Revolting as this whole picture is, it represents as we know a mere thumbnail sketch of the awful practices of human sacrifice all over the world. We hold up our hands in horror at the thought of Huitzilopochtli dropping children from his fingers into the flames, but we have to remember that our own most Christian Saint Augustine was content to describe unbaptized infants as crawling for ever about the floor of Hell! What sort of god, we may ask, did Augustine worship? The Being who could condemn children to such a fate was certainly no better than the Mexican Idol. And yet Augustine was a great and noble man, with some by no means unworthy conceptions of the greatness of his God. In the same way the Aztecs were in many respects a refined and artistic people, and their religion was not all superstition and bloodshed. Prescott says of them (1) that they believed in a supreme Creator and Lord "omnipresent, knowing all thoughts, giving all gifts, without whom Man is as nothing--invisible, incorporeal, one God, of perfect perfection and purity, under whose wings we find repose and a sure defence." How can we reconcile St. Augustine with his own devilish creed, or the religious belief of the Aztecs with their unspeakable cruelties? Perhaps we can only reconcile them by remembering out of what deeps of barbarism and what nightmares of haunting Fear, man has slowly emerged--and is even now only slowly emerging; by remembering also that the ancient ceremonies and rituals of Magic and Fear remained on and were cultivated by the multitude in each nation long after the bolder and nobler spirits had attained to breathe a purer air; by remembering that even to the present day in each individual the Old and the New are for a long period thus intricately intertangled. It is hard to believe that the practice of human and animal sacrifice (with whatever revolting details) should have been cultivated by nine-tenths of the human race over the globe out of sheer perversity and without some reason which at any rate to the perpetrators themselves appeared commanding and convincing. To-day (1918) we are witnessing in the Great European War a carnival of human slaughter which in magnitude and barbarity eclipses in one stroke all the accumulated ceremonial sacrifices of historical ages; and when we ask the why and wherefore of this horrid spectacle we are told, apparently in all sincerity, and by both the parties engaged, of the noble objects and commanding moralities which inspire and compel it. We can hardly, in this last case, disbelieve altogether in the genuineness of the plea, so why should we do so in the former case? In both cases we perceive that underneath the surface pretexts and moralities Fear is and was the great urging and commanding force. (1) Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, ch. 3.