Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/332

310 garments, and weighed her against the church Bible; she outweighed it, and went home in triumph. Here the metaphor of weighing is worked in the opposite way to that in India, but it is quite as intelligible, and not a whit the worse for practical purposes. For yet another case, how an old magical process may be afterward transformed by bringing in the religious sanction, we may look at the ancient classic sieve and shears, the sieve being suspended by sticking the points of the open shears into the rim, and the handles of the shears balanced on the forefingers of the holders. To discover a thief, or a lover, all that was required was to call over all suspected names, till the instrument turned at the right one. In the course of history, this childish divining-ordeal came to be Christianized into the key and Bible; the key, of course, to open the secret, the Bible to supply the test of truth. For a thief-ordeal, the proper mode is to tie in the key at the verse of the 50th Psalm," "When thou sawest a thief, then thou consentedst with him;" and then, when the names are called over, at the name of the guilty one the instrument makes its sign by swerving or turning in the holders' hands. This is interesting, as being almost the only ordeal which survives in common use in England; it may be met with in many an out-of-the-way farmhouse. It is some years since English rustics have dared to "swim" a witch, that is, to put in practice the ancient water-ordeal, which our folk-lore remembers in its most archaic Aryan form. Its essential principle is as plainly magical as any: the water, being set to make the trial, shows its decision by rejecting the guilty, who accordingly comes up to the surface. Our ancestors, who did not seize the distinction between weight and specific gravity, used to wonder at the supernatural power with which the water would heave up a wicked fellow, even if he weighed sixteen stone.

Mediæval ordeals, by water or fire, by touch of the corpse, or by wager of battle, have fallen to mere curiosities of literature, and it is needless to dwell here on their well-known picturesque details, or to repeat the liturgies of prayer or malediction said or sung by the consecrating priests. It is not by such accompanying formulas, but by the intention of the act itself, that we must estimate the real position of the religious element in it. Nowhere is this so strong as in what may be called the ordeal by miracle, where the innocent by divine help walks over the nine red-hot ploughshares, or carries the red-hot iron bar in his hand, or drinks a dose of deadly poison, and is none the worse for it; or, in the opposite way, where the draught of harmless water, cursed or consecrated by the priests, will bring, within a few days, dire disease on him or her who, being guilty, has dared to drink of it.

Looking at the subject from the statesman's point of view, the survey of the ordeals of all nations and ages enables us to judge with some certainty what their practical effect has been for evil or good.