The ethics of the thing appear to hâve concerned no one; nor, to 
tell the truth, need they do so. As St. Paul says, “Without 
shedding of blood there is no remission” ; and who are we to argue 
with St. Paul? But? after ail that, it is open to any one to hâve 
any opinion that he likes upon the subject, or any other subject, 
thank God! At the same time, it is most necessary to study the 
business, whatever we may be going to do about it; for our ethics 
themselves will naturally dépend upon our theory of the universe. 
If we were quite certain, for example, that everybody went to 
heaven when he died, there could be no serious objection to murder 
or suicide, as it is generally conceded—by those who know 
neither — that earth is not such a pleasant place as heaven. 
However, there is a mystery concealed in this theory of the 
bloody sacrifice which is of great importance to the student, and 
we therefore make no further apology. We should not hâve made 
even this apology for an apology, had it not been for the solicitude 
of a pious young friend of great austerity of character who insisted 
that the part of this chapter which now follows — the part which 
was originally written — might cause us to be misunderstood. 
This must not be. 
The blood is the life. This simple statement is explained by 
the Hindus by saying that the blood is the principal vehicle of 
vital Prana. 1 There is some ground for the belief that there is a 
definite substance 2, not isolated as yet, whose presence makes ail 
1. Prana or “force” is often used as a generic term for ail kinds 
of subtle energy. The prana of the body is only one of its “vayus”. 
Vayu means air or spirit. The idea is that ail bodily forces are manifesta¬ 
tions of the finer forces of the more real body, this real body being a 
subtle and invisible thing. 
2. This substance need not be conceived as “material” in the crude 
sense of Victorian science; we now know that such phenomena as the 
rays and émanations of radioactive substances occupy an intermediate 
position. For instance, mass is not, as once supposed, necessarily imper¬ 
méable to mass, and matter itself can be only interpreted in terms of 
motion. So, as to “prana”, one might hypothesize a phenomenon in the 
ether analogous to isomerism. We already know of bodies chemically 
identical whose molecular structure makes one active, another inactive, 
to certain reagents. Metals can be “tired” or even “killed” as to some 
of their properties, without discoverable Chemical change. One can 
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