le stood around
assenting and rejoicing, because the rite meant salvation to themselves
and their children. A man who took a captive in war gave him to the
priest to be sacrificed, and he might not eat of the flesh, "since the
victim was in a sense his son," that is, took the place of his son as a
vicarious sacrifice for himself. They also sacrificed their own
infants.[1958] Child sacrifice expresses the deepest horror and
suffering produced by experience of the human lot. Men must do it. Their
interests demanded it, however much it might pain them. Human sacrifices
may be said to have been universal. They lasted down to the
half-civilized stage of all nations and sporadically even later,[1959]
and they have barely ceased amongst the present half-civilized
peoples.[1960] They are not primarily religious. They are a reaction of
men under the experience of the ills of life, inventing a world
philosophy and putting agents behind it, in order to have something, if
it be only a delusion, to which hope of escape can attach. Human
sacrifices are based on an inference or deduction. There is behind them
an assumption as to the character and logic of the superior powers who
rule the aleatory interest. It is not until skepticism arises as to this
assumption that the usage can be given up.

+607. Beast sacrifice substituted for human sacrifice.+ In the case of
Abraham and Isaac, the former was "tried" by God, apparently meaning
that he underwent some doubt whether he ought not to sacrifice his son
as other west Semites did theirs, and whether a beast would not suffice
(Gen. xxii. 7). For his descendants the legend fixed the usage and
doctrine (verse 13), different from that of the other west Semites, that
a beast was a due substitute. The Chaldees followed the same
reasoning.[1961] According to the mythology of the Egyptians there was a
great destruction of men in the reign of the god Ra, but when he mounted
to the sky he replaced the sacrifice of men by that of beasts.[1962] In
the tragedy of _Iphigenia_, Iphigenia is not slain. Artemis snatches her
away and puts a hind in her place. Robertson Smith[1963] thinks that the
notion of the ancients that the sacrifice of human beings was anterior
to that of beasts, and that the latter were substitutes, was a "false
inference from traditional forms of ritual that had ceased to be
understood." At Hierapolis sacrificed children were called oxen.[1964]
All the Baals demanded human sacrifice