Saladin

“ Man is in the ascendant, Deity in the decline; Heaven is becoming a more and more vague phantasmagoria, and Earth a more and more glorious reality. We now think less of white wings and manna on the other side of the grave, and more of broadcloth and roast-beef on this. We burn more coals and we burn no witches; our ships are on every sea, but we drag no wizards through the waters; our steam-engines whistle all round the globe, but we have no engines of torture ”

“ But they were man to man, warrior to warrior. It was not they, but the cowardly and pious Christian witch-finder, that bound feeble and shrinking woman to the stake, that thrust innumerable pins into her flesh, and beheld with holy triumph or pious stoicism the suffering of the aged and helpless. ”

“ Witchcraft is essentially one of the blessings of Christianity which, according to the utterances of the pulpit, have raised us to such an eminence among the nations of the earth. When, as devout Pilgrim Fathers, we set foot on the shores of America we began, with true Christian charity, to torture and burn each other for witchcraft, till the very Red Indians regarded with horror and bewilderment our helpless suffers at the stake, and thanks the Great Spirit that they were not followers of the white man’s terrible God. ”

“ But the Christian priest has some way of quibbling out of all this and hundreds of other monstrous absurdities and old-world ignorances, which Science has stripped naked and whipped through the streets before the intelligence of the civilised world. The revulsion of popular feeling makes it now impossible to burn any one as a witch; and so Theology, with an effrontery which is absolutely appalling, now discovers that the Bible never taught that witches should be put to death. ”

“ A person once accused of witchcraft found no refuge but the grave. It was in vain to prove an alibi. A dozen persons might swear that at the time you were accused of performing some diabolical act of sorcery you were fifty miles away; it was simply taken for granted that your master, the devil, had gifted you with being present at several places at the same moment of time. It is actually on record that a child saw a black cat go in at an old woman's cottage window, and averred that he believed the cat was the old woman's familiar spirit; and the aspersion of this child cost the woman her life. ”

“ As early as the year 1398 the University of Paris propounded rules for the judicial prosecution of witches, and lamented the terrible spread of sorcery among the people. With intense rigour and cruelty the judges and executioners set about extirpating the diabolical malady. But wherever the fires of death burnt hottest there did witches most increase and multiply. In the morbid state of the imagination, engendered by merciless persecution and cruelty, many were not only accused of witchcraft, but actually imagined themselves to be witches. ”

“ A rider fell from his horse; and, if an old woman happened to be in sight, she would be charged with having accomplished the rider's fall, and torture and death would follow to the accused. Somebody's cow would cease to yield her maximum supply of milk, and some unfortunate old creature would be singled out on this account to endure the most unspeakable suffering. A charge so easily made, and almost invariably fatal if once made, was a ready implement in the hand of the Church to weed out heretics who dared to breathe one disrespectful word of the Scarlet Woman. ”

“ Christianity has not given up witchcraft; she has had it and slavery wrenched out of her teeth by the "Infidelity" of Public Opinion. Even in England in Puritan times, which were eminently witch-burning times, the greatest heretics then in the land-namely, the Independents-were the only sect that raised their voice against the burning of witches. ”

“ Witchcraft is now frequently referred to jocularly; and few men or women whose attention has not been specially directed to the subject have any idea of its ghastliness, cruelty, and horror. If witch prosecutions had been perpetrated by only one sect or faction of the Christian Church, we should have known more about the matter, for the sect that had abstained from such prosecutions would now, ever and anon, rake it up to throw discredit upon the history of the other faction. ”

“ You have for the monk and the presbyter men like me, and men stronger and more eloquent than I, who, regardless of their interests and themselves, agitate with tongue and pen for political equality and mental liberty. This is why every Christian pulpit in the world is whining about the spread of "Infidelity." ”

“ On account of this appalling mistranslation hundreds of thousands of human beings must have ended their lives at the stake. It has been calculated that in England alone some thirty thousand persons, under the charge of sorcery, suffered the penalty of death. Be it God or be it Man who is responsible for bringing witchcraft under the sanction of the Bible, he has committed a crime against the human race which the redemptive blood of a thousand Christs would not wash away, for which an eternity in the fires of perdition could not atone. ”

“ Be he God or Man who is responsible for the unspeakable guilt of mistranslating the word chasaph he merits the execrations of the world and curses from 100,000 blackened and grinning jaws which were raked from among the fiery ashes of the stake to the cold earth of the grave! ”

“ It can readily be understood with what a grasp wild and intense credulity would seize the minds of poor and half-crazy old women, when the wisest in the land averred that they were witches, when their own friends and neighbours appeared as witnesses against them, and when witch-fires blazed on every village green. ”

“ How long will you submit to avaricious attempts to rifle your pockets, and subtile attempts to addle your brains? If from beginning to end the Bible teaches one thing clearly and without equivocation, it is that Jehovah believed in sorcery, and that sorcery should be punished by death. ”

“ A word has a certain fixed and irrefragible meaning till it is inconvenient for theology that it should retain that meaning any longer, and then the priest indulges in some philological hair-splitting, and "proves" that, after all, the word means something that really supports the faith by which he earns his bread. ”

“ No day passes in which we do not render our tribunals bloody by the dooms which we pronounce, or in which we do not return to our homes discountenanced and terrified at the horrible contents of the confessions which it has been our duty to hear. ”

“ Man is not so bad, after all, if gods would only leave him alone and priests would betake themselves to some honest secular calling. I say unhesitatingly that, down through the centuries, men never would have continued to burn and torture hundreds and thousands of frail and helpless old women but for the accursed sanction of "Thus saith the Lord." ”

“ The manufacturing of incantations and spells was profitable, because every priest had, for a sum of money, the power of reversing them; and it was profitable for them that poisons should be distilled, because, for a sum of money, the priest could furnish an antidote to any poison which a poor old woman could concoct, more especially since, in all probability, she concocted it under his indirect instigation. ”

“ Human nature is, in itself, rude and savage enough till, through weary ages, it gropes its way through blood and darkness up to civilisation and culture. Still, in spite of the strong using their strength to overmaster the weak, there is an inherent tendency in the human heart to sympathise with the sorrows and the sufferings of Humanity. ”

“ The stars and moon were originally stuck in the firmament to give light to the earth, and the firmament had originally windows, which could be opened that water might be poured out of them to drown the earth below. ”

“ A huge wedge was placed loosely between each leg and the inside of each box, and a strong man, with his coat off and his sleeves to his elbows, and leaning upon a heavy hammer, stood near, and ready to drive the wedges home. The wedge for each leg was carefully adjusted, and the strong man stood with the hammer raised over his head, ready to strike, and the pale and agonised John Fian was asked if he would even now confess. He clenched his teeth, and the perspiration moistened upon his white cheeks the dried blood from the circular wound which the torture-rope had cut to his skull ”

“ It was not unusual for a child of five years to be executed because some infatuated fanatic found in his body the mark of teeth of a child of about that age; and among the Christians in America a poor dog was actually hanged for having sold himself to the devil. ”

“ And the devil is accounted so good a master that we cannot commit so great a number of his slaves to the flames but what there shall arise from their ashes a number sufficient to supply their place." But more terrible days still were in store, for the revolt against Rome had fairly set in, and the bull of Pope Innocent VIII. was the sanction and stimulant to a desperate attempt to exterminate heresy by fire and massacre. ”

“ But how far the prayers of the clergy were sincere we may be permitted to doubt, seeing that witchcraft, being an excellent medium through which to impress the ignorant with a vivid conception of the supernatural, was also a considerable source of priestly revenue. ”

“ The learned held that the executed children had been anointed by the devil with an ointment made of the scrapings of altars and the filing of church-clocks! The learned clergy also held that the witches had sons and daughters by the fiends, and that these sons and daughters incestuously produced an offspring of toads and serpents. Prayers were ordered through the churches weekly that the power of Satan might be restrained, so that thousands of old women and hundreds of young children might be exempted from perishing at the stake. ”