ants, seeing the extremity to which they were
reduced, imputed all their misfortunes to the just anger of Saturn,
because that, instead of offering up children nobly born, who were usually
sacrificed to him, there had been fraudulently substituted in their stead
the children of slaves and foreigners. To atone for this crime, two
hundred children of the best families in Carthage were sacrificed to
Saturn; besides which, upwards of three hundred citizens, from a sense of
their guilt of this pretended crime, voluntarily sacrificed themselves.
Diodorus adds, that there was a brazen statue of Saturn, the hands of
which were turned downward; so that when a child was laid on them, it
dropped immediately into a hollow, where was a fiery furnace.

Can this, says Plutarch,(525) be called worshipping the gods? Can we be
said to entertain an honourable idea of them, if we suppose that they are
pleased with slaughter, thirsty of human blood, and capable of requiring
or accepting such offerings? Religion, says this judicious author,(526) is
placed between two rocks, that are equally dangerous to man, and injurious
to the deity, I mean impiety and superstition. The one, from an
affectation of free-thinking, believes nothing; and the other, from a
blind weakness, believes all things. Impiety, to rid itself of a terror
which galls it, denies the very existence of the gods: whilst
superstition, to calm its fears, capriciously forges gods, which it makes
not only the friends, but protectors and models, of crimes. Had it not
been better, says he further,(527) for the Carthaginians to have had
originally a Critias, or a Diagoras, who were open and undisguised
atheists, for their lawgivers, than to have established so frantic and
wicked a religion? Could the Typhons and the giants, (the avowed enemies
of the gods,) had they gained a victory over them, have established more
abominable sacrifices?

Such were the sentiments which a heathen entertained of this part of the
Carthaginian worship. One would indeed scarce believe that mankind were
capable of such madness and frenzy. Men do not generally of themselves
entertain ideas so destructive of all that nature considers as most
sacred, as to sacrifice, to murder, their children with their own hands,
and to throw them in cool blood into fiery furnaces! Sentiments so
unnatural and barbarous, and yet adopted by whole nations, and even by the
most civilized, by the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Gauls