sacrificed on the altars of religion this particular delusion can
claim a considerable proportion. By a moderate computation, nine
millions have been burned or hanged since the establishment of
Christianity.[2] Prechristian antiquity experienced its
tremendous power, and the primitive faith of Christianity easily
accepted and soon developed it. It was reserved, however, for the
triumphant Church to display it in its greatest horrors: and if
we deplore the too credulous or accommodative faith of the early
militant Church or the unilluminated ignorance of paganism, we
may still more indignantly denounce the cruel policy of
Catholicism and the barbarous folly of Protestant theology which
could deliberately punish an impossible crime. It is the reproach
of Protestantism that this persecution was most furiously raging
in the age that produced Newton and Locke. Compared with its
atrocities even the Marian burnings appear as nothing: and it may
well be doubted whether the fanatic zeal of the 'bloody Queen,'
is no less contemptible than the credulous barbarity of the
judges of the seventeenth century. The period 1484 (the year in
which Innocent VIII. published his famous 'Witch Hammer' signally
ratified 120 years later by the Act of Parliament of James I. of
England) to 1680 might be characterised not improperly as the era
of devil-worship; and we are tempted almost to embrace the theory
of Zerdusht and the Magi and conceive that Ahriman was then
superior in the eternal strife; to imagine the _Evil One_, as in
the days of the Man of Uz, 'going to and fro in the earth, and
walking up and down in it.' It is come to that at the present
day, according to a more rational observer of the seventeenth
century, that it is regarded as a part of religion to ascribe
great wonders to the devil; and those are taxed with infidelity
and perverseness who hesitate to believe what thousands relate
concerning his power. Whoever does not do so is accounted an
atheist because he cannot persuade himself that there are two
Gods, the one good and the other evil[3]--an assertion which is
no mere hyperbole or exaggeration of a truth: there is the
certain evidence of facts as well as the concurrent testimony of
various writers.

[2] According to Dr. Sprenger (_Life of Mohammed_). Cicero's
observation that there was no people either so civilised or
learned, or so savage and barbarous, that had not a belief
that the future may be predicted by c