the Ammonites and Moabites, the human flesheaters and sacrificers of their own children. "Thou hast taken thy sons and thy daughters and these hast thou sacrificed to be devoured." When the microscopic search of scepticism, which has sounded the seas and searched the heavens to disprove the existence of God and the divinity of the Christian religion, turns its attention to human society and can find a place on this planet where, before the coming of Christ, outside of Palestine, human life was held sacred or where a virtuous woman could be found, it will be in order for the sceptic to jeer at the Christian religion. Even to-day, where the Gospel of Christ has not gone and cleared the way and laid the foundations for decency and moral cleanliness, an honest man cannot live and bring up his children unspoiled and unpolluted. Not alone as a prophet, but as a student of history did Isaiah, thousands of years ago, say that "the nation or kingdom that will not serve God shall perish." All history proves it and as "the strength of the pack is the wolf" the strength of the nation is the individual man. What he is, society is, as society is, so is the nation.

CHAPTER XXI

FROM COPAN TO THE REGION OF MYSTERY

Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple,

Who believe that in all ages

Every human heart is human,

That in even savage bosoms, there are longings, yearnings, strivings
For the good they comprehend not,

Listen to this simple story.

-Hiawatha.

COPAN was partially inhabited when Hernandez de Chaves conquered Honduras. When in 1700, Diego Fuentes visited the forest-shrouded city, the great circus or open-air theatre still remained intact, and Copan "was a deserted city, which filled me with astonishment."

Honduras, Nicaragua, Yucatan and Guatemala have all the marks of a hoary antiquity, bristling with unsolved problems that are baffling antiquarian research and archæological wisdom. The tidal remains of an ancient civilization strew the land; we gaze upon them, examine them, shake our heads and look wise.

In my wanderings in out-of-the-way places, in the bypaths and byways outside the line of travel, and during my many sojourns with half-savage tribes, I have come face to face with habits, customs, and practices whose universality chronicles the unity of the human race, and the perpetuity

of which among all pagan peoples continuing in some form even among Christians-is, to say the least, curious if not startling. Among the great problems in the mystery of past human history the monoliths and mounds which are found on our habitable earth still tax the ingenuity of antiquarians. Beginning with the mysterious pyramids of Egypt and Cholula, Mexico, or perhaps Nagkon Wat of Farther India, these strange monuments, some of gigantic proportions, elaborately wrought-others rude, with hardly any sculpture—are scattered everywhere. To us the best known are the cromlechs like those of Stonehenge, England. But these mystic remains are found in Northern Africa, Madagascar, and all over Asia, from Mount Sinai and the Caucasus to India. The traveller passes them in Siberia, in Japan, in Western France, in Denmark, Sweden, and in Northern Germany as far as the Oder River. They are standing often alone and isolated in South and Central America, and where stone was not to be found they were built of baked and puddled earth, as in the Scioto and Mississippi valleys. And now those who have visited the Easter Islands, in the Pacific Ocean, tell us that some of the most wonderful and even terrifying monuments, rudely sculptured, are found here and there in these mysterious islands. In many localities where these weird and solitary memorials of the remote past are found, there are no quarries or huge stones, yet many of the blocks in the foundations of these structures weigh from

forty to fifty tons. Scientists and archæologists have puzzled their heads over the import of these monuments, but to me the greatest problem is how a primitive people, without a knowledge of engineering or modern machinery, and in many instances without draught animals could have moved and swung into position these immense rocks.

Again, how account for the origin and universality of serpent worship? Everywhere, everywhere before the appearance of our divine Lord upon the earth the serpent was adored. All over Asia, Africa, and America, temples were built in his honour, and even the enlightened races of Europe, such as the Roman and the Grecian, were tainted with this vile idolatry.

The serpent is the central figure in African Vaudaux worship, and among some of the negroes of Hayti and other West India Islands even to-day he is housed and venerated. If my memory is true Father Lalemant in his letter, published in the "Jesuit Relations," says that one of the Huron Indians of the priest's escort accidentally stepped upon a snake, then filled his pipe, and returning, blew tobacco smoke upon it as a peace offering. Some years ago there was a popular song called, "Never Take the Horseshoe from the Door," but neither the writer of the song nor any one of the thousands who sang and whistled it probably knew that the superstition of the horseshoe was a survival of the times when the worship of the snake was forbidden in Rome by an imperial edict.

There is no continuous problem in the melancholy annals of our race so hard to solve as the problem of serpent worship; there is no chapter in all our history so filled with mystery and pathos as the chapter dealing with the serpent. From the hour that God accomplished His will in making man to His image and likeness, the serpent enters into the life of the newly-created being, stays with him and becomes perpetuated in his offspring. From that fateful hour, among all nations unillumined by the "orient light from the Son of Justice," among all civilized and uncivilized pagan races, the serpent has survived and come down to us coiled around the pillars of the Temple of Time demanding and receiving the adoration of immortal man, exacting sacrifices from soul and body, and carrying terror and awe to the hearts of the bravest and most intelligent of God's creatures.

But let us pass on. My own church, the Church of England, that of the Jews, Greeks, Russians and German Lutherans, enforce or recommend fasting as a very beneficial and salutary spiritual mortification. It was so held by the Chaldeans, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the ancient Jews, and antedates the deluge. In times past it was universal, especially among the Semitic and Hamitic races. The Ninevites, to avert the destruction of their city, imposed a fast even upon the domestic animals, and the royal prophet David, pleading for mercy reminds God that "I humbled my soul with fasting."