Forum, the Sacred Altar, of Home, and the Church slumbers this elemental
beast.

Culture at best is but a few hundred years old and it has probably
skipped several generations in its growth. The Archaic instinct in man
to kill reaches back millions of years into the past. The only power on
earth to restrain that force is Law. The rules of life, embodied in law
are the painful results of experience in killing and the dire effects
which follow, both to the individual and the race. Law is a force only
so long as reverence for law is made the first principle of man's social
training. The moment he lifts his individual will against the embodied
experience of humanity, he is once more the elemental beast of the
prehistoric jungle--the Hunter.

And when the game is human and the hunter is a man of prayer, we have
the supreme form of the beast, the ancient Witch Hunter. It is a fact
that the pleasure of killing is universal in man. Our savage ancestors
for millions of years had to kill to live. We have long ago outgrown
this necessity in the development of civilization. But the instinct
remains.

We are human as we restrain this instinct and bring it under the
dominion of Law. We still hunt the most delicate and beautiful animals,
stalk and kill them, driven by the passionate secret pleasure of the act
of murder. With bated breath and glittering eyes we press our advantage
until the broken wing ceases to flutter and the splintered bone to
crawl.

This imperious atavism the best of us cannot or will not control in the
pursuit of animals. When man has lifted his arm in defiance of Tradition
and Law, this impulse is the dominant force which sweeps all else as
chaff before it.

John Brown was the apostle of the sternest faith ever developed in the
agonies of our history. To him life had always been a horror.

There was no hesitation, no halting, no quiver of maudlin pity, when he
slowly rose from his grass-covered lair in the darkness and called his
men at ten o'clock:

"Ready!"

Single file, moving silently and swiftly they crept through the night,
only the sharpened swords clanking occasionally broke the silence. Their
tread was soft as the claws of panthers. The leader's spirit gripped
mind and body of his followers.

They moved northward from the camp in the ravine and crossed the
Mosquito Creek just above the home of the Doyles. Once over the creek,
the hunters again spread out single file fifty yards apart.

The