aliens, did it, at least, secure the rights of freemen for each member of the Chosen Race? On the contrary, it is enacted immediately after the Ten Commandments, that Hebrews might purchase their own countrymen for a term of six years. If, in the interval, the master gave the slave a wife, and children were born of the marriage, the man was free to depart on the expiration of his term of servitude, leaving his family as the property of the slaveowner. But, if love of wife and children induced the husband and father to prefer slavery to desertion of his family, then he was forthwith marked with the brand of perpetual slavery. Natural affection among Hebrew slaves, therefore, condemned them to penal servitude for life, whilst callous heartlessness secured the priceless boon of freedom!

As

Thus slavery, invested with all the honours of a divine institution, was carried into the nineteenth century in the name of an infallible Bible by communities holding the foremost place in modern civilisation. the British and American nations have, however, with tardy consciousness of guilt, disavowed Moses in emancipation, is it not full time for them to vindicate their 'deal Deity from the charge of past complicity in human bondage?

Mosaic legislation inflicted yet one more appalling calamity on mankind.

Exod. xxii. 18: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.'

Lev. xix. 26: Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards to be defiled by them. I am the Lord your God.'

Lev. xx. 27: A man also or a woman that hath a

familiar spirit or that is a wizard shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.'

Thus, alleged revelation adopts the barbarous superstition of sorcery in terms so vague, that even three thousand years later the British witch-hunter could devise no more rational method of detection than that of thrusting pins into the flesh of suspects to test Satanic insensibility to pain; and tens of thousands of innocent men and women, convicted by irrational evidence of impossible crime, were consigned to the stake or the gallows by the sentence of learned and conscientious judges, piously accepting judicial guidance from an infallible Bible.

Inspired by Mosaic legislation, the Church of Rome employed, for centuries, all her vast resources in an imaginary conflict with impalpable phantoms, whose supposed mediums were the unhappy victims of the spiritual contest. The chiefs of the Reformation were as ignorant as their theological opponents of the monstrous delusion involved in human intercourse with evil spirits. Luther, a steadfast believer in every form of Satanic agency, was unmerciful in his denunciation of infernal practitioners. Episcopalians and Nonconformists, in England and Scotland, vied with each other in piously hunting down fresh victims for immolation at the altar of the Hebrew God, who had imposed on mankind the religious duty of exterminating witches. And finally the Pilgrim Fathers, carrying with them this most pernicious superstition to a new hemisphere, piously committed the appalling crimes against Humanity, involved in the persecution and judicial murder of the martyrs of Salem.

The reasoning which caused these tragedies was simple and conclusive-an infallible Bible condemns witches to death: they therefore inevitably exist, and it becomes a religious duty to bring the nefarious criminals to justice. This deplorable fallacy received full confirmation in practical results. The miserable victims of popular superstition, tortured into delirious hallucinations, or seeking death as a release from mental and physical agony, confessed their awful crimes. How marvellous the triumph of divine revelation! convicted sorcerers establishing the infallibility of Scripture by candid admission of fellowship with the Devil! Could the zeal of faith or the obligations of religion pause at any measure short of consigning the accursed criminals to the gallows or the stake, in conformity with a theocratic administration of justice?

Self

That the prevalence and lamentable results of this superstition are assignable to faith in an infallible Bible is disclosed in the statement of Sir Matthew Hale, who, when condemning Amy Duny and Rose Cullenden to be burnt as witches in 1664 at Bury, declared that the existence of witchcraft was unquestionably established by the evidence of Scripture.

If, in those days, any presumptuous mortal disclosed impious doubts of man's fellowship with the Devil, he was forthwith denounced by Orthodoxy as an infidel or an atheist.

British laws against witchcraft were repealed A.D. 1736. But as no sacrilegious hand may tamper with sacred Scripture, the superstition survives in Mosaic statutes. Wesley declared that 'giving up witchcraft was giving up the Bible.' To later theologians, accus

tomed to ingenious adaptation of faith to reason, this language may appear extreme; but in it we find the honest and forcible expression of an inevitable conclusion. If Wesley meant, as no doubt he did mean, that belief in witchcraft and faith in the infallibility of Scripture must stand or fall together, the great evangelist simply stated what every unbiassed thinker must accept as truth. For, if we once admit that past generations committed judicial murder in harmony with Mosaic legislation, the Bible finally loses all claim to the authority of an infallible guide, and we must carefully criticise its teaching in the light of our own age, that future generations may not condemn us for blind acceptance of some sacred superstition, as pernicious then, in their eyes, as belief in witchcraft, now, in ours.

CHAPTER IV.

HEBREW MORALITY-continued.

Not only is Mosaic legislation thus identified with the ignorance, superstition, and cruelty of a barbarous age, but furthermore, overlaid with an elaborate ritualism, more conducive to faith in priests than trust in God, and so impossible of observance as to be named by an apostolic Jew, 'A yoke alike intolerable in past and present.'1 There is, perhaps, no lesson we more clearly learn from Scripture than the moral inefficacy of rites and ceremonies; and the ancient Hebrews would assuredly have been better and happier men if Moses had relied less on ceremonial piety, and more on human virtue.

Apologetic theologians, however, hasten to assure us that the apparently trivial and purposeless rites of the ceremonial law were but material types of the spiritual mysteries to be revealed through Christianity to later generations-a theory which, however, depicts the temporal Ruler of the Hebrews studying rather to supply modern piety with materials for ingenious speculation, than to provide the Chosen Race with the laws most conducive to their intellectual and moral progress.

1 Acts xv. 10.