** It may help us to understand how the sacrifice of an animal may atone for human life, if we notice how in South Africa a Zulu will redeem a lost child from the finder by a bullock. The legend is of course far older than the record of it which reaches us. In a notable passage in Ezekiel xx. 25, 26, the Lord declares that he had given his people "statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live." And he continues, "I polluted them in their own gifts in that they cause to pass through _the fire_ all that openeth the womb, that I might make them desolate, to the end that they might know that I am the Lord." The fact that the very same words are used in Ezekiel which are found in Exodus xiii. 12, at once suggests that originally the passover was a human sacrifice, and that of the most abominable kind--the offering of the firstborn--and that the story of the Lord slaying the firstborn of Egypt was an invention to account for the relics of the custom. We know that such sacrifices did remain as part of the Jewish religion. Ezekiel himself says that when they had slain their children to their idols, they came the same day in the sanctuary to profane it (xxiii. 39). Micah argues against the barbarous practice: "Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?" (vi. 6). Two kings of Judah, Ahaz and Manasseh, are recorded to have offered up their children as burnt offerings (2 Chron. xxviii. 3, xxxiii. 6), as upon one occasion did the king of Moab (2 Kings iii. 27). 2 Chron. xxx., in relating how Hezekiah commanded all Israel to keep the Passover, says that "they had not done it of a long time in such sort as it was written," and relates how the Levites were ashamed and many yet did eat the Passover otherwise than it was written. And in the account of how Josiah broke down the altars which had been set up by Ahaz and Manasseh one reads "surely there was not held such a Passover from the days of the judges." In other words, it had never been kept in the same fashion within human memory. The keeping of the Passover had been different before this reformation, just as until the age of Hezekiah the Jews worshipped a brazen serpent, which they afterwards accounted for by ascribing it to Moses, the law-giver who had prohibited all idolatry. On the eve of the Passover, to the present day, the firstborn son among the Jews, who is of full age--i.e., thirteen--fasts. This we take to be a rudimentary survival.