Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/83

36 acceptable sacrifice to the Fetiche is the blood of his enemies. A stranger whom accident or design brings to the devotee is a choice offering. The Saint is a murderer. War is a constant and normal state of men, not an exception as it afterwards becomes; the captives are sacrificed as a matter of course. The energies of the race are devoted to destruction; not to creative industry. It is the business of a man to war; of a slave and a woman, to till the soil. The fancied God guides the deepening battle; presides over the butchery, and canonizes the bloody hand. He is the God of Battles, teaches men to war, inspires them to fight.

It is, unfortunately, but too easy to find historical verifications of this phase of human nature. The Jews, in their early and remarkable passage from Fetichism to Polytheism and Monotheism—if we may trust the tale—resolve to exterminate all the Canaanites, millions of men, unoffending and peaceful, because the two nations worshipped different Gods, and Jehovah, the peculiar Deity of the Jews, a jealous God, demanded the destruction of the other nation, who did not worship him. Men, women, and children must be slain. The Spaniards found cannibalism in the name of God, prevailing at Mexico, and elsewhere. In our day it still continues in the South Sea Islands, under forms horrible almost as of old in the Holy Land.

But the intense demands which war makes on all the energies of men help to unfold the thinking faculty, to elevate the race and thus indirectly to promote truer no-