Human sacrifice, Gentlemen, appears to have been a universal practice; but wherever the human sympathies developed themselves rapidly, it was early superseded by various substituted rites which it was supposed might with advantage replace it. Such were flagellation, mutilation of some unessential part of the body, or the emission of a certain quantity of blood. This last practice, in particular, might be regarded as an act of individual devotion, a gift made to the gods by the worshipper himself out of his own very substance. The priesthood of Quetzalcoatl, who had little taste for human sacrifices, seem to have introduced this method of propitiating the gods by giving them one's own blood; and the practice of drawing it from the tongue, the lips, the nose, the ears or the bosom, came to be the chief form of expression of individual piety and penitence in Central America and in Mexico. The priests in particular owed it to their special character to draw their blood for the benefit of the gods, and nothing could be stranger than the refined methods they adopted to accomplish this end. For instance, they would pass strings or splinters through their lips or ears and so draw a little blood. But then a fresh string or a fresh splinter must be added every day, and so it might go on indefinitely, for the more there were, the more meritorious was the act; nor can we doubt that the idea of the suffering endured enhancing the merit of the deed itself, was already widely spread in Mexico. There was a system of Mexican _asceticism_, too, specially characterized by the long fasts which the faithful, and more particularly the priests, endured. Indeed, fasting is one of the most general and ancient forms of adoration. It rests, in the first place, on an instinctive feeling that a man is more worthy to present himself before the divine beings when fasting than when stuffed with food; and, in the second place, on the fact that fasting is shown by experience to promote dreams, hallucinations, extasies and so forth, which have always been considered as so many forms of communication with the deity.[24] It was only later that fasting became the sign and index of mourning, and therefore of sincere repentance and profound sorrow. Mexico had its solitaries or hermits, too, who sought to enter into closer communion with the gods by living in the desert under conditions of the severest asceticism. Are we not once more tempted to exclaim that there is nothing new under the sun? But the devotees of the ancient Mexican religion had other methods of uniting themselves substantially and corporeally with their gods; and in accordance with the notions which we have seen were accredited by their religion, they had developed a kind (or kinds) of _communion_ from which, with a little theology, a regular doctrine of transubstantiation might have been drawn.