tic
and extravagant. The people had their chief interest in the future
world, about which there could be no reality. They lived in a world of
phantasms. The phantasms were dictated to them upon authority in the
shape of dogmas of world philosophy and precepts of conduct. In
discussing the world philosophy and its application they attained to
extremes of animosity and ferocity. Whether Jesus and his apostles lived
in voluntary beggary; whether any part of the blood of Jesus remained on
earth; whether the dead went at once, or only at the judgment day, into
the presence of God,--are specimens of the questions they debated. The
unseemliness was in the mode of discussion, not in the absurdity of the
subject. They all went into the debate understanding that the defeated
or weaker party was to be burned. That was the rule of the game. All the
strife of sects and parties was carried on in unseemly ways and with
scandalous incidents. The lack of control, measure, due limit, was due
to the lack of reality. Torture, persecution, violent measures, would
all have been impossible if there had been a sense of seemliness. The
punishments, executions, and public amusements grossly outraged any
human and civilized taste. The treatment of the Templars, although it
was no doubt good statecraft to abolish the order, was a scandalous
outrage. In the face of Christendom torture was used to extort the
evidence which was wanted to destroy the order, without regard to truth
and justice.[1651] The crusades were extravagant and fantastic, and were
attended by incidents of shameful excess, gross selfishness, venality,
and bad faith. It is one of the most amazing facts about witch
persecutions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that jurists did
not see the unseemliness of their acts compared with the civilization of
the period and the character claimed by their states. How was it
possible for grave, learned, and honest men to go on torturing and
burning miserable old women? It is not until the end of the seventeenth
century that we hear of sheriffs in England who refused to burn witches.
One of the most unseemly incidents in history is the execution of
Damiens for attempting to kill Louis XV. The authorities of the first
state in Christendom multiplied tortures of the extremest kind, and
caused them to be executed in public on the culprit. The treatment of
the Tories in the American Revolution was unseemly. It left a deep stain
on our histor