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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?

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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British laws against witchcraft were repealed A.D. 1736.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.

The most important religious rite borrowed by Moses from the ceremonial worship of heathen gods, is Sacrifice, a barbarous device for propitiating the gods, reaching us from ages so remote that we fail to trace its origin in even the most ancient traditions; and therefore see in its irrational barbarism the superstitious terrors of primeval man, hastening with tribute from his possessions to appease the wrath and win the favour of the invisible Beings, whose voices were heard in the roar of the tempest, and from whose hands were launched the terrors of the thunderbolt.

This debased form of worship, engrafted on prehistoric religions when mankind had no perception of beneficence in God, attained its fullest development in the adoption of human sacrifice. The first victims were doubtless prisoners captured in battle; but when priests announced that the inexorable gods demanded the sacrifice of man's dearest treasures, even affectionate parents piously responded to divine cruelty by yielding up their children to the knife or the flames.

This sanguinary piety attained its most awful consummation among the Tyrians, Carthaginians, and kindred nations, who, in all great emergencies or national calamities, sacrificed the most valuable lives to appease the anger of the gods. They even periodically selected the children of the noblest families-especially only sons and daughters-to be held in reserve for immolation when the public welfare should require the propitiation of some offended deity.

When children were sacrificed to Kronus, or Molech, they were cast into the arms of an idol glowing with heat, from which they fell into a devouring furnace, and

were promptly consumed in honour of the god of light and fire. When the innocent victims were sacrificed to other gods, the unhappy parents, piously surrendering the claims of natural affection to the obligations of national religion, conducted their sons and daughters to infernal altars, where, embracing them with religious heroism, and soothing them into submission to the appalling will of the gods, they plunged a knife into their bosoms, and besmeared the hideous altars with the life-blood of theological victims.

As we consider the revolting horrors which the institution of sacrifice inflicted on the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Persians, Greeks, Gauls, Germans, Scythians, and Scandinavians, with numerous other tribes and nations, who all piously slew their children in conscientious conviction that they were performing religious duties, shall we not join with that worthy old heathen, Plutarch, in the inquiry, whether it would not have been better for mankind to have had atheists as their lawgivers, and never to have heard of gods or demons, than to have had theological rulers who taught them to secure the prosperity of their country by propitiating invisible Beings with the blood of their children? And may we not reasonably inquire, from modern believers in an infallible Bible, whether they consider it credible that an omnipotent and omniscient Deity ever adopted a religious rite common to all heathen theologies, and inevitably tending towards the abomination of human sacrifice?

In Judges xi. we read that Jephthah, an inspired judge, ' vowed a vow unto the Lord and said, If thou shalt without fail deliver the children of Ammon into

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