Yet Mr. Frazer himself assures us that the idea of the divinity of the victim may have been forgotten; that his 'sacrifice' might seem 'the execution of a criminal.' I cite the passage: 'The divine character of the animal or man is forgotten, and he comes to be regarded merely as an ordinary victim. This is especially the case when it is a divine man who is killed. For when a nation becomes civilised, if it does not drop human sacrifices altogether, it at least selects as victims only such wretches as would be put to death at any rate. Thus, as in the Sacæan festival at Babylon, the killing of a god may come to be confounded with the execution of a criminal.'[4] Yet within eighty pages Mr. Frazer attributes the 'halo of divinity' to the happy accident which enabled the victim to die as a _recognised_ representative of a dying god.[5] Mr. Frazer puts forth his hypothesis 'with great diffidence.'[6] He thinks that he may 'have perhaps been led by the interest and importance of the subject somewhat deeper than the evidence warrants.'[7] That is certain. We have shown that the evidence, in our opinion, warrants none of the hypotheses; no, not one. It is not proved that magic is older than religion. It is disproved that general belief (as distinguished from local legend) in any age regards gods as mortal. There is no evidence, or none is given, to show that a man has ever been sacrificed for the benefit of a god whom he incarnates. There is no evidence that a real king was ever yearly sacrificed to benefit a god at Babylon, or in every city-state of early Italy, or anywhere. The idea is incredible. The evidence for any sacrifice of mock-kings is, historically, of the weakest conceivable kind. The deaths of the Sacæan mock-kings were infamous executions of criminals; they were not sacrifices, if they ever occurred at all. The date of the festival at which, if at all, they perished cannot be made to fit in with Purim or Easter. There is no evidence that the Jews borrowed the custom of killing a yearly human victim, or practised the habit. If they did, it was a month after Purim.[8] If they did, by Mr. Frazer's own statement the killing might be thought that of a vulgar malefactor,[9] and could not cast on all or on any one of the victims a halo of divinity. Finally, our own history, in the case of the Earl of Atholl (who pretended to the crown at the murder of James I. of Scotland) and in the case of Sir William Wallace (who was accused of saying that he would be crowned in Westminster Hall), proves that pretenders to royalty have been mocked by being indued with symbols of royalty. Wallace was crowned at his trial with laurel; Atholl was tortured to death with a red-hot iron crown. The Victim of Calvary was accused of aiming at a kingdom, and, like Wallace and Atholl, was crowned--with thorns. The preliminary scourging is illustrated by the tyranny of Verres in Sicily.