icans and
Calvinists, so ready at all times to commit one another to the flames
and to the headsman, found in this matter common ground, upon which all
could heartily unite for the grand purpose of extirpating error. When,
out of the quiet of our own times, we look back upon the terrors of the
Tower, and the smoke and glare of Smithfield, we think with mingled pity
and admiration of those brave men and women who, in the sixteenth
century, enriched with their blood and ashes the soil from whence was to
spring our political and religious freedom. But no whit of admiration,
hardly a glimmer of pity, is even casually evinced for those poor
creatures who, neglected, despised, and abhorred, were, at the same
time, dying the same agonizing death, and passing through the torment of
the flames to that "something after death--the undiscovered country,"
without the sweet assurance which sustained their better-remembered
fellow-sufferers, that beyond the martyr's cross was waiting the
martyr's crown. No such hope supported those who were condemned to die
for the crime of witchcraft: their anticipations of the future were as
dreary as their memories of the past, and no friendly voice was raised,
or hand stretched out, to encourage or console them during that last sad
journey. Their hope of mercy from man was small--strangulation before
the application of the fire, instead of the more lingering and painful
death at most;--their hope of mercy from Heaven, nothing; yet, under
these circumstances, the most auspicious perhaps that could be imagined
for the extirpation of a heretical belief, persecution failed to effect
its object. The more the Government burnt the witches, the more the
crime of witchcraft spread; and it was not until an attitude of
contemptuous toleration was adopted towards the culprits that the belief
died down, gradually but surely, not on account of the conclusiveness of
the arguments directed against it, but from its own inherent lack of
vitality.[1]

[Footnote 1: See Mr. Lecky's elaborate and interesting description of
the demise of the belief in the first chapter of his History of the Rise
of Rationalism in Europe.]

83. The history and phenomena of witchcraft have been so admirably
treated by more than one modern investigator, as to render it
unnecessary to deal exhaustively with a subject which presents such a
vast amount of material for arrangement and comment. The scope of the
following remarks will therefor