they had between
them. She was by no means free from fear. He had seen his friends
married, and felt soured thereat. Thenceforth her way is marked by
tears, by utter weakness, by a woful self-surrender. Threatened by her
only God, her son, heart-broken at finding herself in a plight so
unnatural, she falls desperate. She tries to drown all her memories in
sleep. At length comes an issue for which neither of them can fairly
account, an issue such as nowadays will often happen in the poorer
quarters of large towns, where some poor woman is forced, frightened,
perhaps beaten, into bearing every outrage. Thus conquered, and, spite
of her scruples, far too resigned, she endured thenceforth a pitiable
bondage; a life of shame and sorrow, and abundant anguish, growing
with the yearly widening difference between their several ages. The
woman of six-and-thirty might keep watch over a son of twenty years:
but at fifty, alas! or still later, where would he be? From the great
Sabbath where thronged the people of far villages, he would be
bringing home a strange woman for his youthful mistress, a woman hard,
heartless, devoid of ruth, who would rob her of her son, her seat by
the fire, her bed, of the very house which she herself had made.

To believe Lancre and others, Satan accounted the son for
praiseworthy, if he kept faithful to his mother, thus making a virtue
of a crime. If this be true, we must assume that the woman was
protected by a woman, that the Witch sided with the mother, to defend
her hearth against a daughter-in-law who, stick in hand, would have
sent her forth to beg.

Lancre further maintains that "never was good Witch, but she sprang
from the love of a mother for her son." In this way, indeed, was born
the Persian soothsayer, the natural fruit, they say, of so hateful a
mystery; and thus the secrets of the magical art were kept confined to
one family which constantly renewed itself.

An impious error led them to imitate the harmless mystery of the
husbandman, the unceasing vegetable round whereby the corn resown in
the furrow, brings forth its corn.

The less monstrous unions of brother with sister, so common in the
East, and in Greece, were cold and rarely fruitful. They were wisely
abandoned; nor would people ever have returned to them, but for that
rebellious spirit which, being aroused by absurd restrictions, flung
itself foolishly into the opposite extreme. Thus from unnatural laws,
hatred begot unnatur