easily, and
so his vengeance followed him into the unseen and unknown world. How the
doctrine got in among the legends of the church we are no more bound
to show than we are to account for the intercalation of the "three
witnesses" text, or the false insertion, or false omission, whichever
it may be, of the last twelve verses of the Gospel of St Mark. We do not
hang our grandmothers now, as our ancestors did theirs, on the strength
of the positive command, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."

The simple truth is that civilization has outgrown witchcraft, and is
outgrowing the Christian Tartarus. The pulpit no longer troubles itself
about witches and their evil doings. All the legends in the world could
not arrest the decay of that superstition and all the edicts that grew
out of it. All the stories that can be found in old manuscripts will
never prevent the going out of the fires of the legendary Inferno. It is
not much talked about nowadays to ears polite or impolite. Humanity
is shocked and repelled by it. The heart of woman is in unconquerable
rebellion against it. The more humane sects tear it from their "Bodies
of Divinity" as if it were the flaming shirt of Nessus. A few doctrines
with which it was bound up have dropped or are dropping away from it:
the primal curse; consequential damages to give infinite extension to
every transgression of the law of God; inverting the natural order of
relative obligations; stretching the smallest of finite offenses to the
proportions of the infinite; making the babe in arms the responsible
being, and not the parent who gave it birth and determined its
conditions of existence.

After a doctrine like "the hangman's whip" has served its purpose,--if
it ever had any useful purpose,--after a doctrine like that of
witchcraft has hanged old women enough, civilization contrives to
get rid of it. When we say that civilization crowds out the old
superstitious legends, we recognize two chief causes. The first is the
naked individual protest; the voice of the inspiration which giveth
man understanding. This shows itself conspicuously in the modern poets.
Burns in Scotland, Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, in America, preached
a new gospel to the successors of men like Thomas Boston and Jonathan
Edwards. In due season, the growth of knowledge, chiefly under the form
of that part of knowledge called science, so changes the views of the
universe that many of its long-unchallenged legends be