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Updated: June 11, 2025
In the days, now happily remote, when folks, provided as for a picnic, laboriously travelled great distances in order to be present at the execution of some unhappy wretch; in the days when harmless old women, whose chief fault may probably have been that they were poor and friendless, and perhaps by age and privation rendered little better than half-witted, were baited, and dragged by an ignorant and credulous populace to a fiery or to a watery death, there survived in Scotland yet another barbarous custom not unworthy to take rank with witch-burning.
But God made the earthquake, the volcano, the cyclone; the shark, the viper, the tiger, the octopus, the poison berry; and the deadly loathsome germs of cholera, consumption, typhoid, smallpox, and the black death. God has permitted famine, pestilence, and war. He has permitted martyrdom, witch-burning, slavery, massacre, torture, and human sacrifice.
One does not, as I have said, need to deny heredity in order to resist such legislation, any more than one needs to deny the spiritual world in order to resist an epidemic of witch-burning. I admit there may be such a thing as hereditary feeble-mindedness; I believe there is such a thing as witchcraft.
"Neither was it in Longfellow's nature; yet Longfellow's poems on Slavery are judged worthy to form a separate section of his works. But Holmes can denounce most valiantly. He denounces witch-burning and Inquisition-persecution, like the chivalrous soul that he is.
The bishop probably saved her from the vengeance of this rural dean, for witch-burning was not unknown even then, as Walter de Map witnesses. This was not the first essay of our bishop in witch-laying. When he was still Prior of Witham, Bartholomew, Bishop of Exeter, a learned and pious man, and one of St. Thomas' opposers, consulted him upon a sad case.
As for magic, necromancy, pyromancy, geomancy, coscinomancy, and all the other mancies there was then a whole literature about them. And the witch-burning inquisitors like Sprenger, Bodin, Delrio, and the rest, believed as firmly in the magic powers of the poor wretches whom they tortured to death, as did, in many cases, the poor wretches themselves. Everyone, almost, believed in magic.
In short, slavery was one of the many "relics of barbarism" like the divine right of kings, religious persecution, torture of the accused, imprisonment and enslavement for debt, witch-burning, and kindred "institutions" which were transmitted to that generation from former ages as so many burdens of humanity, for help in the removal of which the new nation was in the providence of God perhaps called into existence.
We can read of the later New Englanders in the making, among the works of Cotton Mather, his father Increase Mather, and the witch-burning, periwig-hating, doctrinal Judge Sewall, who so manfully confessed and atoned for his mistake about the Salem witches.
The great holes through which, as through earthquake rents, the innermost life of Rome has become visible in the last thirty years, are beginning to close up. In that sort of rag-fair, witch-burning ground limited only by the island and the belfries of Trastevere which I used to look down upon from Palazzo Orsini, the Jews are building a colossal synagogue.
They are no more possessed of an evil, designing spirit, as our witch-burning ancestors consistently believed, than the ordinary human being is possessed of "free-will." Spinoza's psychology is dialectical. But it is no indictment of his psychology to point out that it is. It is true, his formal definition of sorrow, for instance, fails supremely to touch the strings of a sympathetic heart.
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