Page:Witchcraft In Christian Countries.pdf/4

6 engine is Infidelity, all popular forms of Government are Infidelity, and all sources of enlightenment are Infidelity. Everything that would, in the interests of the people, depose Deity, hurl the king from his throne, and break the teeth of the priest, is rank Infidelity. But slavery is Christian, witchcraft is Christian, despotism is Christian, war is Christian, ignorance is Christian, and everything that would make earth a hell for the servile many and a Paradise for the tyrannic few.

Christianity has not given up witchcraft; she has had it and slavery wrenched out of her teeth by the "Infidelity" of Public Opinion. Even in England in Puritan times, which were eminently witch-burning times, the greatest heretics then in the land-namely, the Independents-were the only sect that raised their voice against the burning of witches. So has it ever been—Orthodoxy on the side of Ignorance and Injustice, Heresy on the side of Enlightenment and Justice. Even Macaulay, who was no opponent of Christianity, in his essay on "Ranke's History of the Popes," makes a striking admission on this head. Speaking of Voltaire and his school, he observes: "On one side was a Church boasting of the purity of a doctrine derived from the Apostles, but disgraced by the massacre of St. Bartholomew, by the murder of the best of kings, by the War of Cevennes, by the destruction of Port Royal. On the other side was a sect laughing at the Scriptures, shooting out the tongue at the sacraments, but ready to encounter principalities and powers in the cause of justice, mercy, and toleration,"

This poor, emasculated eunuch, which is all that is now left of a once powerful superstition, is not Christianity at all. It has lost its slavery; it has half lost its kingcraft; it has lost its witchcraft; it has lost its dungeons, its axes, and its gibbets. It has lost nearly its every principle; but it has held tenaciously on by the cash. It has lost the Lord; but it has still the loaves and fishes. What it has lost Humanity has gained. I do not mourn over its humiliation. I laugh bitterly at its shiftiness and meanness. Its very devil has, before the Court of Arches, had his identity denied; the Broad Church party has robbed it of its roaring hell; and Colenso, Robertson Smith, and other exegetical scholars