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Cornwallis will go on as he pleases and overrun the state, and the militia will never stand to front him again under Horatio Gates. Worse still, Ferguson is off to the westward, embodying the Tories by the hundred, and we shall have burnings and hangings and harryings to the king's taste." I nursed my knee a moment and then said: "What may one man do to help, Colonel Davie?" He looked up quickly.
A colporteur, known to me, when engaged selling Bibles in a Brazilian town, reports that the fanatical populace got his books and carried them, fastened and burning, at the end of blazing torches, while they tramped the streets, yelling: "Away with all false books!" "Away with the religion of the devils!" A recent Papal bull reads: "Bible burnings are most Catholic demonstrations."
And we know that the period during which the influence of Christian theism was strongest, was the period when the intellectual life of civilised man was at its lowest, morality at its weakest, and the general outlook most hopeless. Religious control gave us heresy hunts, and Jew hunts, burnings for witchcraft, and magic in the place of medicine.
He then began an impassioned invective against the South and recited in detail horror after horror, for which the South was answerable. He described hangings, revolting in their brutality; he drew vivid word pictures of various burnings, mentioning one where a white woman struck the match and ignited the pile of wood that was to consume the trembling negro.
In the Low Countries law had ceased to exist, and there anything might happen however monstrous or inhuman. Indeed, with one decree of the Holy Office, confirmed by a proclamation of Philip of Spain, all the inhabitants of the Netherlands, three millions of them, had been condemned to death. Men's minds were full of terror, for on every side were burnings and hangings and torturings.
A man may endure to touch the fire with a short touch, and away; but to dwell with everlasting burnings, that is fearful. Oh then, what is dwelling with them and in them for ever and ever? We use to say, "Light burdens carried far are heavy:" what then will it be to bear that burden, that guilt, that the law and the justice and the wrath of God will lay upon the lost soul for ever?
Already have I told you of holy men who would gouge a man's eye out for the extraction of one small bean, and counted burnings life's highest joy, and held the body accursed as a necessary evil for the tabernacling of the soul.
In comparison with the ages of Christianity the ancient world was unquestionably less cruel than the Middle Age, with its deaths by exquisite torture, its innumerable burnings at the stake.
The crowd carry off bits of skin, hair, finger-nails, and rope as trophies. In fact, these "burnings" are the most extraordinary features in this "enlightened" country. The papers denounce them and compare the people to ghouls; yet these same people accuse the Chinese of being cruel, barbarous, insensible to cruelty, and "pagans."
Thou art like him that snoring still doth lie Upon the bed of vain security, Whilst all about him into burning flame By fire is turned; yea, and while the frame And building where he lies consuming is, And while himself these burnings cannot miss.
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