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With longing eyes we gazed from the buses which hours of bumping and rolling on poor roads had made to us torture-chambers. How gladly would we have strolled through its streets gazing on the pretty girls and gaping at the novelty of its quaint buildings and the unusual ware in its shop-windows.
But, pest on railroad cars I they are mere torture-chambers, with the additional chance, as Johnson said of the ship, of being land-wrecked. Some people like 'em, though. And there are dangers everywhere. The other day-a high windy day a party went to the mountain, and had like to have been blown off from the top. But they said it was beautiful.
To the pride of her conquistadores was added the fanaticism of Xavier and his retinue, and in the very years when within the same region Baber and Akbar were raising the wise and tolerant administration of the first Moguls, the Inquisition, with its priests, incantations, and torture-chambers, was established at Goa.
The red devils of Pandemonium may be terrible, fresh from the flames of the pit; but they are nothing to their brothers in blue, who people the air, overcloud the eyes and set up torture-chambers in the brain. Bunyan, in that ever-living "Pilgrim's Progress," paints no tyrant so terrible as "Giant Despair," and no obstruction to the way so fatally impassable as the "Slough of Despond."
I hope they do not all know how miserable they are, and fancy that they enjoy themselves; but with many the suffering is too great for self-deception, and they come home to look back upon those long halls, filled with the masterpieces of ancient and modern art, as mere torture-chambers, whence nothing is brought away but backache, headache, weary feet and an agonizing confusion of ideas.
Such a request is like the embrace of the "virgin" in old torture-chambers. She is robed in soft raiment, but beneath it are the knife-blades which are ready to lacerate and kill the victim, if he awaits the pressure of the machinery already in motion. Mr. Motley knew well what was the logical order in an official execution, and saw fit to let the government work its will upon him as its servant.
Only his side I saw; the thin bent arm in its black covering looked like one of those devilish, nameless instruments which lie in the disused torture-chambers of mediaeval castles. But I had escaped him, though his eyes had said I should not. Had I escaped him? That which gave him the power over me came back out of oblivion, where I had hoped to keep it. For I knew him now.
If we had only a Charles Stuart on the throne there would be nane o' this Whiggery." "There would be in its place masses, and popish priests, and a few private torture-chambers, and whiles a Presbyterian heretic or twa burned at the Grass-market. Whiggery is a grand thing when it keeps the Scarlet Woman on her ain seven hills. Scotland's hills and braes can do weel, weel without her."
One sniffling school-girl who prefers a temperature of 80 degrees can force a car full of people to swelter in an atmosphere that is death to them, because she refuses either to put on her wraps or to have a window opened. Street railways are torture-chambers where we slaves are made to suffer in another way.
I had a passion for historical reading, indeed, at that time had probably read more and thought more upon my reading than had most men of my age in college, and the more I thus read and thought, the more evident it became to me that, while the simple religion of the Blessed Founder of Christianity has gone on through the ages producing the noblest growths of faith, hope, and charity, many of the beliefs insisted upon within the church as necessary to salvation were survivals of primeval superstition, or evolved in obedience to pagan environment or Jewish habits of thought or Greek metaphysics or mediaeval interpolations in our sacred books; that most of the frightful systems and events in modern history have arisen from theological dogmatism; that the long reign of hideous cruelty in the administration of the penal law, with its torture-chambers, its burnings of heretics and witches, its cruelties of every sort, its repression of so much of sane human instinct and noble human thought, arose from this source, directly or indirectly; and that even such ghastly scenes as those of the French Revolution were provoked by a natural reaction in the minds of a people whom the church, by its theory of divine retribution, had educated for ages to be cruel.
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