compelled to endure. Doubtless the tyrant the savage, indiscriminating, and unrelenting barbarity with which he proceeded, and the tortures and torments of those whose temporal loss but eternal gain it was that they could "profess and call themselves Chris thought it necessary to evince his conviction (To be continued.) R. C. THE MAN OF SORROWS. BY GRENVILLE MELLEN. "And he arose and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, Peace, be still." Mark iv. 39. THE NECESSITY OF AN ATONEMENT, PROVED FROM THE HISTORY OF HUMAN SACRIFICES. HE universal prevalence of brought by Diodorus against the Egyptians, human sacrifices through- is supported by Plutarch, on the authority out the Gentile world, is a of Manetho. At Heliopolis also, three men decisive proof of the light were daily offered up to Lucian; which pracin which the human mind, tice Porphyry informs us, was put a stop to unaided by revelation, is disposed to by Amasis. And we are told by an Arabian view the divinity; and clearly evinces writer, Murtadi, that it had been customary how little likelihood there is in the with the Egyptians to sacrifice to the river supposition that unassisted reason Nile, a young and beautiful virgin, by flingcould discover the sufficiency of re-ing her, decked in the richest attire, into the pentance to regain the favor of an offended stream: and a vestige of this barbarous cusGod. Of this savage custom, Mr. De Paawtom remains to this day; for we learn that asserts, that there is no nation mentioned in the Egyptians annually make a clay statue history, whom we cannot reproach with hav- in the form of a woman, and throw it into ing more than once made the blood of its the river previous to the opening of the dam. citizens stream forth in holy and pious ceremonies, to appease the divinity when he appeared angry, or to move him when he appeared indolent. Of this position, both ancient and modern historians apply the fullest confirmation. Heliodorus informs us, that the Ethiopians were required by their laws to sacrifice boys to the sun, and girls to the moon. Sanchoniathon, as quoted by Philo, asserts, that among the Phoenicians, "It was customary in great and public calamities, for princes and magistrates to offer up in sacrifice to the avenging demons, the dearest of their off spring." That this cruel practice existed also among the Chinese, appears from their histories, which record the oblation of their monarch Chingtang, in pacification of their offended deity, and to avert from the nation the dreadful calamities with which it was at that time visited. This sacrifice, it is added, was pronounced by the priests to be demanded by the will of heaven: and the aged monarch is represented as supplicating at the altar, that his life may be accepted as an atonement for the sins of the people. Even the Persians, whose mild and beneficent religion appears at this day so repugnant to this horrid usage, were not exempt from its contagion. Not only were their sacred rites, like those of other nations, stained with the blood of immolated victims, as may be seen in Herodotus, Xenophon, Arrian, Ovid, Strabo, Suidas, and is fully proved by Brissonius, but Herodotus expressly pronounces it to have been the Persian custom to offer human victims by inhumation: and in support of his position adduces two striking instances of the fact; This practice is also attributed to them by Porphyry. Herodotus describes it as a custom among the Scythians, to sacrifice every hundreth man of their prisoners to their god Mars. And Keysler, who has carefully investigated the antiquities of that race, represents the spreading oaks under which they were used to perform these sanguinary rites, as being always profusely sprinkled with the blood of the expiring victims. Of the Egyp-in one of which his testimony is corroborated tians, Diodorus relates it to have been an established practice to sacrifice red-haired men at the tomb of Osiris; from which, he says, misunderstood by the Greeks, arose the fable of the bloody rites of Busiris. This charge by that of Plutarch. The ancient Indians likewise, are represented both by Sir W. Jones, and Mr. Wilkins, as having been polluted by the blood of human victims. Of the same horrid nature were the rites time, a man was every year sacrificed at the shrine of Jupiter Latialis. of the early Druids. The Massilian grove (the Pontiffs on consulting the books of Sibyls of the Gallic Druids is described by Lucan, to know if a sufficient atonement had been in terms that make the reader shudder-"that made, and finding that the offended deity every branch was reeking with human gore," continued incensed, ordered two men and two is almost the least chilling of the poetic hor- women, Greeks and Gauls, to be buried alive. rors with which he has surrounded this dread-Porphyry also assures us, that even in his ful sanctuary of Druidical superstition. We are informed that it was the custom of the Gallie Druids to set up an immense gigantic figure of a wicker man, in the texture of which they entwined above an hundred human victims, and then consumed the whole as an offering to their gods. Nor were the Druids of Mona less cruel in their religious ceremonics, than their brethren of Gaul: Tacitus represents it as their constant usage to sacrifice to their gods the prisoners taken in war: cruore capivo adolere aras, fas ha-Italicus, and by Justin. Ennius says of them, bebant. In the northern nations, these tre- Poenici sunt soliti suos sacrificare puellos. mendous mysteries were usually buried in They are reported by Diodorus to have ofthe gloom of the thickest woods. In the ex-fered two hundred victims at once; and to tended wilds of Arduenna, and the great so unnatural an extreme was this horrid suHercynian forest particularly, places set apart for this dreadful purpose abounded. The same cruel mode of appeasing their offended gods, we find ascribed to all the other heathen nations: to the Getæ, by Herodotus, to the Lucadians by Strabo, to the Goths by Jornandes, to the Gauls by Cicero, and by Cæsar, to the Heruli, by Procop, to the Britons, by Tacitus, and by Pliny, to the Germans by Tacitus, to the Carthaginians by Sanchoniathon, by Plato, by Pliny, by Silius tioned. perstition carried by this people, that it was usual for the parent himself, to slaughter the Phylarchus, as quoted by Porphyry, af-dearest and most beautiful of his offspring at firms, that of old it was a rule with every the altars of their bloody deities. Scripture Grecian state, before they marched against proves the practice to have existed in Canaan, an enemy, to supplicate their gods by human before the Israelites came thither. So that victims; and accordingly we find human sa- the universality of the practice in the ancient crifices attributed to the Thebans, Corinth-heathen world, cannot reasonably be quesians, Messenians, and Temessenses, by Pausanians; to the Lacedæmonians by Fulgentius, Theodoret, and Apollodorus; and to the Athenians by Plutarch, and it is notorious, that the Athenians, as well as the Massilians, had a custom of sacrificing a man every year, after loading him with dreadful curses, that the wrath of the gods might fall upon his head, and be turned away from the rest of the citizens. In what light then the heathens of antiquity considered their deities, and how far they were under the impression of the existence of a Supreme benevolence requiring nothing but repentance and reformation of life, may be readily inferred from this review of facts. Agreeably to the inference which these furnish, we find the reflecting Tacitus pronounce, that the gods interfere in human concerns, but to punish." 46 The practice prevailed also among the Romans, as appears not only from the devotions The subject of this number may derive so frequent in the early periods of their his- additional light from the nature of the repretory, but from the express testimonies of Livy,sentations of the Divinity, throughout the Plutarch, and Pliny. In the year of Rome heathen nations. Thus in the images of the 657, we find a law enacted in the Consulship deity among the Indians, we find an awful of Lentulus and Crassus, by which it was and terrific power the ruling feature. Thouprohibited: but it appears notwithstanding to sands of outstretched arms and hands genehave been in existence so late as in the reign rally filled with swords and daggers, bows of Trajan; for at this time three Vestal vir- and arrows, and every instrument of destrucgins having been punished for incontinence, {tion, express to the terrified worshipper the lia sibi amputabant, et furore perciti caput rotabant, cultrisque faciem musculosque totius corporis dissecabant; morsibus quoque se ipsos impetabant." And Seneca, as quoted by the same writer, confirms this report in the following passage, taken from his work on Superstition, now no longer extant: " Ille virilis sibi partes amputat, ille lacertos secat. cruel nature of the god. The collars of human skulls, the forked tongues shooting from serpent's jaws, the appendages of mutilated corses, and all the other circumstances of terrific cruelty which distinguish the black goddess, Seeva, Haree, and other of the idols of Hindostan, sufficiently manifest the genius of that religion which presented these as objects of adoration. To the hideous idols of Mex-Ubi iratos deos timent, qui sic propitios merico, one of which was of most gigantic size, entur?-Tantus est perturbatæ mentis et seseated upon huge snakes, and expressly denominated TERROR, it was usual to present the heart, torn from the breast of the human victim, and to insert it, whilst yet warm and reeking, in the jaws of the blood-thirsty divinity. The supreme god of the ancient Scythians was worshipped by them under the similitude of a naked sword; and in Valhalla, or the Hall of Slaughter, the paradise of the terrible god of the northern European regions, the cruel revelries of Woden were celebrated by deep potations from the skulls of enemies slain in battle. dibus suis pulsæ furor, ut sic Dii placentur quemadmodum ne homines quidem teterrimi. Se ipsi in templis contrucidant, vulneribus suis ac sanguine supplicant." And it deserves to be remarked that these unnatural rites, together with that most unnatural of all, human sacrifice, are pronounced by Plutarch, to have been instituted for the purpose of averting the wrath of malignant demons. Nor have these cruel modes of worship been confined to the heathens of antiquity. By the same unworthy conceptions of the Deity, the pagans of later times have been led to the same unworthy expressions of their religious feelings. Thus, in the narrative of Cooke's voyages, we are informed that it was usual with the inhabitants of the Friendly disorder, to cut off their little finger as an offering to the deity, which they deemed effi Consistent with this character of their gods, we find the worship of many of the heathen nations to consist in suffering and mortification, in cutting their flesh with knives, and scorching their limbs with fire. Of these un-Islands, when afflicted with any dangerous natural and inhuman exercises of devotion, ancient history supplies numberless instances, In the worship of Baal, as related in the bookcacious to procure their recovery: and in the of Kings; and the consecration to Moloch, as practised by the Ammonites, and not unfrequently by the Hebrews themselves, the sacred volume affords an incontestible record of this diabolical superstition. Similar practices are attested by almost every page of the profane historian. The cruel austerities of the Gymnosophist both of Africa and India, the dreadful sufferings of the initiated vota. ries of Mithra and Eleusis, the Spartan scourgings in honor of Diana, the frantic and savage rites of Bellona, and the horrid selfmutilations of the worshippers of Cybele, but too clearly evince the dreadful views entertained by the ancient heathens of the nature of their gods. Of the last named class of Pagan devotees, (to instance one as a specimen of all,) we have the following account from Augustine-"Deæ magnæ sacerdotes, qui Galli vocabantur, viri Sandwich Islands it was the custom to strike out the fore teeth, as a propitiatory sacrifice to avert the anger of the Eatooa, or divinity. If we look again to the religion of the Mexicans, we meet the same sort of savage superstition, but carried to a most unnatural excess. Clavigero says, "it makes one shudder to think of the austerities which they exercised upon themselves, either in atonement of their transgressions, or in preparation for their festivals:" and then proceeds, in this and the following sections, to give a dreadful description indeed of the barbarous self-lacerations, practised both by the Mexicans and Tlascalans, in the discharge of their religious duties: and yet he afterwards asserts, that all these, horrid as they are, must be deemed inconsiderable, when compared with the inhumanities of the ancient priests of Bellona and Cybele, of whom we have already spoken; and still more so, when contrasted with those of the penitents of the East Indies and Japan. ridian sun between the tropics;" these, with other panaceas not less tremendous, are the With good reason, indeed, has the author means whereby the infatuated worshippers of made this concluding remark; for of the va- Brahma hope to conciliate the Deity, and to rious austerities which have been at different obtain the blessings of immortality: and by times practised as means of propitiating supe- these, all hope to attain those blessings, exrior powers, there are none that can be rankedcept only the wretched race of the Chandawith those of the devotees of Hindostan at lahs, whom, by the unalterable laws of Brahthe present day. Dreadful as we find thema, no repentance, no mortification can rescue other rites that have been noticed, yet their from the doom of eternal misery; and against accumulated horrors fall infinitely short of whom the gates of happiness are for ever the penitentiary tortures endured by the In-closed. dian Yogee, the Gymnosophist of modern Now, from this enumeration of facts, it times-"to suspend themselves on high in seems not difficult to decide, whether the cages, upon trees considered sacred, refusing dictate of untutored reason be the conviction all sustenance but such as to keep the pulse of the DIVINE BENEVOLENCE, and the persuaof life just beating; to hang aloft upon ten-sion that the Supreme Being is to be conciliter-hooks, and voluntarily bear inexpressibleated by good and virtuous conduct alone: and agonies; to thrust themselves by hundreds under the wheels of immense machines that carry about their unconscious gods, where they are instantly crushed to atoms; at other times, to hurl themselves from precipices of stupendous height; now to stand up to their necks in rivers, till rapacious alligators come to devour them; now to bury themselves in snow till frozen to death; to measure with their naked bodies, trained over burning sands, the ground lying between one pagoda andligions of all ancient and modern nations, they another, distant perhaps many leagues; or to brave, with fixed eyes, the ardor of a me from this also we shall be enabled to judge what degree of credit is due to the assertion of those who pronounce, that "all men naturally apprehend the Deity to be propitious:" that "no nation whatever, either Jew or heathen, ancient or modern, appears to have had the least knowledge, or to betray the least sense of their want, of any expedient of satisfaction for sin, besides repentance and a good life:" and that "from a full review of the re appear to be utterly destitute of any thing like a doctrine of proper atonement." RECOGNITION IN A FUTURE STATE. practical when the doctrine is urged as a consolation to the bereaved, or as an inducement to the yet ungodly. NE of the most pleasing thoughts is that we shall see our friends again." This is the common ex- Man is bound to man by two ties. By the pression of persons when one all are brothers, as being the children of led to think or speak of a future state. one Heavenly Father. This constitutes a Of course, by seeing is meant, not the general relationship. By the other, there are bare recognition, but, the attendant particular relationships subsisting between feelings of those that meet after a descendants of the same earthly ancestor; long separation; that there shall be, by friendship; by love. These relationships, in Heaven, a renewal of those feelings that however pure and ennobling, have yet an bound us together when on earth. earthly character; and however more we The question how far this is true becomes may feel this relationship than that which |