renounce their property, and to give themselves up entirely to his guidance. The rich were required to sell their possessions and give the proceeds to the poor, or to the rulers of the church, and to content themselves with the hope of treasures in Heaven. They were forbidden to lay up for themselves treasures on earth, or even to take thought for the morrow what they should eat or what they should drink, or wherewithal they should be clothed. They were required to believe that wealth was a curse and poverty a blessing.

The members of the church acted on this principle according to the book of Acts. For as many as had houses or lands sold them, and laid the price at the Apostles' feet. It is plain from the story of Annanias and Sapphira, that people were not regarded with favor if they failed thus to dispose of their property. Those who had no property were required to offer weekly all their surplus income. When the Christian priests gained power, they demanded the tenth of the produce of the soil. They coveted the land itself, as well as the produce, and in some countries they obtained one-third, in others one-half, and in others again nearly the whole of the land of the people. They claimed the people also, and held them and worked them as slaves. The clergy and the monasteries held on to slavery after the system had been abandoned by others. The clergy were the last to set their bondmen and bondwomen free.

These priests, who preached of the blessedness of poverty to others, dwelt in princely halls and royal palaces themselves; clothed themselves in purple and scarlet; surrounded themselves with hosts of attendants, both servile and military, and rested not till they obtained first judicial, and then royal authority and power, and even made themselves kings of kings, lords of lords, the owners, the rulers, the disposers of all things under Heaven. They took all, and reduced the working classes to the most dreadful state of want and wretchedness.

And to this day, in Catholic countries, hardly any class can prosper but the priests. Even in Protestant England, the bishops of the established church live like princes, on property obtained without equivalent from the people. One bishop, the bishop of Durham, it is said, receives from the toiling classes, four hundred thousand dollars a year. From sixty to seventy millions of dollars annually, are received by the clergy of the State Church from the

producing classes. The amount expended on the dissenting churches is probably as great as that expended on the government church. The offerings of Christians, or the exactions of the various bodies of clergymen in Great Britain and Ireland, can hardly be less than one hundred and fifty millions of dollars a year. The sum expended on Christianity in the United States of America will probably be as large. Here, then, we have three hundred millions of dollars spent on one religion by two countries. Reckon next the immense amount wasted on religious tracts and books. Reckon next the time sacrificed in reading those worthless books, in brooding over their gloomy and demoralizing contents, in attending religious services, in distributing tracts and Bibles, and in fabricating and circulating slanders about dissenters, heretics and infidels. Reckon next the loss, the expense, the waste incurred by the ignorance and errors perpetuated by Christianity; the sickness, the despondency, the misery, the premature death caused by the deadly influence of Christianity, and you will have a sacrifice to this wide-spread and horrible superstition truly appalling.

The gods, or the priests, were not satisfied with the sacrifice of animals; they demanded the sacrifice of men, women and children. The worshippers of Moloch were accustomed, it is said, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire. Abraham, we are told, was commanded by God to offer up his son Isaac, as a burnt offering.

We read in Judges xi, that, when Jepthah was about to go out to war with the Ammonites, that the spirit of the Lord came upon him, and he vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, "If thou shalt without fail deliver the children of Ammon into my hands, then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace, shall surely be the Lord's; and I will offer it up for a burnt offering. On his return victorious, his daughter, his only child, came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances. When he saw her, he rent his clothes, and said, "Alas! my daughter! thou hast brought me very low; for I have opened my mouth to the Lord, and I cannot go back." And at the end of two months he did with her according to his vow.

The law with regard to such cases. may be found in Leviticus xxvii. 28, 29. "No devoted thing that a man devoteth unto the Lord of man and,beast shall be sold or redeemed: every devoted thing is most holy unto the

Lord. None devoted, which shall be devoted of men, shall be redeemed; but shall surely be put to death."

In 2 Samuel, xxi, we have an account of the sacrifice of seven persons, sons and grandsons of Saul, to make atonement for the cruelty of Saul to the Gibeonites, and to induce God to put an end to a three years' famine, by which he had been torturing and destroying the poor people for the dead king's sin.

This horrid practice of offering human victims to the gods appears to have formed a part of all the religions of antiquity. The gods of the Gentiles and the God of the Jews were alike in their relish for human blood. Every ninth month the Druids had a festival, which lasted nine days, and every day they offered nine victims. Sometimes these victims were animals; at other times they were men. Every nine years they had a more solemn festival, when all the victims sacrificed were men. In time of war the victims were usually captives; in time of peace they were slaves. But in times of great calamities they sacrificed persons of the highest rank. In times of famine, when the people were suffering from want, they sometimes sacrificed their king. The first king of Vermland, says Howitt, was offered as a burnt offering to Odin, to induce him to put away a great dearth. The kings sometimes sacrificed their own people, and even their own children, to the gods. Hacon, King of Norway, offered his son in sacrifice, to obtain a victory over his enemy, Harold. Aune, King of Sweden, sacrificed his nine sons to Odin, to prevail on him to prolong his life

The ancient Gauls, too, offered human sacrifices. It was a doctrine of their religion that nothing but the life of a man could atone for the life of a man.

The same horrid practice was found prevailing in America, at the time of its discovery by Europeans. The natives never approached the altars of their gods without sprinkling them with their own blood, and human sacrifices were deemed the most acceptable that could be offered. Every captive taken in war was sacrificed. The Spanish writers probably exaggerate, but they tell us that the Mexicans never offered less than twenty thousand human victims a year. The skulls of the victims were ranged in order, in a building erected for that purpose; and two of the officers of Cortez, we are told, counted a hundred and thirty-six thousand.

Even the ancient Greeks offered human sacrifices. Aris

tomenes, we are told, sacrificed three hundred men. Themistocles is said to have sacrificed some captive Persians, to secure the assistance of the gods against Persia. Bacchus had an altar in Arcadia, on which young damsels were beaten to death with rods. The Lacedemonians were said to have scourged children-scourged them sometimes to death-in honor of Diana Orthia. Till lately widows were

burnt on the funeral piles of their dead husbands in India; and even to this day men throw themselves under the wheels of Juggernaut and are crushed to death, and mothers still sacrifice their children by throwing them into the Ganges.

But multitudes of human sacrifices have been offered on the shrine of religion, which never went under the name of sacrifices. The human victims which the Jews offered, in their regular form of worship, were but a handful, compared with the numbers they offered in other ways. According to the Bible, the Jews, in obedience to the commands of their God, slaughtered and sacrificed whole nations. They sacrificed in this way the Ammonites. They utterly destroyed the men, the women and the little ones of every city, and left none remaining. The Lord their God, it is said, hardened the spirit of the king of the Ammonites, and made his heart obstinate, that he might deliver him and his people into the hands of the Jews for slaughter. Deut., ii., 30-36. The Lord next delivered into the hands of his savage worshippers Og, King of Bashan, and all his people, and they smote them till there was none left alive. They destroyed all the men, the women and the children of every city. Deut., iii, 3-6. God next demanded that the Jews should sacrifice all the nation of the Midianites, because some of the Midianitish women had been led to form alliances with Israelitish men. And the Jews, ever prompt in obeying the commands of their God to shed human blood and offer human victims, slaughtered the Midianites. At first they slew only the men. The women and the children they kept alive and brought them to their quarters. Moses, however, who was ope at the time, was exceedingly angry, and commande hem to kill every male among the little ones, and every woman that was a wife or a mother; and they did as they were directed. They killed from thirty to forty thousand young boys, and babes and sucklings, and all their mothers; and thirty-two thousand virgins, whom they did not destroy, they devoted to a pious doom more cruel and revolting than death.

Joshua sacrificed quite a number of nations, the Bible tells us, and he sacrificed them wholly, men, women and children, as the Lord commanded. The Hittites, the Ammonites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites-he slew them all, leaving neither man, nor child, nor mother. And in the same way the worshippers of Jehovah disposed of the Amalekites, whose ancestors were charged with having given Jehovah an affront some six hundred years before. "Go and smite Amalek," for it is thus the divine commission runs; "Go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not, but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." And they slew them all.

God did not always wait for his people to sacrifice his victims; but frequently came down himself, or sent special messengers, to take them. Thus he took some seventy thousand men of Bethshemesh, for looking into a chest of his, in which he kept his law and an old walking stick of one of his ancient priests. He also killed seventy thousand innocent men because David numbered the people.

God further required that the Jews should offer to him all such of their own people as should worship any god besides Jehovah, and all that should make an image even of Jehovah himself. He also required that they should sacrifice every dissenter from the established religion, every teacher of a new doctrine or a new worship, every layman that encroached on the priest's office, and every one that found fault with the conduct of Jehovah, or that set himself against his priests. He also demanded that all witches and wizards, all soothsayers and star-gazers, all charmers and diviners, all spiritualists and spiritual mediums, should be sacrificed as fast as they made their appearance. He next demanded all Sabbath breakers, or persons who might gather sticks, kindle a fire, cook meat, go a journey, or do any kind of work on that day. All children, too, that did not please their pious parents were to be sacrificed. All women, whom their husbands might happen to aspect, or might pretend to suspect, of unfaithfulness to their lordships, were to be disposed of by poison. How many people were thus sacrificed to the God of the Jews it is impossible to say. On one occasion one man, Elijah, sacrificed in one day four hundred and fifty priests of another god. His companion, Elisha, once sacrificed forty and two young children; and on another occasion,