Human sacrifice

“ Human sacrifice takes place in other forms, according to universal report. Thus one hears now and then that a warrior chief had his young son kill a slave or a captive in order to receive the spirit of bravery through the power of a war deity, who would impart to him the desire to perform feats of valor. ”

“ The Godhead veiled in suffering, for our sins,—
An unimagined splendor poured on earth
In sacrifice supreme,—this was a scene
Fit for the tears of angels and all men.
If he was man—a passionate human heart,
Like unto ours, but with intenser fire,
And whiter from the deep and central glow;
Who loved all men as never man before,
Who felt as never mortal all the weight
Of this world's sorrow, and whose sinless hands
Upstretched in prayer did seem, indeed, to clutch
The hand divine ”

“ The historical sacrifice was a burning-glass which focused the diffused rays of the Sun of righteousness and made them effective in the melting of human hearts. The sufferings of Christ take deepest hold upon us only when we see in them the two contrasted but complementary truths: that holiness must make penalty to follow sin, and that love must share that penalty with the transgressor. ”

“ Do we not still hang murderers throughout all Christendom as an act of worship? This is not done as political economy, but as "Divine service;" not for the conversion of man, but in the name of God,—one of the few relics of human sacrifice. "Reason is carnal," says one priest,—men accept a palpable absurdity as a "revealed truth;" "Conscience must not be trusted," says another,—and human sacrifice is readily assented to. ”

“ The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolize. ”

“ If you suppose that you can offer sacrifice, God Himself thus speaks of you as most abandoned sinners: ‘The wicked man,’ He says, ‘that sacrificeth a calf is as if he cut off a dog’s neck; and he that offereth an oblation, as if he offered swine’s blood.’ [1] Recognize herein your sacrifice, who have already poured out human blood. ”

“ When the sacrifice was made, the human feelings rose in her heart with terrible violence, and life appeared to her as one dreary blank, now that her home was shorn of its light, now that the beloved child of her heart had ceased to gladden her eyes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ These sad things must be atoned; the vicarious sacrifice must be self-made by the doer thereof—persons who unthinkingly tear down and wreck their fellows, every soul of whom might be builded up. made strong for the Right, and emulous of all great and good and noble thoughts and deeds which God's human children have ever done—and all by kindness, open-hearted conduct and friendly cheer. Heaven! how much misery and crime might be stayed by one kind and loving word! ”

“ From out of the very heart or centre of human nature...there is raised the sinless sacrifice of perfect humanity by the God Man....It is a representative sacrifice, for it consists of no unheard-of experience, of no merely symbolic ceremony, but of just those universal incidents of suffering, which, though he must have felt them with a bitterness unknown to us, are intensely human. ”

“ He had no idea of retribution after death, and he came to look upon human sacrifice as a legitimate, moral, and even divine institution. In time, such sacrifices became of almost daily occurrence at each of the numberless temples. ”

“ But he who knows the one sacrifice of Christians, which is the sacrifice offered in those places, also knows that these are not sacrifices offered to the martyrs. It is, then, neither with divine honours nor with human crimes, by which they worship their gods, that we honour our martyrs; neither do we offer sacrifices to them, or convert the crimes of the gods into their sacred rites. ”

“ In the sacrifice of human life, and in the waste of human treasure,--in its losses and in its burdens,--it affects both belligerent nations, and its sad effects of mangled bodies, of death, and of desolation, endure long after its thunders are hushed in peace. ”

“ Here we shall find it necessary to consider the origin and meaning of sacrifice in general, as it is self-evident that the notion of sacrifice is previous to the selection of the subjects for it, that of human beings differing only in degree of worth or excellence from those of any other kind. What then could induce mankind universally to imagine, that sacrifices of animals could be agreeable to those beings whom they judged superior to themselves, and the proper objects of religious adoration? ”

“ Hence the idea of sacrifice is one of perpetual and keen interest to De Maistre. Sacrifice is ideal slaughter, slaughter the one and only aim of which is the accomplishment of what is right and meet. From the earliest ages men have offered both animal and human sacrifices ”

“ Christian authors exclaim against the practice of offering human sacrifices, which, they say, is done in some countries; and those authors make those exclamations without ever reflecting that their own doctrine of salvation is founded on a human sacrifice. ”

“ While human sacrifice continued to a comparatively late period, it was the ordinary sort of sacrifice that constituted the main part of the ancient religious bond of society.1866 In the course of time the apparatus of sacrifice was elaborated—altars, temples, priests came into existence, and an immense organization was built up. ”

“ True, the fact that the human individual, as well as the animal, possesses a value for those who bring the sacrifice, also introduces the idea of a gift; added to this, moreover, in the case of human sacrifice, is the further thought that the sacrifice is a substitution for the sacrificial community. ”

“ You think that the blood of human victims is the most acceptable offering to your Maker, and worse than the ignorant pagans, who made martyrs of the blessed saints, sacrifice them on the altar of a religion which is all charity, meekness, and forgiveness. ”

“ The necessity of sacrifice, as an atonement for sin, forms an essential, though bloody, part of both the Hebrew and the Christian faiths, and history has long taught us that the slaughter of a man, woman, or child, formed, in the estimation of the Ancient Greeks, and other nations, one of the most acceptable of the forms of homage paid by a human being to the Creator. ”

“ In all probability, these words refer to the origin of human sacrifices, emanating as they did from an infernal design, which we must consider as one of the strongest characteristics of this race; and those bloody sacrifices of the primitive world seem to have stamped on the rites and customs, as well as on the traditions and sentiments, of many nations a peculiar character of gloom and sadness. ”

“ He did not lay down His life—His human life—because of God's demand to have a bloody sacrifice to satisfy His wrath or His sense of justice, to pay the penalty of man's sins, but to save mankind personally from man's enemies of the underworld by fighting against them in His assumed human and delivering mankind from hopeless subjection to the hells. ”

“ For, however absurd it may seem to us, it is a very widespread custom to sacrifice to a divinity his living representative or incarnation, whether in animal or human form. It is believed in such cases that the victim's spirit, released by sacrifice, forthwith finds a home in another body. ”

“ And here, facing this supreme religious sacrifice, we reach the summit of the tragedy, the very heart of it—the sacrifice of our own individual consciousness upon the altar of the perfected Human Consciousness, of the Divine Consciousness.
But is there really a tragedy? If we could attain to a clear vision of this anacefaleosis, if we could succeed in understanding and feeling that we were going to enrich Christ, should we hesitate for a moment in surrendering ourselves utterly to Him? ”

“ This, I think, implies, that on some occasions, human sacrifices are considered as necessary, particularly when they take such men as have, by the laws of their country, forfeited their lives, and have nothing to redeem them ”

“ On whom my grace descends, those who are marked
As vessels to the honour of their God,
May credit this strange sacrifice, and save
Their souls alive: millions shall live and die,
Who ne'er shall call upon their Saviour's name,
But, unredeemed, go to the gaping grave.
Thousands shall deem it an old woman's tale,
Such as the nurses frighten babes withal:
These, in a gulph of anguish and of flame,
Shall curse their reprobation endlessly,
Yet tenfold pangs shall force them to avow,
Even on their beds of torment, where they howl,
My honour, and the justice of their doom. ”

“ There comes One with outstretched, wounded hands, and says, 'Cast all thy burden upon Me, and I will free thee from it all.' 'Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows!' Trust in Him, in His great sacrifice, and you will find that His 'innocent blood' has a power that will liberate your conscience from its torpor, its vain excuses, its agony and despair. ”

“ And on the ordinarily accepted view of the origin of sacrifice—which regards it as a gift to propitiate a superior being—this can be easily understood as the avoidance of the worshipper of taking what belongs especially to the god, the essence of the victim’s life, the blood. ”

“ As civilization advanced, these crude concepts of sacrifice were elevated to the level of the rituals of self-abnegation, asceticism, fasting, deprivation, and the later Christian doctrine of sanctification through sorrow, suffering, and the mortification of the flesh. ”

“ My lords, you are impatient for the sacrifice—the blood which you seek is not congealed by the artificial terrors which surround your victim; it circulates warmly and unruffled, through the channels which God created for noble purposes, but which you are bent to destroy, for purposes so grievous, that they cry to heaven. ”

“ Ten thousand souls have shed streams of their sacred blood in this path, their precious lives they offered in sacrifice unto Him, hastened wrapt in holy ecstasy unto the glorious field of martyrdom, upraised the Standard of God’s Faith and writ with their life-blood upon the Tablet of the world the verses of His Divine Unity. ”

“ All history, it has been said, shows man living under an irritated God, and seeking to appease him by sacrifice of blood; the essence of all religion, it has been added, lies in that of which sacrifice is the symbol—namely, in the offering up of self, in the rendering up of our will to the will of God. ”

“ If these sacrifices, so insignificant, so valueless, and to the eye of man so powerless, were effective for their purpose,—shall not that most marvellous wonder in the whole history of the Godhead, the sacrifice of the Son of God, be effective for His? ”

“ There hath been slaughter for the sacrifice,
And slaying for the meat, but henceforth none
Shall spill the blood of life nor taste of flesh,
Seeing that knowledge grows, and life is one,
And mercy cometh to the merciful. ”

“ To sacrifice one's body is not the worst suffering, but also to sacrifice, to deny, to kill one's own soul!—You who die at least for a just cause, and who, full of sap and loaded with faith, fall like ripe fruit, how sweet is your lot beside this torture! ”

“ It is by virtue of this sacrifice that the divinely-emancipated soul comes to dwell among men, clothed with a body of flesh, content to dwell among the lowliest and least, and to be esteemed the servant of all mankind. ”

“ For after all we see now that sacrifice is of the very essence of social life. “It is expedient that ONE man should die for the people”; and not only that one man should actually die, but (what is far more important) that each man should be ready and WILLING to die in that cause, when the occasion and the need arises. Taken in its larger meanings and implications Sacrifice, as conceived in the ancient world, was a perfectly reasonable thing. ”

“ O Lord, Thou shalt open my mouth, and my lips shall show forth Thy praise. For if Thou hadst desired sacrifice, I would have given it; Thou wilt not delight in burnt-offerings. The sacrifice [acceptable] to God is a bruised spirit; a broken and a contrite heart God will not despise." [83]
Chap. xix.—Imitating these examples, let us seek after peace.
Thus the humility and godly submission of so great and illustrious men have rendered not only us, but also all the generations before us, better; even as many as have received His oracles in fear and truth. ”

“ Well, in like manner we, although sinners, plead for pardon from the King of heaven and earth for our banished friends, and with much surer hopes of success, for the gift we offer is not an earthly crown, but is the body and blood of His own well-beloved Son, Who has bled for the sins of the whole world.” The holy sacrifice is, I again repeat, the most effectual and the most powerful means we have for assisting the suffering souls in purgatory. ”

“ Within blood was contained life, hence the offering of a bloody victim was but the returning to their god, as a free-will gift that which he had bestowed, such sacrifice being regarded as the only acceptable means of grace or reconciliation. ”