s torn from his body. This
was, it is true, censured as an extreme case, but it was only an
excessive application of the common torture.

The witches were commonly strangled before they were burnt, but this
merciful provision was very frequently omitted. An Earl of Wear tells
how, with a piercing yell, some women once broke half-burnt from the
slow fire consuming them, struggled for a few moments with a despairing
energy among the spectators, but soon with shrieks of blasphemy and wild
protestations of innocence sank writhing in agony amid the flames.

But just picture this scene for a moment! The horror of such a scene!
What a crime for one human to commit against another! A burnt offering
to the gods! How well pleased the Almighty God must have been with the
stench of burning human flesh rising to his nostrils. And how well he
must have rewarded his faithful servants, for was this not done in His
name? "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."

As Lecky points out in his famous work on the "History of European
Morals," such incidents are but illustrations of the great truth that
when men have come to regard a certain class of their fellow creatures
as doomed by the Almighty to eternal and excruciating agonies, and when
their theology directs their minds with intense and realizing
earnestness to the contemplation of such agonies, the result will be an
indifference to the suffering of those whom they deem the enemies of
their God, as absolute as it is perhaps possible for human nature to
attain.

It is a historical fact that in 1591, a lady of rank, Eufame Macalyane,
sought the assistance of Agnes Sampson for the relief of pain at the
time of birth of her two sons. Agnes Sampson was tried before King James
for her heresy, was condemned as a witch, and was burned alive on the
Castle Hill of Edinburgh.

It is generally said that the last execution in Scotland was in 1722,
but Captain Burt, who visited the country in 1730, speaks of a woman who
was burnt as late as 1727. As late as 1736, the divines of the
Associated Presbytery passed a resolution declaiming their belief in
witchcraft, and deploring the scepticism that was then general.

The Pilgrim Fathers brought to our shores the seeds of the Witchcraft
Delusion at a time when it was rapidly fading in England, and again
history furnishes us with an example of a people with strong religious
instincts who, being freed from their persecutors, became in turn the
most