l. It is a sorry and silly farce. Of course it made
a tremendous hurly-burly in its day, but it is gone now, and doesn't
matter a ha'porth to anybody. Nevertheless because Gessler's cap goes up
so often nowadays, and so many of us are kneeling to it, it is good and
wholesome to hear of a poor Bishop who was brave enough to take a shot
at it instead.

SOME OLD ORDEALS

Notwithstanding Bishop Wilson's severity, his tyranny, his undue pride
in the authority of the Church, and his morbid jealousy of the powers
of the State, his rule was a wise and just one, and he was a spiritual
statesman, who needed not to be ashamed. He raised the tone of life in
the Isle of Man, made it possible to accept a man's _yea_ and _nay_,
even in those perilous issues of life where the weakness and meanness
of poor humanity reveals itself in lies and subterfuges. This he did by
making false swearing a terror. One ancient ordeal of swearing he set
his face against, but another he encouraged, and often practised, let me
describe both.

In the old days, when a man died intestate, leaving no record of his
debts, a creditor might establish a claim by going with the Bishop to
the grave of the dead man at midnight, stretching himself on it with
face towards heaven and a Bible on his breast, and then saying solemnly,
"I swear that So-and-so, who lies buried here, died in my debt by so
much." After that the debt was allowed. What warning the Bishop first
pronounced I do not know, but the scene is a vivid one, even if we think
of the creditor as swearing truly, and a startling and terrible one if
we think of him as about to swear to what is false. The dark night, the
dark figures moving in it, the churchyard, the debtor's grave, the sham
creditor, who had been loud in his protests under the light of the inn
of the village, now quaking and trembling as the Bishop's warning comes
out of the gloom, then stammering, and breaking down, and finally, with
ghostly visions of a dead hand clutching at him from the grave, starting
up, shrieking, and flying away. It is a nightmare. Let us not remember
it when the candles are put out.

This ordeal was in force until the seventeenth century, but Bishop
Wilson judged it un-Christian, and never practised it. The old Roman
canon law of Purgation, a similar ordeal, he used not rarely. It was
designed to meet cases of slander in which there was no direct and
positive evidence. If a good woman had been accused of uncha