In this they were not mistaken, for he was found afterwards dead, having had a hundred pikes run through his body. There were ten young men, members of the methodist society, who went to the commanding officer, and requested him to give them arms. He cursed them, and said, that as they had refused to unite with the yeomanry, he would place them between the fire of the rebels and that of the king's soldiers, and they should all be cut off. One of them boldly replied, "Sir, you are welcome to do with us just what you please; we bless the Lord we are not afraid to die; death is no king of terrors to us; but if you think good to intrust us with arms, you may, if you please, place us in the front of the hottest battle, and we shall die fighting for our king and country." Struck with the uncommon courage of the young men, he gave them arms, but none of the soldiers would fight in company with them, because they had not learned the regular exercise. "This, sir," said one of the young men," is the very thing we desire; we wish to fight alone, and to die upon the spot, if such is the will of the Lord." The commanding officer then appointed them their station upon a certain bridge, where he believed the rebels would make their first attack, and ordered them upon the approach of the rebels to fire upon them, and then retreat into a certain house which he described. No, sir," said the young man, "we will not retreat; we will stand our ground, and die upon the spot." They were placed upon the said bridge, and very soon a thick fog came on, and like a cloud covered them all over. They soon heard, but could not see the rebels, who had brought 100 Irish cars with them to carry away the plunder of the town, being quite sure of victory. When they came nearer, they set up a dreadful yell, something like the war-whoop of the Indians, and set fire to some houses, and the wind blew the smoke upon those young men, so that they were still the more hidden from the sight of the rebels. When they judged that the rebels were near enough, they fired upon them, and retiring a little, charged again, and fired a second, a third, and a fourth time, with very good effect. This stunned the rebels, as they could form no proper judgment of those who thus fired upon them. 66 There was a house near the bridge occupied by a young woman, a member of the methodist society, who had sixteen young girls under her care. She kept a boarding-school. The rebels desired very much to get possession of this house and while their commander was attempting to get in at a window, a little boy of about 14 years of age, who was in the house, fired upon the man and killed him upon the spot. The king's soldiers seeing these ten young men fight so valiantly, joined them, and the battle became general; and in about an hour and a half, the rebels began to fly in all directions. The poor people in the house where Mr. Averell was, had shut in all the windows, such was the noise and confusion in the streets, and gave themselves wholly to prayer. One of the maids at last ventured to open a window and look out, and, clapping her hands, she cried out, "Glory be to God! he has given us the victory! I see a soldier throwing his helmet into the air, in token of victory." They then kneeled down, and, with floods of tears, returned thanks to the Lord who had so wonderfully appeared for them. They then expressed their concern for the young woman and the 16 girls before mentioned: and it being death for any of the men to appear in the street, the maid said, "Send me, I am not afraid to die; I'll go in the name of the Lord, and see what is become of them." She set out, and made her way through the street over the dead bodies of men and horses, and found the young woman and the 16 girls, all quite safe, up in the garret. The house was between the two fires, that of the soldiers and the rebels, and consequently all the windows were broken in pieces, and the walls of the rooms within were lined with bullets which had flown in all directions, and yet the Lord had preserved the poor young woman, and all that were under her care. The maid brought them through the street to the house where Mr. Averell was. They were so overcome with wonder and love, that they were hardly able to bear their excess of joy. One of the ten young men came a little after, and gave them a full account of the whole business, and informed them that the Lord had so wonderfully preserved them all, that not one of them had received the slightest wound. Only one of the society had consented to learn the manual exercise on the Lord's day, and he was mortally wounded. The young men found him, brought him to a house, and took care of him; and as he had lost a sense of the love of God, they kneeled down round his bed, and never ceased crying to God, till he gave him a clear sense of his pardoning love, and he then died peace. An interesting historical extract—showing the tyranny of sin and ignorance exercised over those countries where the principle of the gospel of Christ are not known. By ADAM CLARKE, LL. D. On the subject of vicarious punishment, or rather the case of one becoming an anathema or sacrifice for the public good, in illustration of chap. ix. 3. I shall make no apology for the following extracts, taken from an author whose learning is vast, and whose piety is unblemished. "When mankind lost sight of a beneficent creator, the God of purity, and consecrated altars to the sun, the moon, the stars, to dæmons, and to hero gods, under the name of Moloch, Ashtaroth, and Baalim; these objects of their worship led them to the most horrid acts of cruelty, and to every species of obscenity; even their sons and their daughters they burnt in the fire to their gods, more especially in seasons of distress. Such was the conduct of the king of Moab; for when he was besieged in his capital, and expected he should fall into the hands of his enemies, he took his eldest son, who should have reigned in his stead, and offered him for a burnt offering on the wall. With these facts, thus related from the scriptures, all accounts, ancient and modern, exactly correspond. Homer, who, it must he recollected, wrote more than nine hundred years before the Christian æra, although he describes chiefly the common sacritice of quadrupeds, yet gives one account of human victims.But, in succeeding generations, when it was conceived that one great and most malignant spirit was the proper object of their fear, or that subordinate provincial gods, equally malignant, nesciaque humanis precibus mansuescere corda, disposed of all things in our world; men bound their own species to the altar, and in circumstances of national distress presented such as they valued most, either their children or themselves. Herodotus informs us, that when the army of Xerxes came to the Strymon, the Magi offered a sacrifice of white horses to that river. On his arrival at the Scamander, the king ascended the citadel of Priam; and having surveyed it, he ordered a thousand oxen to be sacrificed to the Trojan Minerva. But on other occasions he chose human victims; for we are informed that, when, having passed the Strymon, he reached the nine ways, he buried alive nine young men, and as many virgins, natives of the country. In this he followed the example of his wife, for she commanded fourteen Persian children, of illustrious birth, to be offered in that manner to the deity who reigns beneath the earth. Thus in the infancy of Rome, we see Curtius, for the salvation of his country, devoting himself to the infernal gods, when, as it ap pears, an earthquake had occasioned a deep and extensive chasm in the forum; and the augurs had declared, that the portentions opening would never close, till what contributed more to the strength and power of the Romans should be cast into it; but that by such a sacrifice they would obtain immortality for their republic. When all men were at a loss how to understand this oracle, M. Curtius, armed as for battle, presented himself in the forum, and explained it thus:-What is more valuable to Rome mer to gratify Diana. The Sabian idolaters in Persia offered human victims to Mithras; the Cretans, to Jupiter; the Lacedemonian and Lusitanians, to Mars: the Lesbians, to Bacchus ; the Phocians, to Diana; the Thessalians, to Chiron. The Gauls, equally cruel in their worship, sacrificed men, originally, to Eso and Teutate; but latterly to Mercury, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, and Minerva. Cæsar informs us, that whenever they thought themselves in danger, whether from sickness, or af ter any considerable defeat in war, being persuaded that, unless life be given for life, the anger of the gods can never be appeased; they constructed wicker images of enormous bulk, which they filled with men, who were first suffocated with smoke, and then consumed by fire. For this purpose they prefered criminals; but when a sufficient number of these could not be found, they supplied the deficiency from the community at large. The Germans are said to have differed from the Gauls, in having no Druids, and in being little addicted to the service of the altar. Their only gods were the Sun, Vulcan, and the Moon; yet, among the objects of their worship, was Tuisco their pro genitor, and Woden, the hero of the north. It is true, that neither Cæsar nor Tacitus says any thing of their shedding blood in sacrifice; yet the probability is, that, like the Saxons, and other northern nations, they not only offered blood, but took their choicest victims from the human race. In Sweden, the altars of Woden smoked incessantly with blood: this flowed most abundantly at the solemn festivals celebrated every ninth year at Upsal. Then the king, attended by the senate, and by all the great officers about his court, entered the temple, which glittered on all sides with gold, and conducted to the altar nine slaves, or in time of war nine captives.— These met the caresses of the multitude, as being about to avert from them the displeasure of the gods, and then submitted to their fate but in times of distress, more noble victims bled; and it stands upon record, that when Aune their king was ill, he offered up to Woden his nine sons, to obtain the prolongation of his life. The Danes had precisely the same abominable customs. Every ninth year, in the month of January, they sacrificed ninetynine men, with as many horses, dogs, and cocks: and Hacon, king of Norway, offered his own son to obtain from Woden the victory over Harold; with whom he was at war. In Russia, the Slavi worshipped a multitude of gods, and erected to them innumerable altars. Of these deities Peroun, that is, the Thunderer, was the supreme; and before his image many of their prisoners bled. Their god of physic, who also The last of all, and horrible to tell, Sad sacrifice! twelve Trojan captives fell; POPE'S Homer, IL. xxiii. ver. 203. How much was it to be lamented, that even civilized nations should forget the intention for which sacrifices were originally instituted! The bad effects, however, would not have been either so extensive or so great, had they not wholly lost the knowledge of Jehovah ; and taken, as the object of their fear, that evil and apostate spirit, whose name, with the utmost propriety, is called Appolyon, or the destroyer; and whose worship has been universally diffused at different periods among all the nations of the earth. The practice of shedding human blood, before the altars of their gods, was not peculiar to the Trojans and the Greeks; the Romans followed their example. In the first ages of their republic, they sacrificed children to the goddess Mania; in later periods, numerous gladiators bled at the tombs of the Patricians, to appease the manes of the deceased. And it is particularly noticed of Augustus, that, after the taking of Perusia, he sacrificed, on the ides of March, three hundred senators and knights to the divinity of Julius Cæsar. The Carthaginians, as Diodorus Siculus informs us, bound themselves by a solemn vow to Chronus, that they would sacrifice to him children selected from the offspring of their nobles; but in process of time they substituted for these the children of their slaves, which practice they continued, till, being defeated by Agathocles, tyrant of Sicily; and, attributing their disgrace to the anger of the god, they offered two hundred children, taken from the most distinguished families in Carthage; besides which, three hundred citizens presented themselves, that, by their voluntary death, they might render the deity propitious to their country. The mode of sacrificing these children was horrid in the extreme; for they were cast into the arms of a brazen statue, and from thence dropped into a furnace, as was practised amongst the first inhabitants of Latium. It was probably in this manner the Ammonites offered up their children to Moloch. The Pelasgi at one time sacrificed a tenth part of all their children, an obedience to an oracle. The Egyptians, in Heliopolis, sacrificed three men every day to Juno. The Spartans and Arcadians scourged to death young women; the latter to appease the wrath of Bacchus; thre for |