Agni the divine Fire, mouth of the gods, messenger of the All-knowing, to whom is chanted the Vedic strophe, 'Agni! the sacrifice which thou encompassest whole, it goes unto the gods!'[1] The Homeric poems show the plain meaning of the hecatombs of old barbaric Greece, where the savour of the burnt offering went up in wreathing smoke to heaven, (
Greek characters).[2] Passed into a far other stage of history, men's minds had not lost sight of the archaic thought even in Porphyry's time, for he knows how the demons who desire to be gods rejoice in the libations and fumes of sacrifice, whereby their spiritual and bodily substance fattens, for this lives on the steam and vapours and is strengthened by the fumes of the blood and flesh.[3]
The view of commentators that sacrifice, as a religious act of remote antiquity and world-wide prevalence, was adopted, regulated, and sanctioned in the Jewish law, is in agreement with the general ethnography of the subject. Here sacrifice appears not with the lower conception of a gift acceptable and even beneficial to deity, but with the higher significance of devout homage or expiation for sin. As is so usual in the history of religion, the offering consisted in general of food, and the consummation of the sacrifice was by fire. To the ceremonial details of the sacrificial rites of Israel, whether prescribing the burning of the carcases of oxen and sheep or of the bloodless gifts of flour mingled with oil, there is appended again and again the explanation of the intent of the rite; it is 'an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the Lord.' The copious records of sacrifice in the Old Testament enable us to follow its expansion from the simple patriarchal forms of a pastoral tribe, to the huge and complex system organized to carry on the ancient service in a now populous and settled kingdom. Among writers on the Jewish religion, Dean Stanley has vividly por-
