lead naturally to lying, hypocrisy, and breach of faith; and thereby accustoming the mind insensibly to be less scrupulous with regard to the choice of means for compassing its design, prepare it for the basest frauds and the most perfidious actions. This was also one of the characteristics of the Carthaginians, and it was so notorious that to signify any remarkable dishonesty it was usual to call it Punic honour, fides Punica; and to describe a knavish, deceitful mind, no expression was thought more proper and emphatical than this-a Carthaginian mind, Punicum ingenium.”*

This immoderate thirst after gain generally gave occasion in Carthage to the committing of base and unjust actions. One single example, mentioned by Livy, may prove this. In the time of a truce granted by Scipio, at the earnest entreaties of the Carthaginians, some Roman vessels, being driven by a storm on the coasts of Carthage, were seized by order of the senate and people, who could not suffer so tempting a prey to escape them. They were resolved to get money, however scandalous and dishonourable the means of acquiring it. Even in St. Austin's time, as that father informs us, they showed, on a particular occasion, that they still retained something of their ancient characteristics.

Such, therefore, was the basis of the Carthaginian character, morally deformed by a course of practical training, but over which was raised a superstructure of religious fanaticism, leading, on the other hand, to practices infinitely more revolting.

I have said their language came from Phenicia, and in it, as a vehicle, was also imported their ideas of me

* Carthaginienses fraudulenti et mendaces,-multis et variis mercatorum advenarumque sermonibus ad studium fallendi quæstûs cupiditate vocabantur.-Cic. Orat. 2 in Rull. n. 94.

taphysics. This was, therefore, the atmosphere through which shone upon them the same "dim religious light" that first dawned in Egypt; but so gross was now the medium, that the spirituality of that religion was entirely obscured; and as the natural rays of the sun, on entering a gloomy horizon, often reflect objects in a distorted form, so, through the density of this moral gloom, did the objects of Egyptian faith assume to the Carthaginian people the most hideous aspect. Ignorance is the parent of fear; and as their cupidity gave them no leisure nor inclination to cultivate literature, which might have enabled them to analyse the meaning of their religious. allegories, their ignorant fears deduced from them a system of superstition in which all the ties of humanity were torn asunder, and the tenderest feelings of nature trampled upon. And if fear was thus the origin of their gods, no less did it invest them with a character of the most vindictive nature. To appease the wrath of Saturn, the deity of second rank in their calendar, known in Scripture by the name of Moloch, human sacrifices were offered up in multitudes. This custom passed from Tyre to Carthage, and hence we may conclude its Egyptian and hieroglyphic origin. Philo mentions, that the kings of Tyre, in great dangers, used to sacrifice their sons to appease the anger of the gods. Particular persons,

desirous of averting any great calamity, took the same method, and were so very superstitious, that such as had no children purchased those of the poor, that they might not be deprived of the merit of such a sacrifice. At first, children were inhumanly burnt, either in a fiery furnace, like those in the valley of Hinnom, so often mentioned in Scripture, or in a flaming statue of Saturn. The cries of these unhappy victims were drowned by the uninterrupted noise of drums and trumpets. Mothers made it

a merit and a part of their religion to view this barbarous spectacle with dry eyes, and without so much as a groan; and if a tear or a sigh stole from them the sacrifice was less acceptable to the deity, and all the effect of it was entirely lost. Thus, strength of mind, or rather savage barbarity, was carried to such excess, that even mothers would endeavour with embraces and kisses to hush the cries of their children, lest, had the victim been offered with an unbecoming grace, and in the midst of tears, it should offend the god.

The Carthaginians retained these barbarous practices until the ruin of their city; and even their great generals yielded to the horrid custom. In an action between Gelon the Syracusan monarch, and Hamilcar, the son of Hanno the Carthaginian leader, which lasted from morning to night, we are told the latter was perpetually offering up to the gods sacrifices of living men, who were thrown on a flaming pile; and seeing his troops routed and put to flight, he himself rushed into the pile, that he might not survive his own disgrace, and to extinguish with his own blood this sacrilegious fire when he found it had proved of no service to him.

In times of pestilence they used to sacrifice numbers of children to their gods, unmoved by pity for their tender age. Diodorus relates an instance of this cruelty which must strike the reader with horror. At the time that Agathocles was going to besiege Carthage, its inhabitants, seeing the extremity to which they were reduced, imputed all their misfortunes to the great anger of Saturn, because that, instead of offering up children nobly, born, who were usually sacrificed to him, he had fraudulently been put off with the children of slaves and foreigners. To atone for this crime, two hundred children of the best families in Carthage were sacrificed to Saturn, besides

which, upwards of three hundred citizens, from a sense of their guilt of this pretended crime, voluntarily sacrificed themselves.

Seeing, therefore, to what excesses an ignorant fear will lead mankind when the venerative faculties are under its training, it is almost superfluous to notice an equally certain result of its influence in deforming the social character. Hence we are again told, "They had something austere and savage in their dispositions and genius, a haughty and imperious air, a sort of ferocity which in its first starts was deaf to either reason or remonstrance, and plunged brutally into the utmost excesses of violence. The people, cowardly and grovelling under apprehensions, were fiery and cruel in their transports; at the same time that they trembled under their magistrates, they were dreaded in their turn by their miserable vassals." In war, Livy mentions that "ill success was punished as a crime against the state; and whenever a battle was lost, the general, at his return, was almost sure of ending his life on a gibbet or scaffold. Such was the furious, cruel, and barbarous disposition of the Carthaginians, who were always ready to shed the blood of their citizens as well as of foreigners. The unheard-of tortures which they made Regulus suffer are a manifest proof of this assertion, and their whole history will furnish such instances of it as are not to be read without horror." To read such a page of history as this is indeed a sickening task, but to the moralist not without profit, as indicating the fearful extent of misery that may be brought upon one man by another, and on one nation by another, when the depths of the human heart are moved by selfish motives, when the moral and spiritual feelings are either under-trained or over-trained, and the mental faculties unenlightened.

CHAPTER III.

IN Greece, there is a striking example how much the foundation of individual, as well as national, character, is formed by the plastic influence of external circumstances. The mild climate and romantic scenery of that classic land, must have impressed their peculiar characteristics upon its earliest inhabitants. The former would shed a soothing influence over the frame, educing a corresponding moral temperament, and the latter stamp upon the soul an innate impression of the beautiful and sublime. To these native tendencies of the Greeks, there seemed only wanting an extrinsic guidance in harmony with them, to form the living models of mankind; but while much of their education was a deduction from nature itself, forming the best foundation for a course of artificial mental and moral training, the latter was derived from a foreign source- -it was an exotic planted in their native soil, producing altogether an original fruit. Their writing, commerce, and navigation, came from Phenicia; the elements of their arts, sciences, religion, and laws from Egypt. In ancient times the country was divided into very small republics, neighbours in point of locality, but differing in their customs, laws, and characters, and of hostile interests. These differences, and their natural desire of aggrandisement at the