection of the Man-God. Dr. Frazer relates how “the idea that the God thus slain in the person of his representative comes to life again immediately was graphically represented in the Mexican ritual by skinning the slain man-god, and clothing in his skin a living man, who thus became the new representative of the god-head.”[29]
It is civilisation that determines the tone of religion. In Peru, where the civilisation was higher and the priesthood less powerful, the sacrificial system was less burdensome and less terrible. Thus human sacrifices were practically extinct. The Peruvians had the institution of a Holy Communion, in which they ate of a sacred bread, sancu, sprinkled with the blood of a sacrificed sheep, the priest pronouncing this formula: “Take heed how ye eat this sancu; for he who eats it in sin and with a double will and heart is seen by our Father, the Sun, who will punish him with grievous troubles.” The Spaniards themselves recognised that the Mexicans ate the mystical body of the God with every sign of devotion and contrition; and they were so far from depreciating the Peruvian Communion that they supposed St. Bartholomew had established it.[30]
With these facts confronting us, it is nothing short of marvellous to find many learned divines completely ignoring them in their apologetic efforts. I say marvellous, for I assume they possess honesty of purpose and some acquaintance with ancient beliefs; but perhaps I am wrong in the latter assumption. The continuance of the celebration of the Holy Eucharist until the present day is held to be one of the evidences for the Christian faith, and this on the ground that the rite could not have survived if Christ had not founded it. For some reason, best known to the apologist, the almost universal observance of the same ceremony, ages before the Christian era, and its survival among the nations who finally adopted Christianity, are entirely overlooked. Thus Dr. Maclear, in his book, The Evidential Value of the Holy Eucharist, says: “The singular rite has survived all the vicissitudes of more than 1,000 years.... The early Christian would inform a supposed questioner that the meal was a sacrificial feast, instituted by Him from Whom we are called Christians, and Who died for us on the Cross. Here, then, we are on solid ground. The rite, so unique and so unprecedented, rests on an objective historical fact.” One would think that Dr. Maclear had entirely neglected the study of ancient and even modern non-Christian[31] beliefs.