There is nothing peculiar to the Semites either in the general or in the particular usage, both being once nearly universal; but it is with the Semites that we are here specially concerned. The story of Abraham and Isaac, to say nothing of that of Jephthah's daughter, is a finger-post in the evolution of religion, being inferribly a humane myth to promote the substitution of animal for human sacrifice. And the Phoenician myth of "Ieoud," the "only-begotten" son of King Kronos, "whom the Phoenicians call Israel," sacrificed by his father at a time of national danger, after being dressed in the trappings of royalty, [56] points towards the historic roots of Christianity. Again and again we meet the conception of the "only-begotten" "Son of the Father"--Father Abraham, Father Kronos, Father Israel, the Father-King--as a special sacrifice in Hebrew and other Semitic history. Kronos is a Semitic God; and in connection with the Roman Saturnalia we have the record of a Greek oracle commanding to "send a man to the Father"--that is, to Kronos. [57] What is certain is that sacrifices of kings, which were at one stage of social evolution normal, [58] inevitably tended to take other tribal or communal forms; and a multitude of rites preserved plain marks of the regal origin. Kings would inevitably pass off their original tragic burden; the community, bent on the safeguard of sacrifice, shifted it in turn. [59] Sacrifice of some kind, it was felt, there must be, to avert divine wrath: [60] that conviction lies at the base of the Christian as of the Jewish religion: it is fundamental to all primitive religion; and it is happily beyond our power to realize save symbolically the immeasurable human slaughter that the religious conviction has involved. Primarily, voluntary victims were desired; and in Roman and Japanese history there are special or general records of their being forthcoming, annually or in times of emergency. [61] Even in the case of animal sacrifice, the Romans had a trick of putting barley in the victim's ear to make him bow his head as if in submission. [62] But as regards human sacrifices, which were felt to be specially efficacious, the progression was inevitable from willing to compelled victims; and out of the multitude of the forms of human sacrifice, for which war captives and slaves at some stages supplied a large proportion of the victims, we single that of the evolution from the voluntary scape-goat or the sacrificed king or messenger, through the victim "bought with a price," to the released criminal or other desperate or resigned person bribed with a period of licence and abundance to die for the community at the end of it.