d, 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 sun-worship, 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 po