ally guilty. How could he disprove it? How
could he show that he did not cause a storm at sea? All storms were at
that time supposed to be inspired by the devil; the people believed
that all storms were caused by him, or by persons whom he assisted. I
implore you to remember that the men who believed these things wrote
our creeds and our confessions of faith, and it is by their dust that I
am asked to kneel and pay implicit homage, instead of investigating;
and I implore you to recollect that they wrote our creeds.

A woman was tried and convicted before Sir Matthew Hale, one of the
greatest judges and lawyers of England, for having caused children to
vomit crooked pins. Think of that! The learned judge charged the
intelligent jury that there was no doubt as to the existence of
witches, that it was established by all history and expressly taught by
the Bible. The woman was hung and her body was burned. Sir Thomas
Moore declared that to give up witchcraft was to throw away the sacred
scriptures. John Wesley, too, was a firm believer in ghosts, and
insisted upon their existence after all laws upon the subject had been
repealed in England, and I beg of you to remember that John Wesley was
the founder of the Methodist Church. In New England a woman was
charged with being a witch and with having changed herself into a fox;
while in that condition she was attacked and bitten by some dogs, and a
committee of three men was ordered by the Court to examine this woman.
They removed her clothing, and searched for what they were pleased to
call witch-spots--that is to say, spots into which a needle could be
thrust without giving pain; they reported to the Court that such spots
were found. She denied that she had ever changed herself into a fox.
On the report of the committee she was found guilty, and she was
actually executed by our Puritan fathers, the gentlemen who braved the
danger of the deep for the sake of worshiping God and persecuting their
fellow men. I belong to their blood, and the best thing I can say
about them, and that which rises like a white shaft to their eternal
honor, is that they were in favor of education.

A man was attacked by a wolf; he defended himself and succeeded in
cutting off one of the animal's paws, and the wolf ran away; he put it
in his pocket and carried it home; there he found his wife with one of
her hands gone, and he took that paw from his pocket and put it upon
her arm, and it as