[44] It is plain by the text that Jephthah did actually sacrifice his daughter. Doctor Calmet; in his dissertation upon Jephthah’s vow, says, that “God did not approve these vows; but when once any one had made them, he insisted upon their being fulfilled, was it only to punish those who made them, and to put a check upon them in the doing it by fear of being obliged to perform them.” This action of Jephthah is condemned by St. Augustine and almost all the fathers, although the Scripture says that he was filled with the spirit of God; and St. Paul in the eleventh chapter of his Epistle to the Hebrews, greatly praises Jephthah, exalting him even above Samuel and David. St. Jerome, in his Epistle to Julian, expresses himself thus; “Jephthah sacrificed his daughter to the Lord, and therefore the Apostle has placed him among the saints.” Here now is a diversity in opinions, concerning which it is not permitted us to pronounce a decision; nay, it is even dangerous to have any opinion of our own. [45] The death of Agag, king of the Amalekites, may be looked upon as a real sacrifice. Saul had made this prince a prisoner of war, and had admitted him to a capitulation notwithstanding that the priest and the prophet Samuel had charged him to spare no one; saying to him expressly: “Go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not, but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”—“And Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord at Gilgal.” “The zeal with which this prophet was animated,” says Calmet, “put a sword into his hand on this occasion, to revenge the honor of God, and to confound Saul.” In this melancholy adventure, we have a vow, a priest, and a victim; consequently, it is a real sacrifice. We find from history that most nations, the Chinese excepted, were wont to sacrifice human victims to the Deity; Plutarch says, that this custom prevailed even among the Romans at some certain times. Cæsar in his “Commentaries” tells us that the Germans were going to sacrifice two of his officers, whom he had sent to confer with their king, Ariovistus, had not Cæsar delivered them by beating the German army. I have in another place observed,* that this violation of the laws of nations, and the offering of human victims, which was rendered more horrible by its being done by the hands of their women, seems a little to contradict Tacitus’s panegyric on them in his treatise “_De Moribus Germanorum_,” which seems rather to have been designed as a satire upon the Roman people, than to praise the Germans, to whom he was an utter stranger. And here we may observe by the way, that Tacitus was fonder of satire than of truth; he labors to throw everything, even the most indifferent actions, into an odious point of light; and his malice pleases us as much as his style, because we are naturally fond of wit and slander.