who, in preaching on Jonah, said, "Ken ye, brethren, what fish it was
that swallowed him? Aiblins ye may think it was a shark; nae, nae, my
brethren, it was nae shark; or aiblins ye may think it was a sammon;
nae, nae, my brethren, it was nae sammon; or aiblins ye may think it was
a dolphin; nae, nae, my brethren, it was nae dolphin." Here an old
woman, thinking to help her master out of a dead lift, cried out,
"Aiblins, sir, it was a dunter" (the vulgar name of a species of whale
common to the Scotch coast). "Aiblins, madam, ye're an auld witch for
taking the word of God out of my mouth," was the reply of the
disappointed rhetorician. As Dr. Johnson was riding in a carriage
through London on a rainy day, he overtook a poor woman carrying a baby,
without any protection from the weather. Making the driver stop the
coach, he invited the poor woman to get in with her child, which she
did. After she had seated herself, the doctor said to her, "My good
woman, I think it most likely that the motion of the coach will wake
your child in a little while, and I wish you to understand that if you
talk any baby-talk to it, you will have to get out of the coach." As the
doctor had anticipated, the child soon awoke, and the forgetful mother
exclaimed to it: "Oh! the little dear, is he going to open his
eyesy-pysy?" "Stop the coach, driver!" shouted Johnson; and the woman
had to get out and finish her journey on foot. Frederick William, of
Prussia, father of the great Frederick, had a way of addressing,
familiarly, the people he met in the streets of Berlin, utterly
indifferent, we are told, to his own dignity and to the feelings of
others; if he could devise something that was not quite agreeable, it
was sure to be said. The fear of such encounters sometimes made nervous
people indiscreetly evade the royal presence. One Jew having fairly
taken to his heels, he was pursued by the king in hot haste. "Why did
you run away from me?" said the king, when he came up with him in
breathless dudgeon. "From fear," answered the Jew, in the most ingenuous
manner; but the rejoinder of the king was a hearty thwack with his cane,
who roared out that he wished himself to be loved and not to be feared!
A writer upon Holland--its Martyrs and Heroes, gives an account of
Richard Willemson, a worthy burgess of Aspern, and an Anabaptist, who
was chased by an officer of justice. It was a winter day, and he fled
across the ice. The frozen surface, however, was so thin that the
fugitive had the utmost difficulty in crossing, and his pursuer fell
through. Perceiving his danger, Willemson returned and at the risk of
his own life saved his enemy. Touched with such generosity, the officer
would gladly have let his prisoner go; but the burgomaster, who
witnessed the occurrence, called out, "Fulfil your oath," and the good
Christian was led away to a fiery martyrdom.
Dr. Livingstone, when he first went into Africa, as a missionary,
attached himself to the tribe of Bakwains. Their chief, Sechele,
embraced Christianity, and became an assiduous reader of the Bible, the
eloquence of Isaiah being peculiarly acceptable to him, and he was wont
to say, "He was a fine man, that Isaiah: he knew how to speak." But his
people were not so ready for conversion, although he calmly proposed to
have them flogged into faith: "Do you imagine," he said, "these people
will ever believe by your merely talking to them? I can make them do
nothing except by thrashing them; and if you like I shall call my head
men, and with our litupa (whips of rhinoceros hide) we will soon make
them believe altogether." It has been stated upon authority that when a
fugitive from one of the early missions in New California was captured,
he was brought back again to the mission, where he was bastinadoed, and
an iron rod of a foot or a foot and a half long, and an inch in
diameter, was fastened to one of his feet, which had the double use of
preventing him from repeating the attempt, and of frightening others
from imitating him. Southey says that one of the missionaries whom
Virgilius, the bishop of Salzburg, sent among the Slavonic people, made
the converted serfs sit with him at table, where wine was served to them
in gilt beakers, while he ordered their unbaptized lords to sit on the
ground, out of doors, where the food and wine was thrown before them,
and they were left to serve themselves. Among our Norse forefathers,
King Olaf's mode of converting Eyvind to Christianity was to put a pan
of glowing coals on his belly, which burst asunder. "Wilt thou not,
Eyvind, believe in Christ?" asks Olaf, in excellent faith. Another
argument was an adder put into the mouth of the reluctant disciple Rand,
who refused to believe.
"Seeing a large building," relates an English gentleman, "I asked a man
who looked like a journeyman weaver what it was. He told me a
grammar-school. 'But, sir,' he added, 'I think it would become you
better on the Lord's day morning to be reading your Bible at home, than
asking about public buildings.' I very quickly answered: 'My friend, you
have given me a piece of very good advice; let me give you one, and we
may both profit by our meeting. Beware of spiritual pride.'" "In one of
the debates on the Catholic question," said Lord Byron, "when we were
either equal or within one (I forget which), I had been sent for in
great haste to a ball, which I quitted, I confess, somewhat reluctantly,
to emancipate five millions of people." Some ladies bantering Selwyn on
his want of feeling, in attending to see Lord Lovat's head cut off,
"Why," he said, "I made amends by going to the undertaker's to see it
sewn on again." "I have," says Heine, "the most peaceable disposition.
My desires are a modest cottage with thatched roof--but a good bed, good
fare, fresh milk and butter, flowers by my window, and a few fine trees
before the door. And if the Lord wished to fill my cup of happiness, He
would grant me the pleasure of seeing some six or seven of my enemies
hanged on those trees. With a heart moved to pity, I would, before their
death, forgive the injury they had done me during their lives. Yes, we
ought to forgive our enemies--but not until they are hanged." Some would
pursue them after they are hanged. "Our measure of rewards and
punishments," says Thackeray, "is most partial and incomplete, absurdly
inadequate, utterly worldly, and we wish to continue it into the next
world. Into that next and awful world we strive to pursue men, and send
after them our impotent party verdicts, of condemnation or acquittal. We
set up our paltry little rods to measure Heaven immeasurable, as if, in
comparison to that, Newton's mind, or Pascal's, or Shakespeare's, was
any loftier than mine; as if the ray which travels from the sun would
reach me sooner than the man who blacks my boots. Measured by that
altitude, the tallest and the smallest among us are so alike diminutive
and pitifully base that I say we should take no count of the
calculation, and it is a meanness to reckon the difference."
Tertullian, according to Lecky, had written a treatise dissuading the
Christians of his day from frequenting the public spectacles. He had
collected on the subject many arguments, some of them very powerful, and
others extremely grotesque; but he perceived that to make his
exhortations forcible to the majority of his readers, he must point them
to some counter-attraction. He accordingly proceeded--and his style
assumed a richer glow and a more impetuous eloquence as he rose to the
congenial theme--to tell them that a spectacle was reserved for them, so
fascinating and so attractive that the most joyous festivals of earth
faded in insignificance by the comparison. That spectacle was the
agonies of their fellow-countrymen as they writhe amid the torments of
hell. "What!" he exclaimed, "shall be the magnitude of that scene! How
shall I wonder! How shall I laugh! How shall I rejoice! How shall I
triumph, when I behold so many and such illustrious kings, who were said
to have mounted into heaven, groaning with Jupiter their god in the
lowest darkness of hell! Then shall the soldiers who had persecuted the
name of Christ burn in more cruel fire than any they had kindled for the
saints. Then shall the tragedians pour forth in their own misfortune
more piteous cries than those with which they had made the theatre to
resound, while the comedian's powers shall be better seen as he becomes
more flexible by the heat. Then shall the driver of the circus stand
forth to view, all blushing in his flaming chariot, and the gladiators
pierced, not by spears, but by darts of fire. Compared with such
spectacles, with such subjects of triumph as these, what can praetor or
consul, quaestor or pontiff, afford? And even now faith can bring them
near, imagination can depict them as present!"
Crabb Robinson says some one at a party at which he was present, abusing
Mahometanism in a commonplace way, said: "Its heaven is quite material."
He was met with the quiet remark, "So is the Christian's hell;" to which
there was no reply. In the time of Tertullian, the angel in the Last
Judgment was constantly represented weighing the souls in a literal
balance, while devils clinging to the scales endeavored to disturb the
equilibrium. The redbreast, according to one popular legend, was
commissioned by the Deity to carry a drop of water to the souls of
unbaptized infants in hell, and its breast was singed in piercing the
flames. In Wales, the robin is said to bear in its bill one drop of
water daily to the place of torment, in order to extinguish the flames.
A Calvinistic divine, of the name of Petit Pierre, was ejected from his
church at Neufchatel for preaching and publishing the doctrine that the
damned would at some future period be pardoned. A member said to him,
"My good friend, I no more believe in the eternity of hell than
yourself; but recollect that it may be no bad thing, perhaps, for your
servant, your tailor, and your lawyer, to believe in it." Whitefield was
once preaching in Haworth, and made use of some such expression, as that
he "hoped there was no need to say much to this congregation, as they
had sat under so pious and godly a minister for so many years;"
whereupon Mr. Grimshaw, the curate, stood up in his place, and said with
a loud voice, "Oh, sir! for God's sake do not speak so. I pray you do
not flatter them. I fear the greater part of them are going to hell with
their eyes open." Cowper's friend, Newton, says this in one of his
letters: "A friend of mine was desired to visit a woman in prison; he
was informed of her evil habits of life, and therefore spoke strongly of
the terrors of the Lord, and the curses of the law: she heard him a
while, and then laughed in his face; upon this he changed his note, and
spoke of the Saviour, and what he had done and suffered for sinners. He
had not talked long in this strain before he saw a tear or two in her
eyes: at length she interrupted him by saying: 'Why, sir, do you think
there can be any hope of mercy for me?' He answered, 'Yes, if you feel
your need of it, and are willing to seek it in God's appointed way. I am
sure it is as free for you as for myself.' She replied, 'Ah, if I had
thought so, I should not have been in this prison. I long since settled
it in my mind that I was utterly lost; that I had sinned beyond all
possibility of forgiveness, and that made me desperate.'" Monod relates
that the Moravian missionaries who carried the gospel to the
Greenlanders thought it best to prepare the minds of the savages to
receive it, by declaring to them at first only the general truths of
religion; the existence of God, the obedience due to his laws, and a
future retribution. Thus passed away several years, during which they
saw no fruit of their labors. At last they ventured one day to speak to
them of the Saviour, and read to them the history of his passion. They
had no sooner done so, than one of the hearers, named Kajarnak,
approached the table where the missionary Beck was sitting, and said to
him in an earnest, affecting tone: "What is that you tell us? Repeat
that once more. I too will be saved!" ("The most awfully tremendous of
all metaphysical divines," wrote an eminent Englishman, "is the American
ultra Calvinist, Jonathan Edwards, whose book on Original Sin I
unhappily read when a very young man. It did me an irreparable
mischief.")
"Soon after the accession of James I. to the throne of England," writes
Lecky, in his History of Rationalism in Europe, "a law was enacted which
subjected witches to death on the first conviction, even though they
should have inflicted no injury upon their neighbors. This law was
passed when Coke was attorney general, and Bacon a member of Parliament;
and twelve bishops sat upon the commission to which it was referred. The
prosecutions were rapidly multiplied throughout the country, but
especially in Lancashire, and at the same time the general tone of
literature was strongly tinged with the superstition. Sir Thomas Browne
declared that those who denied the existence of witchcraft were not only
'infidels, but also, by implication, atheists.' In Cromwell's time there
was still greater persecution. The county of Suffolk was especially
agitated, and the famous witch-finder, Matthew Hopkins, pronounced it to
be infested with witches. A commission was accordingly issued, and two
distinguished Presbyterian divines were selected by the Parliament to
accompany it. It would have been impossible to take any measure more
calculated to stimulate the prosecutions, and we accordingly find that
in Suffolk sixty persons were hung for witchcraft in a single year. In
1664 two women were hung in Suffolk, under a sentence of Sir Matthew
Hale, who took the opportunity of declaring that the reality of
witchcraft was unquestionable; 'for, first, the Scriptures had affirmed
so much; and, secondly, the wisdom of all nations had provided laws
against such persons, which is an argument of their confidence of such a
crime.' Sir Thomas Browne, who was a great physician, as well as a great
writer, was called as a witness, and swore 'that he was clearly of
opinion that the persons were bewitched.'"
Here is a terrible story, perfectly well authenticated, taken from the
official report of the proceedings by an English historian: "Toward the
end of 1593 there was trouble in the family of the Earl of Orkney. His
brother laid a plot to murder him, and was said to have sought the help
of a notorious witch called Alison Balfour. When Alison Balfour's life
was looked into, no evidence could be found connecting her either with
the particular offense or with witchcraft in general; but it was enough
in these matters to be accused. She swore she was innocent; but her
guilt was only held to be aggravated by perjury. She was tortured again
and again. Her legs were put in the caschilaws,--an iron frame which was
gradually heated till it burned into the flesh,--but no confession could
be wrung from her. The caschilaws failed utterly, and something else had
to be tried. She had a husband, a son, and a daughter, a child seven
years old. As her own sufferings did not work upon her, she might be
touched, perhaps, by the suffering of those who were dear to her. They
were brought into court, and placed at her side, and the husband first
placed in the 'long irons'--some accursed instrument, I know not what.
Still the devil did not yield. She bore this; and her son was next
operated on. The boy's legs were set in 'the boot,'--the iron boot you
may have heard of. The wedges were driven in, which, when forced home,
crushed the very bone and marrow. Fifty-seven mallet strokes were
delivered upon the wedges. Yet this, too, failed. There was no
confession yet. So, last of all, the little daughter was taken. There
was a machine called the piniwinkies--a kind of thumb-screw, which
brought blood from under the finger-nails, with a pain successfully
terrible. These things were applied to the poor child's hands, and the
mother's constancy broke down, and she said she would admit anything
they wished. She confessed her witchcraft,--so tried, she would have
confessed to the seven deadly sins,--and then she was burned, recalling
her confession, and with her last breath protested her innocence."
"There was one Mary Johnson try'd at Hartford in this countrey," says
Cotton Mather, in his Magnalia Christi Americana, "upon an indictment of
'familiarity with the devil,' and was found guilty thereof, chiefly upon
her own confession.... In the time of her imprisonment, the famous Mr.
Stone was at great pains to promote her conversion from the devil to
God; and she was by the best observers judged very penitent, both before
her execution and at it; and she went out of the world with comfortable
hopes of mercy from God through the merit of our Saviour. Being asked
what she built her hopes upon, she answered, Upon these words: 'Come
unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you
rest;' and these: 'There is a fountain set open for sin and
uncleanness.' And she dy'd in a frame extreamly to the satisfaction of
them that were spectators of it."
In 1768 John Wesley prefaced an account of an apparition that had been
related by a girl named Elizabeth Hobson, by some extremely remarkable
sentences on the subject. "It is true, likewise," he wrote, "that the
English in general, and, indeed, most of the men of learning in Europe,
have given up all account of witches and apparitions as mere old wives'
fables. I am sorry for it, and I willingly take this opportunity of
entering my solemn protest against this violent compliment which so many
that believe the Bible pay to those that do not believe it. I owe them
no such service. I take knowledge that these are at the bottom of the
outcry which has been raised, and with such insolence spread through the
land, in direct opposition, not only to the Bible, but to the suffrage
of the wisest and best men in all ages and nations. They well know
(whether Christians know it or not) that the giving up of witchcraft is
in effect giving up the Bible."
"In the first year of this persecution, Cotton Mather wrote a history of
the earliest of the trials. This history was introduced to the English
public by Richard Baxter, who declared in his preface that 'that man
must be a very obdurate Sadducee who would not believe it.' Not content
with having thus given the weight of his great name to the superstition,
Baxter in the following year published his treatise on The Certainty of
the World of Spirits; in which he collected, with great industry, an
immense number of witch cases; reverted in extremely laudatory terms to
Cotton Mather and his crusade; and denounced, in unmeasured language,
all who were skeptical upon the subject. This work appeared in 1691,
when the panic in America had not yet reached its height; and being
widely circulated there, is said to have contributed much to stimulate
the persecutions. The Pilgrim Fathers had brought to America the seeds
of the persecution; and at the same time when it was rapidly fading in
England, it flourished with fearful vigor in Massachusetts. Cotton
Mather and Parris proclaimed the frequency of the crime; and, being
warmly supported by their brother divines, they succeeded in creating a
panic through the whole country. A commission was issued. A judge named
Stoughton, who appears to have been a perfect creature of the clergy,
conducted the trials. Scourgings and tortures were added to the
terrorism of the pulpit, and many confessions were obtained. The few who
ventured to oppose the prosecutions were denounced as Sadducees and
infidels. Multitudes were thrown into prison, others fled from the
country, abandoning their property, and twenty-seven persons were
executed. An old man of eighty was pressed to death--a horrible
sentence, which was never afterward executed in America. [Giles Corey
was the name of the poor victim. He refused to plead, to save his
property from confiscation. He urged the executioners, it is stated by
Upham, in his History of Witchcraft, to increase the weight which was
crushing him; he told them that it was no use to expect him to yield;
that there could be but one way of ending the matter, and that they
might as well pile on the stones. Calef says, that as his body yielded
to the pressure, his tongue protruded from his mouth, and an official
forced it back with his cane.] The ministers of Boston and Charlestown
drew up an address, warmly thanking the commissioners for their zeal,
and expressing their hope that it would never be relaxed."
There is no more painful reading than this except the trials of the
witches themselves. "These," says Lowell, "awaken, by turns, pity,
indignation, disgust, and dread,--dread, at the thought of what the
human mind may be brought to believe not only probable, but proven. But
it is well to be put upon our guard by lessons of this kind, for the
wisest man is in some respects little better than a madman in a
straight-waistcoat of habit, public opinion, prudence, or the like.
Skepticism began at length to make itself felt, but it spread slowly,
and was shy of proclaiming itself. The orthodox party was not backward
to charge with sorcery whoever doubted their facts or pitied their
victims. The mob, as it always is, was orthodox. It was dangerous to
doubt, it might be fatal to deny."
"The spirit of party," quaintly says Bayle, in his Critical Dictionary,
discoursing of Margaret, Queen of Navarre, "the attachment to a sect,
and even zeal for orthodoxy, produce a kind of ferment in the humors of
our body; and hence the medium through which reason ought to behold
these primitive ideas is clouded and obscured. These are infirmities
which will attend our reason, as long as it shall depend upon the
ministry of organs. It is the same thing to it, as the low and middle
region of the air, the seat of vapors and meteors. There are but very
few persons who can elevate themselves above these clouds, and place
themselves in a true serenity. If any one could do it, we must say of
him what Virgil did of Daphnis:--
'Daphnis, the guest of Heaven, with wondering eyes,
Views in the milky-way the starry skies;
And far beneath him, from the shining sphere,
Beholds the moving clouds and rolling year.'
And he would not have so much the appearance of a man, as of an immortal
Being, placed upon a mountain above the region of wind and clouds. There
is almost as much necessity for being above the passions to come to a
knowledge of some kind of truths, as to act virtuously." "How limited is
human reason," exclaims Disraeli, the younger, "the profoundest
inquirers are most conscious. We are not indebted to the reason of man
for any of the great achievements which are the landmarks of human
action and human progress. It was not reason that besieged Troy; it was
not reason that sent forth the Saracen from the desert to conquer the
world; that inspired the crusades; that instituted the monastic orders;
it was not reason that produced the Jesuits; above all, it was not
reason that enacted the French Revolution. Man is only truly great when
he acts from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the
imagination. Even Mormon counts more votaries than Bentham." "Let us not
dream," said Goethe, "that reason can ever be popular. Passions,
emotions, may be made popular; but reason remains ever the property of
an elect few." "It is not from reason and prudence that people marry,"
said Dr. Johnson, "but from inclination. A man is poor; he thinks it
cannot be worse, and so I'll e'en marry Peggy." "If people," said
Thackeray, "only made prudent marriages, what a stop to population there
would be!"
III.
DISGUISES.