thirteen hundred years before our era. Then there is the Grecian story of Agamemnon, to whom, when about to sacrifice his daughter, a stag was furnished by a goddess as a substitute. There is another Grecian fable in which a maiden was about to be sacrificed, and as the priest uplifted his knife to shed her blood the victim suddenly disappeared, and a goat of uncommon beauty stood in her place as a substitute. Another story runs thus: In Sparta the maiden Helena was about to be immolated on the altar of the gods, when an eagle carried off the knife of the priest and laid it upon the neck of a heifer, which was sacrificed in her stead. Similar stories might be produced from among many nations in the most ancient times, long before the Jews picked this up in Babylon and rewrote it, with modifications, so as to apply it to their mythical progenitor; for this fable of Abraham’s offering was not written until after their return from their Babylonish captivity—much nearer our own time than is generally suspected. Regarded as an historic account of a real transaction, this story of the attempted sacrifice of a beloved son by a venerable father is shocking in the extreme, dishonoring alike to God and to Abraham. A good God could not have done such an unnatural and cruel thing. He had no occasion to try Abraham to find out how much faith he had. He knew that already. Regarded as an astrological allegory, it is ingenious and contains a moral lesson, to wit: obedience to the voice of God and the hope of deliverance in the hour of extreme emergency. The defect in the story is, that God could trifle with a loving child, and pretend to require him to break one of his own commandments, “Thou shalt not kill,” and subject him to its own penalty, “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” It would not have availed Abraham to plead that God told him to murder his son, any more than it availed the Pocasset crank when he pleaded that God had directed him to murder his little daughter. The State of Massachusetts sent the semi-lunatic to a safe place of confinement. This story of Abraham and Isaac has led to scores and scores of murders of children by their fathers, just as the passage in the Old Testament, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” has been pleaded in justification of the cool, deliberate murder of multitudes of men, women, and children on the charge of witchcraft. The literal interpretation of what is called infallible Scripture has been the most bitter curse to deluded, priest-ridden humanity. It is the “stock in trade” of ignorant and selfish ecclesiastics to-day.