Along with the prayers of a nation its sacr:fices should receive atten tion. They are strongly indicative of the national character and the religious thought. The motive of sacrifice is always to pacify or persuade the gods into some action pleasing to the worshipper, either that they will refrain from injuring him or do him some good turn. The sacrifice is always of the nature of a gift, and its value is not the intrinsic worth of the thing given, but the pain it costs the giver to part with it. Measured by motive, this reasoning is natural and correct. The African Bushmen are often seen with one or more joints of their fingers lopped off ; they have sacrificed them to appease the envious divinities, just as Polycrates threw his choicest jewel into the sea lest the gods should be jealous of his constant good fortune. The rite of circumcision, recurring among the Israelites, the ancient Egyptians, and various American tribes, was a symbol of the completer sacrifice which induces some African tribes to submit to semi-castration (Bastian), and led the devotees of Cybele to become eunuchs.
Religions are apt to demand the renunciation of the dearest. The bloody sacrifices of the Aztecs were chiefly confined to captives taken in war, but the Norse Sagas tell us that in time of famine beasts were first sacrificed; if that failed, men of the tribe were slain; and if the dearth still continued, the king himself was obliged to die, that the gods might be persuaded to send food (the Ynglynga Saga). The Mexican culture hero Qnetzalcoatl is traditionally reported to have set his face against bloody sacrifices of all kinds, and to have taught that flowers and incense, the first-fruits of the harvests, and the brilliant feathers of birds are such articles as the gods love (Saliagun); and the Hebrew teacher expressed the idea in its highest sense when be declared that the only sacrifice accept able to the Lord is a pure spirit and a contrite heart. Between this elevated conception and the finger-lopping of the poor Bushman is stretched the whole scale of religious development, which, like the ladder seen by Jacob in his vision, is " set up on the earth, and the top of it reaches to heaven." prominent part of all primitive religions, and inti mately connected with the fruition of the wish which is their common basis, was the prediction offutztre • In its simpler forms it appears as augury and divination by various means, and when more complete as prophecy. How much weight was attached to the dicta of the official augurs, haruspices, oracles, and the like in the classic days of Greece and Rome, and how often they decided the fate of armies and cities, no reader needs to be informed. As is remarked by Dr. Tiele, the power of the Hebrew prophets and seers was such that it virtually modified the royal power of Israel, in theory an absolutism, into a constitutional monarchy.
Nothing lent such aid to Cortes and his handful of soldiers in destroying the powerful state of the Aztecs as the prevalence of an ancient prophecy, derived from the light-myth of Qnetzalcoatl, that some day a white and bearded hero should come from the east and claim the land as his own. The proper word for war in a Central American dialect (the Cakchiquel) is label, literally sign or omen, no contest being initiated unless the native seers had found the omens favorable. In Peru there were about sixteen classes of soothsayers, each practising a special branch of the art—one forecasting events by the shape of grains of maize, another by the ribs on tobacco leaves, a third by the forms of smoke-clouds, and so on.
So vigorous are the survivals of these primitive notions, and so eager remains the desire in the mind of man to lift the veil that shrouds the future, that it is matter of common knowledge that in all the great cities of Christendom many persons of both sexes gain their living by minister ing to this passion of the credulous vulgar. Now-a-days it has little connection with religion, but in more primitive conditions the prognos tication of the future is essentially a part of the priestly function.
Development of Theistic philosopher Auguste Comte, in one of his triplets which has gained a certain amount of vogue, explained the growth of the idea of divinity as beginning in fetichism, advancing to polytheism, and reaching its acme in monotheism; and he classified the religions of the race in accordance with this view.
ifonotheism and have already seen that the lowest religions known are by no means mere fetichisms, and it is equally true that the highest are not monothcisnis. Even the nearest approach to a pure monotheism, that founded by Mohammed, admits the existence of numberless genii and angels who are active as ministers of the divine will. The old Hebrew faith, though maintaining that Jehovah alone was God and there was none other, did not deny the existence of other supernat ural beings, such as the "gods of the heathen," Baal, Moloch, and the rest, and distinctly taught, as in the books of Genesis and Job, the pres ence amid the spiritual cohort of " the adversary " Satan and his assist ants. The same doctrine was recognized by the early Christian Church, which taught that the deities of other religions were really existent, but that " the gods of the heathen are devils." Milton in his Paradise Lost carries out this doctrine in poetic fulness, and most forms of Christianity to-day inculcate a belief in saints, angels, and devils as efficient and imme diate actors in the affairs of daily life. This is as far from true monothe ism as possible.