A single quotation from Mr. Savage Landor’s work on The Hairy Ainu of Japan will also serve as an excellent summary of such encyclopaedic barbaric theology. “If they have any belief at all,” he says, “it is an imperfect kind of Totemism, and the central point of that belief is their own descent from the bear. This does not include the smallest reverence for their ancestor. They capture their Totem and keep it in captivity; they speak to it and feed it; but no prayers are offered to it. When the bear is fat, it is taken out of the cage to be ill-treated and baited by all the men present.” Like the Khond Meriah and the tortures of martyrs. “It is tied to a stake” or _stauros_ or accursed tree, “and a pole is thrust into its mouth; and when the poor beast has been sufficiently tortured, pricked with pointed sticks, shot at with blunted arrows,” like St. Sebastian, “bruised with stones,” like St. Stephen, “maddened with rage and ill-usage, it is killed outright, and, ancestor as it may be, it makes the chief dish and _raison d’etre_ of a festival, where all the members of the tribe partake of its flesh. The owner of the hut in which the feast takes place then sticks the skull on to a forked pole, and sets it outside with the others at the east end of his hut. The skin is made into garments, or is spread on the ground to sleep on.” Here, I need hardly say, we have sacrifice, sacrament, orientation, the sacred head, the use of the skin as a covering of the worshipper, and all the other traits of theanthropic substitution. It is more to our purpose now, however, to remember these two cardinal points: _first, that a dying god, human or animal, is usually selected as a convenient vehicle for the {361}sins of the people; and second, that “without shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.”_ These two doctrines were commonly current all over the world, but especially in that Eastern Mediterranean world where Christianity was first evolved. Indeed, they were there so generally recognised that the writers of the earliest Christian tractates, the Apostolic Epistles, take them for granted as self-evident--as principles of which every intelligent man would at once admit the truth and cogency. CHAPTER XVII.--THE WORLD BEFORE CHRIST.