What thus took place in Greece and Rome is found likewise amongst almost all the Eastern and Western peoples. The most cruel human sacrifices were nowhere more frequent than among the idolatrous races of Shem, whether Canaanites, Phœnicians, or Carthaginians. These specially offered the eldest or the only son. Egyptian, Persian, Arabian, the most ancient Indian history, and that of the Northern peoples, Scythians, Goths, Russians, Germans, Gauls, British, and the Celts in general, give us examples of the same custom. The conclusion from all this is, how strong and general in the religious conscience of all ancient peoples was the sense of sinful man's need to be purified and reconciled with God, and that the means of such reconcilement were thought to be in the vicarious shedding of human blood. At any rate, we may draw from this custom a corroboration of the meaning which lay in the rite of bloody sacrifice of animals, that the vicarious offering of an animal's life, which was deemed to be seated in the blood, was made in the stead of a human life as a ransom for it, as is exactly expressed in the lines of Ovid— "Cor pro corde precor, pro fibris accipe fibras, Hanc animam vobis pro meliore damus," —_Ovid_, _Fasti_, 6, 161. The vicarious character of animal sacrifice is shown in the Egyptian usage, wherein a seal was put upon oxen found pure and spotless for sacrifice, which represented a man kneeling with hands bound behind his back, and a sword put to his throat, while the bystanders lamented the slaughtered animal and struck themselves on the breast. The same idea that the victim was a ransom for man's life is also found in the Indian sacrificial ritual.[95] The institution of bloody sacrifice, then, was not merely an instinctive confession by man of guilt before God, though this confession was contained in it in an eminent degree, but sprung from a direct divine appointment. This conclusion is borne in upon the mind by its existence every where, and by the astonishing force with which it seemed to hold all parts of human life in its grasp. Such an influence, again, shows the extent to which, in the original constitution of things, all human life was bound up in a dependence upon God. Not mental acts only, acts of adoration, thanksgiving, petition, and expiation were enjoined, but all these were expressed in a visible, corporeal action, and associated with it. It is precisely in this association that I trace the stamp of the divine appointment, as well as a seal of permanence, which is shown in the unbroken maintenance of the rite through so many shiftings of races and revolutions of governments in the lapse of so many centuries.