Take our own religion.  Christianity is not an independent form of faith.  Its roots run down into the Hebrew religion, whose record is in the Old Testament; and the Hebrew religion grew out of the old Semitic faiths, and these again sprang from the ancient Babylonian religions or grew alongside of them.  So we are compelled to go far back for the origin of many of our own religious ideas.  Jesus did not claim to be the Founder of a new religion; he claimed only to bring a better interpretation of the religion of his people.  He said that he came not to destroy but to fulfill the law and the prophets.  The New Testament religion is a development of the Old Testament religion.  It is a wonderful growth.  When we go hack to the old monuments and the old documents and trace the progress of religious beliefs and practices from the earliest days to our own, we learn many things which are well worth knowing.

The central fact of religious progress is improvement in the conception of the character of God.  As the ages go by, men gradually come to think better thoughts about God.  Little by little the old crude and savage notions of deity drop out of their minds, and they learn to think of him as just and faithful and kind.

The Bible shows us many signs of this progress.  The earlier stories about God give him a far different character from that which appears in the later prophets.  It was believed by the earlier Hebrews that God desired to have them put to death all the inhabitants of the land of Canaan when they took possession of it; and when they put to the sword not only the armed men of the land, but the women and the little children, they supposed that they were obeying the command of God.  They learned better than that, after a while.

When Abraham started with Isaac for Mount Moriah, he undoubtedly thought that he should please God by putting to death his own well-beloved son; but before he had done the dreadful deed the revelation came to him that that was a terrible mistake; he saw that God was not pleased by human sacrifices.  That was a great day in the history of religion.  Because of that experience, Abraham was able to make his descendants believe the truth that had been given to him, and from that time onward human sacrifices probably ceased among the Hebrews.  A long step had been taken toward the purification of the idea of God of one of its most degrading elements.

This superstition lingered long in other faiths; probably it survived among our own ancestors after Abraham’s day.  Tennyson’s poem, “The Victim,” is a vivid picture of human sacrifice among the Teutonic peoples:—­

    “A plague upon the people fell,
      A famine after laid them low;
    Then thorpe and byre arose in fire,
      For on them brake the sudden foe;
    So thick they died the people cried,
      ‘The Gods are moved against the land.’ 
    The priest in horror about his altar