n India, when a new colony or city was founded, in order to insure its
prosperity, large numbers of children were delivered over as a bribe or
offering of reconciliation to the god of virility. The enormous extent
to which human sacrifice has prevailed in India, in Egypt, in Mexico,
among the Carthaginians, the Jews, the Druids, and even among the Greeks
and Romans, is well attested.

From the records of extant history, it would seem that human sacrifice
usually accompanies a certain stage of sun-worship. Among the Aztecs in
Mexico, a country in which the sun was a universal object of reverence
and in which one of the prescribed duties of the boys trained in the
temple was that of keeping alive the sacred fires, the immolation of
victims became the most prominent feature of their public worship. We
are distinctly told, however, that human sacrifice was not formerly
practiced in Mexico, but that finally here as elsewhere, the idea became
prevalent that by sacrificing human victims to the god of Destruction,
his wrath might be appeased and the people saved from his vengeance. It
is stated that human sacrifices were adopted by the Aztecs early in the
fourteenth century, about two hundred years before the conquest. "Rare
at first, they became more frequent with the wider extent of their
empire; till, at length, almost every festival was closed with this
cruel abomination."

Notwithstanding these atrocities, in their conceptions of a future state
of existence, and especially in their disposition of the unregenerate
after death, are to be observed certain traces of human feeling and
refined sensibility which are difficult to reconcile with the cruelty
practiced in their religious rites, and which bear a striking contrast
to the physical torture, to which after death the wicked are subjected
not only in Mexico, but in countries professing a high stage of
civilization and culture.

Of their religious observances, those which had doubtless been inherited
from an older civilization, Prescott, quoting from Torquemada and
Sahagun, says:

"Many of their ceremonies were of a light and cheerful complexion,
consisting of the national songs and dances, in which both sexes joined.
Processions were made of women and children crowned with garlands and
bearing offerings of fruits, the ripened maize, or the sweet incense
of copal and other odoriferous gums, while the altars of the deity were
stained with no blood save that of animals. Th