In Homer’s _Odyssey_, Ulysses slays animals before the ghosts of Hades, and these run up to be nourished by the blood. He draws his sword, rushes upon them, and drives them away. Then, selecting one with whom he wishes to talk, he feeds him with the invigorating vapor, and the ghost is then made strong enough to talk. But none of these sacrifices were strictly vicarious. The old gods were angry at neglect, but never had the kind of justice that a sheep or goat or cow could not appease. The Jews were not unfamiliar with human sacrifices (Lev. 27:28,29; Judg. 11:30-39), and even the early Christians are said to have offered bloody sacrifices of human beings. The deification of Jesus to correspond with the apotheosis of other personages required a divine parentage. This idea was not gotten up until the second Christian century. Justin made Jesus a second god. But the earlier Fathers did not connect the notion of the vicarious atonement with that of original sin and total depravity. Basilides maintained that penal suffering or suffering for purposes of justice of necessity implies personal criminality in the sufferer, and therefore cannot be endured by an innocent person as a substitute. Prof. Robertson Smith, LL.D., in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, in his learned article on “Sacrifice," says part: “Where we find a practice of sacrificing honorific gifts to the gods, we usually find also certain other sacrifices which resemble those already characterized, to be consumed in sacred ceremony, but differ from them, inasmuch as the sacrifice—usually a living victim—is not regarded as a tribute of honor to the god, but has a special or mystic significance. The most familiar case of this second species of sacrifice is that which the Romans distinguished from the _hostia honoraria_ by the name of _hostia piacularis_. In the former case the deity accepts a gift; in the latter, he demands a life. The former kind of sacrifice is offered by the worshipper on the basis of an established relation of friendly dependence on his divine lord; the latter is directed to appease the divine anger or to conciliate the favor of a deity on whom the worshipper has no right to count” (vol. xxi. p.. 132).