When the Israelites began to write their own history they were a highly developed race in which there were few traces of early savagery, but the habit of sacrificing the firstling was a remnant of earlier economic stress that had passed into their religion. In order to understand the Israelite branch of the Semitic race and how it was possible for it to produce, on the one hand, the humanitarian ideas that rule the world today, when at practically the same time its leaders were protesting against savage sacrifices, but a step removed from cannibalism, one can do no better than to quote the eloquent and learned Chwolson, though his theory of the innate quality of a race is open to serious objections. Commenting on the fundamental causes of the peculiarities of a people, one of which he says is the nature of “its heart and nervous system,” he thus describes the disposition of the Israelites[195]: “In reference to the disposition (Gemueth) and organization of the nervous system: the Semite possesses a deep, easily excitable disposition, and is capable of mighty feelings; he is, therefore, lively, mobile, easily excited, passionate, quickly enthused for an idea, active and enterprising, flexible and adapting, easily finding himself at home in strange relations and circumstances, accommodating himself to them without difficulty, without, however, allowing of being absorbed by them.” While, therefore, some of the Israelites developed in humanitarianism and poetry and religion, under the favourable conditions in Canaan, others, under various other influences, reverted to former practices. Among these practices was that of sacrificing the first-born child. To understand better how the people who gave to the world the Child’s Friend retained so late the habit of sacrificing children, the scope of the custom must be understood. The sacrifice of human beings to the gods, says Grimm,[196] rested on the supposition that human food was agreeable to the gods and not until man had advanced did the idea come that substitutes might be offered. In the cannibalistic stage of development these sacrifices were eaten by the sacrificers, thus establishing a connecting link between the humans and the invisible gods whom they hoped to appease.