From these instances we may proceed, I think, to a more curious set, whose implications seem to me to have been even more grievously mistaken by later interpreters. I mean the case of children of kings or of ruling families, sacrificed in time of war or peril as additional or auxiliary deities. Thus Philo of Byblos says: “It was an ancient custom in a crisis of great danger that the ruler of a city or nation should give his beloved son to die for the whole people, as a ransom offered to the avenging demons; and the children thus offered were slain with mystic rites. So Cronus, whom the Phoenicians call Israel, being king of the land, and having an only-begotten son called Jeoud (for in the Phoenicians tongue Jeoud signifies only-begotten), dressed him in royal robes and sacrificed him upon an altar {261}in a time of war, when the country was in great danger from the enemy.” I do not think Philo is right in his gloss or guess about “the avenging demons,” but otherwise his story is interesting evidence. It helps us more or less directly to connect the common Phoenician and Hebrew child-sacrifices with this deliberate manufacture of artificial gods. I do not doubt, indeed, that the children were partly sacrificed to pre-existent and well-defined great gods; but I believe also that the practice first arose as one of deliberate manufacture of gods, and retained to the end many traces of its origin. We know that in times of national calamity the Phoenicians used thus to sacrifice their dearest to Baal. Phoenician history, we know from Porphyry, is full of such sacrifices. When the Carthaginians were defeated and besieged by Agathocles, they ascribed their disasters to the anger of the god; for whereas in former times they used to sacrifice to him their own children, they had latterly fallen (as we shall see hereafter the Khonds did) into the habit of buying children and rearing them as victims. So two hundred young people of the noblest families were picked out for sacrifice; and these were accompanied by no less than three hundred more, who volunteered to die for the fatherland. They were sacrificed by being placed, one by one, on the sloping hands of the brazen image, from which they rolled into a pit of fire. So too at Jerusalem, in moments of great danger, children were sacrificed to some Molech, whether Jahweh or another, by being placed in the fiery arms of the image at the Tophet. I will admit that in these last cases we approach very near to the mere piacular human sacrifice; but we shall see, when we come to deal with gods of cultivation, and the doctrine of the atonement, that it is difficult to draw a line between the two; while the fact that a dearly-beloved or only-begotten son is the victim--especially the son of a king of divine blood--links such cases on directly to the more obvious instances of deliberate god-making. Some such voluntary sacrifice {262}seems to me to be commemorated in the beautiful imagery of the 53d of Isaiah.