son or some
thing with at least a spark of unselfish love. Fortunately almost
every one is better interiorly than he appears to our limited vision.
The most depraved of mortals has his moments of the higher vision.

From this deduction of inquiring primitive man, namely that the blood
was the source of procreative virility, it is easy to trace the
logical result in the terrible practise of blood-sacrifice which
reigned so long and which, carried from one nation to another, and
engrafted into the God-idea, has come down to us in the story of the
"sacrificial lamb," at length personified in Jesus, the Son of God, as
a final act of propitiation.

The blood-atonement idea is naturally repulsive to civilized beings,
and were it not that nearly every one who adheres to the old form of
orthodox Christianity swallows theologic interpretation of the Bible
as he would swallow a dose of castor-oil, by closing his eyes and
holding his nose, the teaching as thus interpreted would be stopped by
police authority. And yet we may readily trace the gradual descent of
the God-idea of the ancients until it reached the culmination in the
idea of sacrifice of a son of God Himself.

In their blind but eager groping for some means of escape from death,
even as we of this day and generation are groping, the early races
observed that birth was accompanied by blood; that as age came on and
the blood became thin, and in the case of the female ceased to flow at
certain reproductive periods, the power of generation ceased. What
more natural to primitive man than that he should conceive the idea of
sending back to this unknown and invisible power behind the veil of
the sky the blood, which he must need to supply his creative energies?
And when the sacrifice of animals was not sufficient for this God,
they concluded that it must be because he required the blood of man.

And so at first the old and the sick and the deformed were sacrificed;
but as it was seen that this did not answer the need, they began to
sacrifice the young, and naturally the slaves were substituted for the
aged, as affording more blood; and when this failed the idea came,
that the sacrifice must be that of one who was innocent of the world,
and so they selected a girl or a young man, who had been secluded and
trained to the thought of sacrifice, and in whom the sex-function had
been rigorously suppressed.

And still the old grew bloodless and death claimed his toll, and so
th