Part 5

"The Latin tongue," says Montaigne, "is, as it were, natural to me; I understand it better than French, but I have not used to speak it, nor hardly to write it, these forty years; and yet, upon an extreme and sudden emotion, which I have fallen into twice or thrice in my life, and once on seeing my father in perfect health, fall upon me in a swoon, I have always uttered my first outcries and ejaculations in Latin; nature starting up and forcibly expressing itself, in spite of so long a discontinuation." "Nature," says Bacon, "will be buried a great time, and yet revive upon the occasion or temptation; like as it was with AEsop's damsel, turned from a cat to a woman, who sat very demurely at the board's end till a mouse ran before her." "A frog," said Publius Syrus, "would leap from a throne of gold into a puddle." In Froissart's Chronicles there is an account of a reverend monk who had been a robber in the early part of his life, and who, when he grew old, used feelingly to lament that he had ever changed his profession. He said "it was a goodly sight to sally out from his castle, and to see a troop of jolly friars coming riding that way, with their mules well laden with viands and rich stores, to advance toward them, to attack and overthrow them, returning to the castle with a noble booty." Layard relates an incident of the party of Arabs which for some time had been employed to assist him in excavating amongst the ruins of Nineveh. One evening, after their day's work, he observed them following a flock of sheep belonging to the people of the village, shouting their war-cry, flourishing their swords, and indulging in the most extravagant gesticulations. He asked one of the most active of the party to explain to him the cause of such violent proceedings. "O Bey!" they exclaimed almost together, "God be praised, we have eaten butter and wheaten bread under your shadow, and are content; but an Arab is an Arab. It is not for a man to carry about dirt in baskets, and to use a spade all his life; he should be with his sword and his mare in the desert. We are sad as we think of the days when we plundered the Anayza, and we must have excitement or our hearts must break. Let us then believe that these are the sheep we have taken from the enemy, and that we are driving them to our tents." And off they ran, raising their wild cry, and flourishing their swords, to the no small alarm of the shepherd, who saw his sheep scampering in all directions. Hazlitt related an Indian legend of a Brahman, who was so devoted to abstract meditation, that in the pursuit of philosophy he quite forgot his moral duties, and neglected ablution. For this he was degraded from the rank of humanity, and transformed into a monkey. But even when a monkey he retained his original propensities, for he kept apart from other monkeys, and had no other delight than that of eating cocoanuts and studying metaphysics. "Perhaps few narratives in history or mythology," says Carlyle, "are more significant than that Moslem one of Moses and the Dwellers by the Dead Sea. A tribe of men dwelt on the shores of that same asphaltic lake; and having forgotten, as we are all too prone to do, the inner facts of Nature, and taken up with the falsities and other semblances of it, were fallen into sad conditions,--verging, indeed, toward a certain far deeper lake. Whereupon it pleased kind Heaven to send them the prophet Moses, with an instructive word of warning out of which might have sprung 'remedial measures' not a few. But no: the men of the Dead Sea discovered, as the valet species always does in heroes or prophets, no comeliness in Moses; listened with real tedium to Moses, with light grinning, or splenetic sniffs and sneers, affecting even to yawn; and signified, in short, that they found him a humbug, and even a bore. Such was the candid theory these men of the asphalt lake formed to themselves of Moses, that probably he was a humbug, that certainly he was a bore. Moses withdrew; but Nature and her rigorous veracities did not withdraw. The men of the Dead Sea, when we next went to visit them, were all changed into apes, sitting on the trees there, grinning now in the most unaffected manner; gibbering and chattering very genuine nonsense; finding the whole universe now a most indisputable humbug! The universe has become a humbug to those apes who thought it one. There they sit and chatter, to this hour: only, I believe, every Sabbath, there returns to them a bewildered half-consciousness, half-reminiscence; and they sit with their wizened, smoke-dried visages, and such an air of supreme tragicality as apes may, looking out through those blinking, smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, into the wonderfulest universal smoky twilight and undecipherable disordered dusk of things; wholly an uncertainty, unintelligibility, they and it, and for commentary thereon, here and there an unmusical chatter or mew,--truest, tragicalest humbug conceivable by the mind of man or ape! They made no use of their souls; and so have lost them. Their worship on the Sabbath now is to roost there, with unmusical screeches, and half-remember that they had souls." The shark is said to have been the god the Sandwich Islanders, in their savage state, chiefly worshiped, or sought to propitiate. In their present semi-civilized, semi-Christianized condition, it is stated, they pray, and sing, and moralize, in fair weather; but when they get into trouble they are apt to call upon the shark-god of their fathers for help or deliverance.

Sir Walter Scott used to tell a story of a placid minister, near Dundee, who, in preaching on Jonah, said, "Ken ye, brethren, what fish it was that swallowed him? Aiblins ye may think it was a shark; nae, nae, my brethren, it was nae shark; or aiblins ye may think it was a sammon; nae, nae, my brethren, it was nae sammon; or aiblins ye may think it was a dolphin; nae, nae, my brethren, it was nae dolphin." Here an old woman, thinking to help her master out of a dead lift, cried out, "Aiblins, sir, it was a dunter" (the vulgar name of a species of whale common to the Scotch coast). "Aiblins, madam, ye're an auld witch for taking the word of God out of my mouth," was the reply of the disappointed rhetorician. As Dr. Johnson was riding in a carriage through London on a rainy day, he overtook a poor woman carrying a baby, without any protection from the weather. Making the driver stop the coach, he invited the poor woman to get in with her child, which she did. After she had seated herself, the doctor said to her, "My good woman, I think it most likely that the motion of the coach will wake your child in a little while, and I wish you to understand that if you talk any baby-talk to it, you will have to get out of the coach." As the doctor had anticipated, the child soon awoke, and the forgetful mother exclaimed to it: "Oh! the little dear, is he going to open his eyesy-pysy?" "Stop the coach, driver!" shouted Johnson; and the woman had to get out and finish her journey on foot. Frederick William, of Prussia, father of the great Frederick, had a way of addressing, familiarly, the people he met in the streets of Berlin, utterly indifferent, we are told, to his own dignity and to the feelings of others; if he could devise something that was not quite agreeable, it was sure to be said. The fear of such encounters sometimes made nervous people indiscreetly evade the royal presence. One Jew having fairly taken to his heels, he was pursued by the king in hot haste. "Why did you run away from me?" said the king, when he came up with him in breathless dudgeon. "From fear," answered the Jew, in the most ingenuous manner; but the rejoinder of the king was a hearty thwack with his cane, who roared out that he wished himself to be loved and not to be feared!

A writer upon Holland--its Martyrs and Heroes, gives an account of Richard Willemson, a worthy burgess of Aspern, and an Anabaptist, who was chased by an officer of justice. It was a winter day, and he fled across the ice. The frozen surface, however, was so thin that the fugitive had the utmost difficulty in crossing, and his pursuer fell through. Perceiving his danger, Willemson returned and at the risk of his own life saved his enemy. Touched with such generosity, the officer would gladly have let his prisoner go; but the burgomaster, who witnessed the occurrence, called out, "Fulfil your oath," and the good Christian was led away to a fiery martyrdom.

Dr. Livingstone, when he first went into Africa, as a missionary, attached himself to the tribe of Bakwains. Their chief, Sechele, embraced Christianity, and became an assiduous reader of the Bible, the eloquence of Isaiah being peculiarly acceptable to him, and he was wont to say, "He was a fine man, that Isaiah: he knew how to speak." But his people were not so ready for conversion, although he calmly proposed to have them flogged into faith: "Do you imagine," he said, "these people will ever believe by your merely talking to them? I can make them do nothing except by thrashing them; and if you like I shall call my head men, and with our litupa (whips of rhinoceros hide) we will soon make them believe altogether." It has been stated upon authority that when a fugitive from one of the early missions in New California was captured, he was brought back again to the mission, where he was bastinadoed, and an iron rod of a foot or a foot and a half long, and an inch in diameter, was fastened to one of his feet, which had the double use of preventing him from repeating the attempt, and of frightening others from imitating him. Southey says that one of the missionaries whom Virgilius, the bishop of Salzburg, sent among the Slavonic people, made the converted serfs sit with him at table, where wine was served to them in gilt beakers, while he ordered their unbaptized lords to sit on the ground, out of doors, where the food and wine was thrown before them, and they were left to serve themselves. Among our Norse forefathers, King Olaf's mode of converting Eyvind to Christianity was to put a pan of glowing coals on his belly, which burst asunder. "Wilt thou not, Eyvind, believe in Christ?" asks Olaf, in excellent faith. Another argument was an adder put into the mouth of the reluctant disciple Rand, who refused to believe.

"Seeing a large building," relates an English gentleman, "I asked a man who looked like a journeyman weaver what it was. He told me a grammar-school. 'But, sir,' he added, 'I think it would become you better on the Lord's day morning to be reading your Bible at home, than asking about public buildings.' I very quickly answered: 'My friend, you have given me a piece of very good advice; let me give you one, and we may both profit by our meeting. Beware of spiritual pride.'" "In one of the debates on the Catholic question," said Lord Byron, "when we were either equal or within one (I forget which), I had been sent for in great haste to a ball, which I quitted, I confess, somewhat reluctantly, to emancipate five millions of people." Some ladies bantering Selwyn on his want of feeling, in attending to see Lord Lovat's head cut off, "Why," he said, "I made amends by going to the undertaker's to see it sewn on again." "I have," says Heine, "the most peaceable disposition. My desires are a modest cottage with thatched roof--but a good bed, good fare, fresh milk and butter, flowers by my window, and a few fine trees before the door. And if the Lord wished to fill my cup of happiness, He would grant me the pleasure of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanged on those trees. With a heart moved to pity, I would, before their death, forgive the injury they had done me during their lives. Yes, we ought to forgive our enemies--but not until they are hanged." Some would pursue them after they are hanged. "Our measure of rewards and punishments," says Thackeray, "is most partial and incomplete, absurdly inadequate, utterly worldly, and we wish to continue it into the next world. Into that next and awful world we strive to pursue men, and send after them our impotent party verdicts, of condemnation or acquittal. We set up our paltry little rods to measure Heaven immeasurable, as if, in comparison to that, Newton's mind, or Pascal's, or Shakespeare's, was any loftier than mine; as if the ray which travels from the sun would reach me sooner than the man who blacks my boots. Measured by that altitude, the tallest and the smallest among us are so alike diminutive and pitifully base that I say we should take no count of the calculation, and it is a meanness to reckon the difference."

Tertullian, according to Lecky, had written a treatise dissuading the Christians of his day from frequenting the public spectacles. He had collected on the subject many arguments, some of them very powerful, and others extremely grotesque; but he perceived that to make his exhortations forcible to the majority of his readers, he must point them to some counter-attraction. He accordingly proceeded--and his style assumed a richer glow and a more impetuous eloquence as he rose to the congenial theme--to tell them that a spectacle was reserved for them, so fascinating and so attractive that the most joyous festivals of earth faded in insignificance by the comparison. That spectacle was the agonies of their fellow-countrymen as they writhe amid the torments of hell. "What!" he exclaimed, "shall be the magnitude of that scene! How shall I wonder! How shall I laugh! How shall I rejoice! How shall I triumph, when I behold so many and such illustrious kings, who were said to have mounted into heaven, groaning with Jupiter their god in the lowest darkness of hell! Then shall the soldiers who had persecuted the name of Christ burn in more cruel fire than any they had kindled for the saints. Then shall the tragedians pour forth in their own misfortune more piteous cries than those with which they had made the theatre to resound, while the comedian's powers shall be better seen as he becomes more flexible by the heat. Then shall the driver of the circus stand forth to view, all blushing in his flaming chariot, and the gladiators pierced, not by spears, but by darts of fire. Compared with such spectacles, with such subjects of triumph as these, what can praetor or consul, quaestor or pontiff, afford? And even now faith can bring them near, imagination can depict them as present!"

Crabb Robinson says some one at a party at which he was present, abusing Mahometanism in a commonplace way, said: "Its heaven is quite material." He was met with the quiet remark, "So is the Christian's hell;" to which there was no reply. In the time of Tertullian, the angel in the Last Judgment was constantly represented weighing the souls in a literal balance, while devils clinging to the scales endeavored to disturb the equilibrium. The redbreast, according to one popular legend, was commissioned by the Deity to carry a drop of water to the souls of unbaptized infants in hell, and its breast was singed in piercing the flames. In Wales, the robin is said to bear in its bill one drop of water daily to the place of torment, in order to extinguish the flames.

A Calvinistic divine, of the name of Petit Pierre, was ejected from his church at Neufchatel for preaching and publishing the doctrine that the damned would at some future period be pardoned. A member said to him, "My good friend, I no more believe in the eternity of hell than yourself; but recollect that it may be no bad thing, perhaps, for your servant, your tailor, and your lawyer, to believe in it." Whitefield was once preaching in Haworth, and made use of some such expression, as that he "hoped there was no need to say much to this congregation, as they had sat under so pious and godly a minister for so many years;" whereupon Mr. Grimshaw, the curate, stood up in his place, and said with a loud voice, "Oh, sir! for God's sake do not speak so. I pray you do not flatter them. I fear the greater part of them are going to hell with their eyes open." Cowper's friend, Newton, says this in one of his letters: "A friend of mine was desired to visit a woman in prison; he was informed of her evil habits of life, and therefore spoke strongly of the terrors of the Lord, and the curses of the law: she heard him a while, and then laughed in his face; upon this he changed his note, and spoke of the Saviour, and what he had done and suffered for sinners. He had not talked long in this strain before he saw a tear or two in her eyes: at length she interrupted him by saying: 'Why, sir, do you think there can be any hope of mercy for me?' He answered, 'Yes, if you feel your need of it, and are willing to seek it in God's appointed way. I am sure it is as free for you as for myself.' She replied, 'Ah, if I had thought so, I should not have been in this prison. I long since settled it in my mind that I was utterly lost; that I had sinned beyond all possibility of forgiveness, and that made me desperate.'" Monod relates that the Moravian missionaries who carried the gospel to the Greenlanders thought it best to prepare the minds of the savages to receive it, by declaring to them at first only the general truths of religion; the existence of God, the obedience due to his laws, and a future retribution. Thus passed away several years, during which they saw no fruit of their labors. At last they ventured one day to speak to them of the Saviour, and read to them the history of his passion. They had no sooner done so, than one of the hearers, named Kajarnak, approached the table where the missionary Beck was sitting, and said to him in an earnest, affecting tone: "What is that you tell us? Repeat that once more. I too will be saved!" ("The most awfully tremendous of all metaphysical divines," wrote an eminent Englishman, "is the American ultra Calvinist, Jonathan Edwards, whose book on Original Sin I unhappily read when a very young man. It did me an irreparable mischief.")

"Soon after the accession of James I. to the throne of England," writes Lecky, in his History of Rationalism in Europe, "a law was enacted which subjected witches to death on the first conviction, even though they should have inflicted no injury upon their neighbors. This law was passed when Coke was attorney general, and Bacon a member of Parliament; and twelve bishops sat upon the commission to which it was referred. The prosecutions were rapidly multiplied throughout the country, but especially in Lancashire, and at the same time the general tone of literature was strongly tinged with the superstition. Sir Thomas Browne declared that those who denied the existence of witchcraft were not only 'infidels, but also, by implication, atheists.' In Cromwell's time there was still greater persecution. The county of Suffolk was especially agitated, and the famous witch-finder, Matthew Hopkins, pronounced it to be infested with witches. A commission was accordingly issued, and two distinguished Presbyterian divines were selected by the Parliament to accompany it. It would have been impossible to take any measure more calculated to stimulate the prosecutions, and we accordingly find that in Suffolk sixty persons were hung for witchcraft in a single year. In 1664 two women were hung in Suffolk, under a sentence of Sir Matthew Hale, who took the opportunity of declaring that the reality of witchcraft was unquestionable; 'for, first, the Scriptures had affirmed so much; and, secondly, the wisdom of all nations had provided laws against such persons, which is an argument of their confidence of such a crime.' Sir Thomas Browne, who was a great physician, as well as a great writer, was called as a witness, and swore 'that he was clearly of opinion that the persons were bewitched.'"

Here is a terrible story, perfectly well authenticated, taken from the official report of the proceedings by an English historian: "Toward the end of 1593 there was trouble in the family of the Earl of Orkney. His brother laid a plot to murder him, and was said to have sought the help of a notorious witch called Alison Balfour. When Alison Balfour's life was looked into, no evidence could be found connecting her either with the particular offense or with witchcraft in general; but it was enough in these matters to be accused. She swore she was innocent; but her guilt was only held to be aggravated by perjury. She was tortured again and again. Her legs were put in the caschilaws,--an iron frame which was gradually heated till it burned into the flesh,--but no confession could be wrung from her. The caschilaws failed utterly, and something else had to be tried. She had a husband, a son, and a daughter, a child seven years old. As her own sufferings did not work upon her, she might be touched, perhaps, by the suffering of those who were dear to her. They were brought into court, and placed at her side, and the husband first placed in the 'long irons'--some accursed instrument, I know not what. Still the devil did not yield. She bore this; and her son was next operated on. The boy's legs were set in 'the boot,'--the iron boot you may have heard of. The wedges were driven in, which, when forced home, crushed the very bone and marrow. Fifty-seven mallet strokes were delivered upon the wedges. Yet this, too, failed. There was no confession yet. So, last of all, the little daughter was taken. There was a machine called the piniwinkies--a kind of thumb-screw, which brought blood from under the finger-nails, with a pain successfully terrible. These things were applied to the poor child's hands, and the mother's constancy broke down, and she said she would admit anything they wished. She confessed her witchcraft,--so tried, she would have confessed to the seven deadly sins,--and then she was burned, recalling her confession, and with her last breath protested her innocence."

"There was one Mary Johnson try'd at Hartford in this countrey," says Cotton Mather, in his Magnalia Christi Americana, "upon an indictment of 'familiarity with the devil,' and was found guilty thereof, chiefly upon her own confession.... In the time of her imprisonment, the famous Mr. Stone was at great pains to promote her conversion from the devil to God; and she was by the best observers judged very penitent, both before her execution and at it; and she went out of the world with comfortable hopes of mercy from God through the merit of our Saviour. Being asked what she built her hopes upon, she answered, Upon these words: 'Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest;' and these: 'There is a fountain set open for sin and uncleanness.' And she dy'd in a frame extreamly to the satisfaction of them that were spectators of it."

In 1768 John Wesley prefaced an account of an apparition that had been related by a girl named Elizabeth Hobson, by some extremely remarkable sentences on the subject. "It is true, likewise," he wrote, "that the English in general, and, indeed, most of the men of learning in Europe, have given up all account of witches and apparitions as mere old wives' fables. I am sorry for it, and I willingly take this opportunity of entering my solemn protest against this violent compliment which so many that believe the Bible pay to those that do not believe it. I owe them no such service. I take knowledge that these are at the bottom of the outcry which has been raised, and with such insolence spread through the land, in direct opposition, not only to the Bible, but to the suffrage of the wisest and best men in all ages and nations. They well know (whether Christians know it or not) that the giving up of witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible."