which have concurred, in the
intervening ages, to make us recognize as detestable errors the honest
convictions of men who, in mere individual capacity and moral force, were
very much above us. Again, the Scotch Puritans, during the comparatively
short period of their ascendency, surpassed all Christians before them in
the elaborate ingenuity of the tortures they applied for the discovery of
witchcraft and sorcery, and did their utmost to prove that if Scotch
Calvinism was the true religion, the chief "note" of the true religion
was cruelty. It is hardly an endurable task to read the story of their
doings; thoroughly to imagine them as a past reality is already a sort of
torture. One detail is enough, and it is a comparatively mild one. It
was the regular profession of men called "prickers" to thrust long pins
into the body of a suspected witch in order to detect the insensible spot
which was the infallible sign of her guilt. On a superficial view one
would be in danger of saying that the main difference between the
teachers who sanctioned these things and the much-despised ancestors who
offered human victims inside a huge wicker idol, was that they arrived at
a more elaborate barbarity by a longer series of dependent propositions.
We do not share Mr. Buckle's opinion that a Scotch minister's groans were
a part of his deliberate plan for keeping the people in a state of
terrified subjection; the ministers themselves held the belief they
taught, and might well groan over it. What a blessing has a little false
logic been to the world! Seeing that men are so slow to question their
premises, they must have made each other much more miserable, if pity had
not sometimes drawn tender conclusions not warranted by Major and Minor;
if there had not been people with an amiable imbecility of reasoning
which enabled them at once to cling to hideous beliefs, and to be
conscientiously inconsistent with them in their conduct. There is
nothing like acute deductive reasoning for keeping a man in the dark: it
might be called the _technique_ of the intellect, and the concentration
of the mind upon it corresponds to that predominance of technical skill
in art which ends in degradation of the artist's function, unless new
inspiration and invention come to guide it.

And of this there is some good illustration furnished by that third node
in the history of witchcraft, the beginning of its end, which is treated
in an interesting manner