In Eastern Central Africa, "if a freeman were to set fire to the grass or reeds beside a lake, and cause a great conflagration close to the chosen abode of the deity, he is liable to be offered up to the god that is thus annoyed," but if he be the owner of many slaves he can easily redeem himself by offering one of them in his place.[241] The Ojibways, it is said, were once visited with an epidemic, which they regarded as a divine punishment sent them on account of their wickedness; and when all other efforts failed, "it was decided that the most beautiful girl of the tribe should enter a canoe, push into the channel just above the Sault, and throw away her paddle."[242] In B[oe]otia, a drunken man having killed a priest of Dionysus Aegobolus, and a pestilence having broken out immediately after, the calamity was regarded as a judgment on the people for the sacrilege, and the oracle of Delphi ordered them to expiate it by sacrificing to the god a blooming boy.[243] In his work on the Jews, Philo of Byblus states that "it was the custom among the ancients in cases of great dangers, that the rulers of a city or a nation, in order to avert universal destruction, should give the dearest of their children to be killed as a ransom offered to avenging demons."[244] The idea that sins could be expiated by the death of one who {67} had not deserved it, was familiar to the Hebrews. It was said that "the death of the righteous makes atonement."[245] The passage in Isaiah liii. 12 was interpreted of Moses, who "poured out his soul unto death[246] and was numbered with the transgressors (the generation that died in the wilderness) and bare the sin of many "that he might atone for the sin of the golden calf.[247] Ezekiel suffered "that he might wipe out the transgressions of Israel."[248] And of the Maccabaean martyrs it is said, "Having become as it were a vicarious expiation for the sins of the nation, and through the blood of those godly men and their atoning death, divine providence saved Israel which had before been evil entreated."[249] In these cases, of course, there was no sacrifice in the proper sense of the term, but they obviously illustrate the same characteristic of the divine mind. In fact, the death of Christ, by which he atoned and obliterated the sins of all ages, was conceived as a sacrifice, or spoken of in sacrificial figures.[250] [Footnote 241: Macdonald, _Africana_, i. 96 _sq._] [Footnote 242: Dorman, _Origin of Primitive Superstitions_, p. 208.] [Footnote 243: Pausanias, ix. 8. 2.] [Footnote 244: Eusebius, _Praeparatio Evangelica_, i. 10. 40 (Migne, _Patrologia_, Ser. Gr. xxi. 85).] [Footnote 245: Moore, in Cheyne and Black, _Encyclopaedia Biblica_, iv. 4226.] [Footnote 246: _Exodus_, xxxii. 32.] [Footnote 247: _S[=o][t.][=a]h_, 14 A, quoted by Moore, _loc. cit._ col. 4226.] [Footnote 248: _Sanhedrin_, 39 A, quoted _ibid._ col. 4226.] [Footnote 249: _4 Maccabaeans_, xvii. 22, quoted _ibid._ col. 4232.]