Besides the sacrifice of children, there was another species which was customary and particularly striking, and in one respect even more worthy the historian's attention--I mean the sacrifice of pure youths. I may here again enforce the maxim which I have before laid down--namely, that error is the most appalling when it is connected in its origin, or mixed up in its principle, with some confused notion--some profound, though obscure, feeling of the truth. Bearing this in mind, we shall find that the enigmatic lamentation of Lamech[59] over his mysterious slaying of a stripling, occurring in the Mosaic account of the Cainites, would seem to indicate that human sacrifices, and especially this particular kind, had their origin among the race of Cain, deeply imbued even at that early period with anti-christian errors; and that an unhappy delusion--a confused anticipation of a real necessity and of a future reality, contributed to the institution of these sacrifices. Of that great mystery of truth, which the holy Patriarch of the Hebrews, with a prophetic intuition, had discerned in the sacrifice of his well-beloved son commanded him by God, but through the divine mercy not consummated--of this great mystery, we say, a diabolic imitation may have led to the human sacrifices by the early Heathens. But these sacrifices were more widely diffused, even in the Druidical North, and they continued down to a much later period than is commonly supposed, or at present asserted. Thus, for instance, the anti-christian Emperor Julian sought to revive them, in order to promote the infernal purposes of his dark magical rites. We are so habituated to look on the divinities and beautiful fables of ancient Greece, as the fairy creations of poetry, that we are painfully surprised when we unexpectedly stumble on some historical fact, which discloses the true spirit and internal essence of polytheism--the fact, for instance, that Themistocles himself, the deliverer of Greece, offered up three youths in sacrifice.