Page:Witchcraft In Christian Countries.pdf/2

4 a master and another man a slave. The priests of the Lord, the bishops in the Upper House, were the most determined opponents of the anti-slavery agitation of Wilberforce, and Clarkson; and, when the battle came to be finally fought out in America, the canting parsons of that Republic were the worst enemies of the slave, and they preached sermons and quoted no end of texts from Scripture to prove that God Almighty had declared in favour of a trade in human flesh, and that he had mercifully ordained the stripes for the back of the slave.

I am perfectly aware that both witchcraft and slavery had obtained long before Christianity had sprung from the Jewish stable but I maintain that they both would have died out in Europe and America long before they did if it had not been for their pretended credentials from heaven. Nay, more; I venture to impeach Christianity as specially and par excellence the religion of witchcraft. Prosecutions for sorcery were comparatively unknown in heathen Greece, in pagan Rome and in the provinces that owned their sway. Witchcraft is essentially one of the blessings of Christianity which, according to the utterances of the pulpit, have raised us to such an eminence among the nations of the earth. When, as devout Pilgrim Fathers, we set foot on the shores of America we began, with true Christian charity, to torture and burn each other for witchcraft, till the very Red Indians regarded with horror and bewilderment our helpless suffers at the stake, and thanks the Great Spirit that they were not followers of the white man’s terrible God. They were cruel and merciless, but not so cruel as we. They had their tomahawk, their war-paint, and their necklace of human teeth, and, with a hardihood almost superhuman and heroism that has never been surpassed among mortals, their attack was savage and their reprisals merciless. But they were man to man, warrior to warrior. It was not they, but the cowardly and pious Christian witch-finder, that bound feeble and shrinking woman to the stake, that thrust innumerable pins into her flesh, and beheld with holy triumph or pious stoicism the suffering of the aged and helpless.

But now, forsooth, Christianity is ashamed of her previous belief in witchcraft. And why? Has her