ould 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 protesting her innocence.

It is due to the intelligence of the time to admit that after this her
guilt was doubted, and such vicarious means of extorting confession do
not seem to have been tried again. Yet the men who inflicted these
tortures would have borne them all themselves sooner than have done any
act which they consciously knew to be wrong. They did not know that the
instincts of humanity were more sacred than the logic of theology, and
in fighting against the devil they were themselves doing the devil's
work. We should not attempt to apologise for these things, still less to
forget them. No martyrs ever suffered to instil into mankind a more
wholesome lesson--more wholesome, or one more hard to learn. The more
conscientious men are, the more difficult it is for them to understand
that in their most cherished convictions, when they pass beyond the
limits where the wise and good of all sorts agree, they may be the
victims of mere delusion. Yet, after all, and happily, such cases were
but few, and affected but lightly the general condition of the people.

The student running over the records of other times finds certain
salient things standing out in frightful prominence. He concludes that
the substance of those times was made up of the matters most dwelt on by
the annalist. He forgets that the things most noticed are not those of
every-day experience, but the abnormal, the extraordinary, the
monstrous. The exceptions are noted down, the common and usual is passed
over in silence. The philosophic historian, studying hereafter this
present age, in which we are ourselves living, may say that it was a
time of unexampled prosperity, luxury, and wealth; but catching at
certain horrible murders which have lately disgraced our civilisation,
may call us a nation of assassins. It is to invert the pyramid and stand
it on its point. The same system of belief which produced the tragedy
which I have described, in its proper province as the guide of ordinary
life, has been the immediate cause of all that is best and greatest in
Scottish character.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF CATHOLICISM.[C]

Not long ago I heard a living thinker of some eminence say that he
considered Christianity to have been a misfortune. Intellectually, he