ion to that effect would
be--to say the least--rash. Perhaps there IS a very slow amelioration;
but the briefest glance at the history of the Christian churches--the
horrible rancours and revenges of the clergy and the sects against
each other in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., the heresy-hunting
crusades at Beziers and other places and the massacres of the Albigenses
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the witch-findings and
burnings of the sixteenth and seventeenth, the hideous science-urged and
bishop-blessed warfare of the twentieth--horrors fully as great as any
we can charge to the account of the Aztecs or the Babylonians--must give
us pause. Nor must we forget that if there is by chance a substantial
amelioration in our modern outlook with regard to these matters the same
had begun already before the advent of Christianity and can by no means
be ascribed to any miraculous influence of that religion. Abraham was
prompted to slay a ram as a substitute for his son, long before the
Christians were thought of; the rather savage Artemis of the old Greek
rites was (according to Pausanias) (1) honored by the yearly sacrifice
of a perfect boy and girl, but later it was deemed sufficient to draw a
knife across their throats as a symbol, with the result of spilling only
a few drops of their blood, or to flog the boys (with the same result)
upon her altar. Among the Khonds in old days many victims (meriahs) were
sacrificed to the gods, "but in time the man was replaced by a horse,
the horse by a bull, the bull by a ram, the ram by a kid, the kid by
fowls, and the fowls by many flowers." (2) At one time, according to the
Yajur-Veda, there was a festival at which one hundred and twenty-five
victims, men and women, boys and girls, were sacrificed; "but reform
supervened, and now the victims were bound as before to the stake,
but afterwards amid litanies to the immolated (god) Narayana, the
sacrificing priest brandished a knife and--severed the bonds of the
captives." (3) At the Athenian festival of the Thargelia, to which I
referred in the last chapter, it appears that the victims, in later
times, instead of being slain, were tossed from a height into the sea,
and after being rescued were then simply banished; while at Leucatas a
similar festival the fall of the victim was graciously broken by tying
feathers and even living birds to his body. (4)

(1) vii. 19, and iii. 8, 16.

(2) Primitive Folk, by Elie Reclus (Co