Читать книгу Dæmonologia Sacra; or, A Treatise of Satan's Temptations. In Three Parts онлайн

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[9.] Lastly, Let us call to mind how long the devil domineered in the world at this rate of cruelty. When the world grew to a freer use of reason and greater exercise of civility, they found out ways of mitigation, and changed these barbarous rites into more tolerable sacrifices; as in Laodicea, they substituted a hart to be sacrificed instead of a virgin; in Cyprus, an ox was put instead of a man; in Egypt, waxen images instead of men. Images of straw at Rome were cast into Tiber in the place of living men; and the terrible burnings of Moloch, which was not peculiar only to the nations near to Canaan, but was in use also at Carthage, and found in the American islands by the Spaniards; the like brazen images were also found in Lodovicus Vives his time, by the French, in an island called by them Carolina.148 These were at last changed into a februation,149 and instead of burning their children, they only passed them betwixt two fires; but it was long before it came to this. In the time of Socrates, human sacrifices were in use at Carthage, and they continued in the Roman provinces till the time of Tertullian, Eusebius, and Lactantius; though they had been severely forbidden by Augustus Cæsar, and afterward by Tiberius, who was forced to crucify some of the priests that dared to offer such sacrifices, to affright them from those barbarous customs. In other places of the world, how long such things continued, who can tell, especially seeing they were found at Carolina not so very long since?