Chapter XXIII. The Sacrifice Of The Mass. 293 holocausts to the Lord, to propitiate His favor in behalf of his children, and to obtain forgiveness for the sins they might have committed.391 When Jehovah delivered to Moses the written law on Mount Sinai He gave His servant the most minute details with regard to all the ceremonies to be observed in the sacrifices which were to be offered to Him. He prescribed the kind of victims to be immolated, the qualifications of the Priests who were to minister at the altar, and the place and manner in which the victims were to be offered. Hence, it was the custom of the Jewish Priests to slay every day two lambs as a sacrifice to God,392 and in doing this they were prefiguring the great sacrifice of the New Law, in which we daily offer up on the altar "the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world." In a word, in all their public calamities — whenever they were threatened by their enemies; whenever they were about to engage in war; whenever they were visited by any plague or pestilence — the Jews had recourse to God by solemn sacrifices. Like the Catholic Church of the present day, they had sacrifices not only for the living, but also for the dead; for we read in Sacred Scripture that Judas Machabeus ordered sacrifice to be offered up for the souls of his men who were slain in battle.393 We find sacrifices existing not only among the Jews, who worshiped the true God, but also among Pagan and idolatrous nations. No matter how confused, imperfect or erroneous [309] was their knowledge of the Deity, the Pagan nations retained sufficient vestiges of primitive tradition to admonish them of their obligation of appeasing the anger and invoking the blessings of the Divinity by victims and sacrifices. Plutarch, an ancient writer of the second century, says of these heathen people: "You may find cities without walls, without literature and without the