Even the womenthe others had crowded inwere eager for Butts' instant expiation of the worst crime such a community knows.

These oblations and sacrifices were sometimes offered to the deity, whatever his form or name, as an expiation for sin, of which the soul is conscious in all ages and countries; sometimes to obtain divine favor, as in military expeditions, or to secure any object dearest to the heart, such as health, prosperity, or peace; sometimes to propitiate the deity in order to avert the calamities following his supposed wrath or vengeance.

As to the prospects for the fourth year of the war, which opened in August, 1917, American sentiment was expressed by the New York Sun, which said editorially: "We expect today as at first that the end will be catastrophic overthrow for the Kaiser and the military party of Germany, and a dreary expiation by the German people of their sin in allowing themselves to be dragooned into the most immoral enterprise of the ages.

"This anecdote illustrates the good effect of inculcating into the infant mind an abhorrence of cruelty to animals, which is too often a seed sown in the young heart, which goes on increasing daily with the growth of the child, until a fearful career of crime is ended by murder, and its necessary expiation on the scaffold.

He was willing to save the soul of his victim from the terrible expiation in the next world, to which he had so cheerfully consigned his mortal part in this.

The theologians of the Middle Ages taught this doctrine of penance and self-expiation with peculiar zeal and sincerity; and fear rather than love ruled the Christian world.