[177] So Isaac was saved, since God returned the gift of him and used the offering which piety rendered to Him to repay the offerer, while for Abraham the action, though not followed by the intended ending, was complete and perfect, and the record of it as such stands graven not only in the sacred books but in the minds of the readers.
[178] But quarrelsome critics who misconstrue everything and have a way of valuing censure above praise do not think Abraham’s action great or wonderful, as we suppose it to be.
[179] They say that many other persons, full of love for their kinsfolk and offspring, have given their children, some to be sacrificed for their country to serve as a price to redeem it from wars or drought or excessive rainfall or pestilence, others for the sake of what was held to be piety though it is not really so.
[180] Indeed they say that among the Greeks men of the highest reputation, not only private individuals but kings, have with little thought of their offspring put them to death, and thereby saved armed forces of great strength and magnitude when enlisted as their allies, and destroyed them without striking a blow when arrayed as enemies.
[181] Barbarian nations, they add, have for long admitted child sacrifice as a holy deed and acceptable to God, and this practice of theirs is mentioned by the holy Moses as an abomination, for, charging them with this pollution, he says that “they burn their sons and daughters to their gods.”
[182] Again they point out that in India the gymnosophists even now when the long incurable disease of old age begins to take hold of them, even before they are completely in its clutches, make up a funeral pile and burn themselves on it, though they might possibly last out many years more. And the womenfolk when the husbands die before them have been known to hasten rejoicing to share their pyre, and allow themselves to be burned alive with the corpses of the men.
[183] These women might reasonably, no doubt, be praised for their courage, so great and more than great is their contempt for death, and the breathless eagerness with which they rush to it as though it were immortality.