These are not peculiar to what we call pagan people. Do you remember the story of how, after the flood, Noah offers a sacrifice, and God up in heaven is represented as smelling the flavor of the burning meat and as rejoicing in it, accepting the offering, and pledging himself to guard and care for his worshippers? Do you remember, also, that story of Jacob, how, when he is on his journey, he falls asleep, and has his wonderful dream, and sees the ladder starting at his feet and ending at the throne of God, up and down which the angels are passing? When he wakes in the morning, he says, "Surely, this is holy ground"; and he takes the stone on which he slept, and sets it up as an altar, and pours out the sacred oil as an offering to his God. All the way through the Old Testament, in the history of the Hebrew people, you trace these same ideas that you find in the life of almost all the other nations of the world. It was only a step beyond this to the idea of presenting gifts to God, no matter what the nature of that gift might be. And, as men came to make him these sacred offerings, they came also to believe and in the most natural way in the world that, the more costly the gift, the more likely it was to be accepted on the part of its sublime recipient. So human sacrifices arose; for there could be no more sacred gift than for a man to offer his own child or his own wife to God. The gods were looked upon as sometimes demanding these tremendous sacrifices as the conditions of their mercy or their care. I refer you for illustration to one of the most striking and touching of Tennyson's poems. I think it is entitled "The Victim." There had been famine in the land, and the priests have announced that they have learned that the gods demand as an offering that which is most sacred and most dear to the heart of the king; and the question is as to whether it is his son, his boy, or his wife. They think it must be the boy, because he was the one that would continue the kingly line; but the wife detects the gladness of her husband when he sees that the boy is to be selected, and knows by that sense of relief that passes over his face that the priests have made a mistake, and that she herself is to be the victim. And so, in her love for him and for the people, she rushes upon the sacrificial knife.