The custom of burning a beneficent god is too foreign to later modes of thought to escape misinterpretation. - James George Frazer

We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below.

It may be suspected that the custom of employing a divine man or animal as a public scapegoat is much more widely diffused than appears from the examples cited.

If any of my readers set out with the notion that that all races of men think and act much in the same way as educated Englishmen, the evidence of superstitious belief and custom collected in this work should suffice to disabuse him of so erroneous a prepossession.