SACRIFICES OF THE GREEKS. 465 
ceremonial on Mount Lyczus was Pelasgic. And the Agrionia and the 
sacrifices of the Athamantidz are connected with the Minyan Orchomenos, 
the seat of Pelasgic worship. So that we should have in these three cases the 
traditions of the worship of the race which preceded the Hellenes, if we were 
to base any conclusion on the unsatisfactory information which we have in 
regard to them. And there are really no other decided cases of what can be 
regarded as survivals, 
6. That the writers of the third period, influenced by the belief that the 
ordinary gods of the Greeks were demons of savage propensities, lent a ready 
ear to any tale of horror connected with their worship, and that it is in these 
writers that we hear of the human sacrifices of the Greeks; but if we place the 
evidence for these sacrifices fairly in the balance, we shall find it not so strong 
as that which could be adduced to prove that the early Christians killed infants, 
drank their blood, and indulged in indiscriminate sexual intercourse. And yet 
no one now believes these accusations against the Christians. 
In fact, the Greeks were strangers to the idea of sin until the introduction 
of Stoicism, as Sir ALEXANDER GRANT has well shown in his Aristotle, and it is 
likely that the idea was not present to the minds of the earlier Stoics. There 
is therefore, as it seems to me, no analogy between the sacrifices of the Greeks 
and the sacrifice of Golgotha. The sacrifice of Christ is, as Dr CrawForp has 
admirably brought out in his ‘“ Mysteries of Christianity,” p. 230, “ exceptional 
and unique.” But in the deeper meaning of sacrifice, the essence of which is 
self-renunciation, there is a striking parallelism between most of the Greek 
mythical sacrifices, including also the more or less historical voluntary deaths 
of Codrus and Leonidas, and the sacrifice of Christ. The oracle decrees that 
what is noblest, and most beautiful, and most fair must perish. The noblest 
and the fairest offer themselves up for their country, and present to their 
country the most beautiful sacrifice that can be offered—a pure human soul. 
And in like manner the sacrifice of Christ, not indeed devoted, like the Greek 
sacrifices, to a single land, but offered up for the whole world, is an act of obe- 
dience to the will of God, and an infinitely grand exemplification of that self- 
renunciation which constitutes the essence of all true religion. 
