tonly and injuriously, (as they were perpetually among the ancients,) with the sole view of oppressing and enslaving an innocent and unoffending people. A thirst of power and of conquest has given way to more rational and humane pursuits; a certain gentleness of manners mixes itself in the warmest contentions; and even where recourse to arms is found unavoidable, there generally appears on all sides a mutual disposition to soften and alleviate, as much as possible, those dreadful evils which are, to a certain degree, inseparable from national contests. They who suffer in the field are now almost the only sufferers. The rest, though vanquished, are neither enslaved nor put to death. They are treated commonly with lenity and tenderness; and even when obliged to pass under the dominion of a foreign master, are sometimes benefited instead of being injured by the change.*

• The reader will perceive that all these observations relate solely to nations professing and practising Christianity. Where Christianity is extinguished, and philosophy substituted in its room, there you immediately see all the savageness of ancient Paganism regaining its empire over the mind, and manifesting its ferocious spirit in war, in civil dissension, in its laws, its punishments, and every other great concern of human life.

F

III. There is still another very remarkable instance in which the Gospel has put a stop to a species of cruelty of the most atrocious nature; and that is, the entire abolition of human sacrifices. This horrible practice prevailed throughout every region of the heathen world, to a degree which is almost incredible, and still prevails in many savage countries, where Christianity has not yet reached. There are incontestable proofs of its having subsisted among the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Persians, the Phoenicians, and all the various nations of the east.*

* PORPHYRY Пeρi Аπоxns, lib. xi., s. 27. HEROD. lib. 7. It appears also to have prevailed to a dreadful degree among the ancient Hindoos. See MAURICE'S Indian Antiquities, vol. i., pp. 152-337. The vedas themselves, that is, the sacred books of the Hindoos, enjoined it, p. 162. See also in pp. 181-188, the horrible description of the black goddess Callee, to whom human sacrifices were anciently offered in Hindostan. From a very interesting publication by MR. BUCHANAN, one of the Chaplains at Calcutta, called "A Memoir on the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establishment in India," it appears that human sacrifices still subsist among the Hindoos. Death is inflicted in various ways in their sacred rites. Children are sacrificed by their parents to Gunga. Men and women drown themselves in the Ganges, in the places reputed holy. They devote themselves to death by falling under the wheels of the machine which carries their gods. Widows are burned and buried alive with their deceased husbands. And it was calculated, by the late learned Mr. William Chambers, that the widows who perish

It was, we all know, one of the crying sins of the Canaanites, one of the causes of their extermination by the hands of the Israelites, and one of the principal reasons of the many peremptory and tremendous prohibitions to the latter, not to have the slightest commerce or communication with those monsters of cruelty. Deut. xii. 29—32. Yet all these prohibitions did not avail to preserve them entirely free from infection. They suffered themselves to be sometimes drawn into this prevailing and detestable crime, and "offered up their sons and their daughters unto devils." Psalm cvi. 37. The baneful contagion spread like a pestilence over every part of Asia, Africa, and Europe. Noclimate, no government, no state of civilization,

by this self-devotedness, in the northern provinces of Hindostan alone, are not less than ten thousand annually.-App., pp. 95.98. This shows, in the strongest point of view, of what infinite importance it is to communicate the light of the Gospel to heathen nations, as it is the only effectual means of extirpating the savage customs to which they are all more or less addicted, especially that of human sacrifices. Christianity has already annihilated this horrible practice wherever it has been introduced. Does it not then become the British Government, is it not the duty of a Christian kingdom, to impart to their pagan subjects in India the blessings of the Gospel? which can alone completely civilize and humanize them, and which the above-mentioned Memoir shows to be perfectly practicable, if a sufficient ecclesiastical establishment is allowed to that country.

no mode of

pagan superstition, was free from it. Even the Greeks and Romans, though less involved in this guilt than many other nations, were not altogether untainted with it. On great and extraordinary occasions, they had recourse to that which was esteemed the most valuable, the most efficacious, and most meritorious sacrifice that could be offered to the gods,—the effusion of human blood.* But among other more barbarous nations, it took a firmer and a wider root. The Scythians and Thracians, the Gauls and the Germans, were strongly addicted to it; and even this island, where benevolence and humanity have now (thanks to the Gospel) fixed their seat; this island was, at one time, (under the gloomy and ferocious despotism of the Druids,) polluted with the religious murder of its wretched inhabitants. The evil reached from one end of the globe to the other; and on the first discovery of America, it was found that the

• PLUTARCH, in the Lives of Themistocles, Marcellus, and Aristides. Livy, lib. xxii., c. 57. FLORUS, lib. i., c. 13. PROCOPIUS de Bell. Goth., lib. ii., p. 38. VIRG. En. x.

† HEROD., lib. iv. TACIT. Annal. xiii. c. 57. De Moribus German., 9. CESAR de Bell, Gall., lib. vi., C. 15, 18. Histoire Philosophique et Politique, &c., vol. vi., p. 175. MAURICE on India, p. 159.

southern hemisphere was even more deeply contaminated with this crime than the northern. In the midst of wealth, luxury, magnificence, and many of the polished arts of life, Montezuma offered twenty thousand human victims every year to the sun.* In one of the most powerful kingdoms of Africa + the same savage superstition still exists; and our own navigators found it established in every new-discovered island throughout the whole extent of the vast Pacific

ocean.

What a picture does this present to us of human nature unsubdued by grace, and of human reason (that is, of natural religion, or, as it is now by the courtesy of the times called, philosophy) unassisted by revelation! And what a deep and grateful sense ought it to impress on our minds, of the infinite obligations we owe to the Gospel, which has rescued us from this, as well as from the many other abominations, enormities, and cruelties of Paganism! Wherever the divine light of Christianity broke forth, at

Introduction to MICKLE'S Translation of the Lusiad, p. 7, note; and ROBERTSON'S History of America, vol. iii., p. 199, and note 31.

† Kingdom of Dahomi.

Cook's last Voyage, vol. ii., p. 203.