fellow, that carries the same specific being with himself, shews enough of his temper against man, but never more than when he prevails against the engagements of kindness, blood, affinity, and relation, to raise a man’s enemies out of his own house, ‘the father against the son, and the son against the father, the daughter against the mother, and the mother against the daughter,’ [Mat. x. 35;] for this is little less than an unnatural mutiny of the members against the body. 5. Fifthly, We have yet a more visible instance of his cruelty in _his bloody and tyrannical superstitions_. Look but into the rites and ways of his worship among the heathen in all ages and places, and you will find nothing but vile and ridiculous fooleries, or insolent and despiteful usages. In the former he hath driven men to villainous debaucheries, in the latter to execrable cruelties. Of the latter I shall only speak; though in the former, by debasing man to be his laughing-stock, he is cruel in his scorn and mockery. Here I might mention his tyrannical ceremonies of the lower order, such as touch not life; such were their tedious pilgrimages, as in Zeilan; their painful whippings, as of the youth of Lacedæmon at the altar of Diana; of their priests, and that with knotted cords upon their shoulders, as at Mexico and New Spain; their harsh usages in tedious fastings, stinking drenches, hard lyings upon stones, eating earth, strict forbearances of wine and commerce, their torturings and manglings of their bodies by terrible lancings and cuttings for the effusion of blood, 1 Kings xviii.; their dismembering themselves, plucking out their eyes, mangling their flesh, to cast in the idol’s face, sacrificing their own blood, as did the priests of Bellona and Dea Syria.[134] So did the kings of New Spain at their election, as Montezuma the Second, who sacrificed by drawing blood from his ears and the calves of his legs.[135] In Narsinga and Bisnagar they go their pilgrimages with knives sticking on their arms and legs till the wounded flesh festered. Some cast themselves under the wheels of the waggon on which their idol is drawn in procession.[136] Yet are all these but small matters in comparison of the bloody outrages committed upon mankind in the abominable custom of sacrificing men to him. Of this many authors give us a large account.[137] The Lacedæmonians to avert the plague sacrifice a virgin; the Athenians, by the advice of Apollo’s oracle, sent yearly to King Minos seven males and so many females to be sacrificed to appease the wrath of the god for their killing of Androgeus. The Carthaginians, being vanquished by Agathocles, king of Sicily, sacrificed two hundred noblemen’s children at once. The Romans had every year such sacrifices of men and women, of each sex two, for a long time; and this was so common among the wiser pagan nations, that whensoever they fell into danger, either of war, sicknesses,