eir souls." Early in the history of this worship it was deemed
sufficient if children passed through the fires without the destruction
of their lives, but down the ages it came to be believed, that if a
family would secure the favor of this deity, the oldest child of each
union must be actually roasted to conciliate favor. Even good old
Abraham who had been called from upper Chaldea to receive all the land
of Israel for him and his seed forever, conceived the idea that God
required the roasting of the son of Sarah upon the hill of Zion, and
never relented until a ray of common sense enlightened his intellectual
vision, after he had actually bound Isaac to the altar.

We have referred to the beautiful monuments that still exist at Uxmal,
Palenque, Occasingo, Queche and Otumba, and to the temples and monuments
still standing there. Upon all these beautiful structures are engraved
in the living stone, or wrought in stucco, most striking representations
of the sun with a huge priest on either side, standing with arms
outstretched each holding in his hands a naked child offering it to the
relentless deity. The practice of burning human beings as offerings to
the sun existed very extensively down to the date of the Spanish
conquest. Showing that the same so-called religion which prevailed in
western Europe before the Roman conquest, was still paramount and
terribly enforced among these settlers in America, though so far removed
from the parent stock. We have spoken thus far of American remains which
are found north of the Isthmus of Panama, but there are still existing,
in the old land of Peru, structures which for thousands of years have
been telling the story of their origin.

There are all over this land of Peru remains not of palaces and temples,
but of roads and water-courses showing a mechanical skill such as
perhaps cannot be found in any part of the earth elsewhere as existing
as early as these must have been constructed.

The people who did this work are absolutely extinct. Many have supposed
that in the population of Central America there is still a remainder of
the blood of the people who once dwelt there, thus rendering the local
inhabitants in some degree superior to the aboriginal Indians of that
country. Not so in Peru. It is only from the structures which we find
and the conditions which attend them that, any evidence is found that
there ever was in Peru, any people superior to the dull Indians of the
mounta