Holy Sacrifice is over.

*264 Q. What is a sacrifice?
A. A sacrifice is the offering of an object by a priest to God alone,
and the consuming of it to acknowledge that He is the Creator and Lord
of all things.

"Sacrifice." From the very earliest history of man we find people--for
example, Abel, Noe, etc.--offering up sacrifice to God; that is, taking
something and offering it to God, and then destroying it to show that
they believed God to be the Master of life and death, and the Supreme
Lord of all things. These offerings were sometimes plants or fruits, but
most frequently animals.

When men lost the knowledge of the true God and began to worship idols
of wood and stone, they began or continued to offer sacrifice to these
false gods. Very often, too, they sacrificed human beings to please, as
they imagined, these gods. They believed there was a god for
everything--a god for the ocean, a god for thunder, a god for wind, for
war, etc.; and when anything happened that frightened or injured the
people, they believed that some of these gods were offended, and offered
up sacrifice to pacify them. They had a temple in Rome called the
Pantheon, or temple of all the gods, and here they kept the idols of all
the gods they could think of or know. At Athens, they were afraid of
neglecting any god whom they might thus give offense, and so they had an
altar for the unknown god. When St. Paul came to preach, he saw this
altar to the unknown god, and told them that was the God he came to
preach about. (Acts 17). He preached to them the existence of the true
God, and showed them that there is only one God and not many gods.

They did not have these idols of wood and stone in their temples for the
same reason that we have images in our churches, because they believed
that the idols were really gods, and offered sacrifice to them, whereas
we know that our images are the works of men. Near the city of Jerusalem
there was a great idol named Molech, to which parents offered their
infants in sacrifice. We know, too, from the history of this country
that the Indians used to send a beautiful young girl in a white canoe
over the falls of Niagara every year, as a sacrifice offered to the god
of the falls. Even yet human sacrifices are offered up on savage
islands. Sometimes certain animals were selected to be heathen gods. The
people who worship idols, animals, or other things of that kind as gods
are called pagans, idolaters, or heathens