t only remains to be observed, with regard to theft, that when cattle
was recovered yet alive, the thief restored double, but when his act was
consummated by slaughtering what he had taken, then he restored a sheep
fourfold, and for an ox five oxen, because his villainy was more
high-handed. And we still retain the law which allows the blood of a
robber at night to be shed, but forbids it in the day, when help can
more easily be had.

All this is reasonable and enlightened law; founded, like all good
legislation, upon clear and satisfactory principles, and well calculated
to elevate the tone of the public feeling, to be not only so many
specific enactments, but also the germinant seeds of good.

CHAPTER XXII.

_THE LESSER LAW (continued)._

PART IV.

xxii. 16-xxiii. 19.

The Fourth section of this law within the law consists of enactments,
curiously disconnected, many of them without a penalty, varying greatly
in importance, but all of a moral nature, and connected with the
well-being of the state. It is hard to conceive how the systematic
revision of which we hear so much could have left them in the condition
in which they stand.

It is enacted that a seducer must marry the woman he has betrayed, and
if her father refuse to give her to him, then he must pay the same dower
as a bridegroom would have done (xxii. 16, 17). And presently the
sentence of death is launched against a blacker sensual crime (19). But
between the two is interposed the celebrated mandate which doomed the
sorceress to death, remarkable as the first mention of witchcraft in
Scripture, and the only passage in all the Bible where the word is in
the feminine form--a witch, or sorceress; remarkable also for a far
graver reason, which makes it necessary to linger over the subject at
some length.

SORCERY.

"Thou shalt not suffer a sorceress to live."--xxii. 18.

The world knows only too well what sad and shameful inferences have been
drawn from these words. Unspeakable terrors, estrangement of natural
sympathy, tortures and cruel deaths, have been inflicted on many
thousands of the most forlorn creatures upon earth (creatures who were
sustained in their sufferings by no high ardour of conviction or
fanaticism, not being martyrs but simply victims), because it was held
that Moses, in declaring that witches should not live, affirmed the
reality of witchcraft. No sooner did the argument cease to be dangerous
to old women than it