The same process of reasoning, which led man, in the infancy of his reason, to personify the power who presided over the human race, induced him to infer that his pain and misfortune emanated from a malignant being, who delighted to do him harm. He then, by the simple process of his imagination, concluded that there must be two opposing powers which governed the affairs of mortals. The good, proceeded from a being who showered down blessings on mortals; and all evil and pain, from a being who took pleasure in the unhappiness of the human race; and his residence, to correspond with his evil disposition, was by them fixed in the gloomy regions of darkness and horror. This, then, Christians, appears to have been the origin of your God and Heaven; and also your Devil and Hell. That both heaven and hell are of heathen origin, there can be no doubt; and it is also equally clear, that the Jews, when they returned from captivity, brought these doctrines back with them into Judea. They then made part of the Jewish faith, and Jesus embraced them; for he pretended to cast out devils, and the Devil enticed him in the wilderness to rebel against God and enlist into the service of his Satanic Majesty. And this heaven, which originated in heathenism, Jesus promised as the reward of his faithful followers; and with this very hell he threatened the disobedient.
What can Christians say (after this) of the divinity or the antiquity of the New Testament? Its doctrines originated in an age unknown, among a people more ancient than Moses, or than Adam, who is said to have been the first man. Yes! ye ministers of grace, your heaven and hell, by the proclaiming of which you alarm the good man, but make the wicked man worse, have no more existence in reality than the heaven and hell of Mahomet. But if there be a heaven, such as you preach up, and the road to it be as difficult as Jesus declared it to be, many of you will have to put up at the half-way house; you will never reach the end of your journey.
The following account of witchcraft in Sweden, is extracted from “Godwin’s Lives of the Necromancers:”—“The story of witchcraft, as it is reported to have passed in Sweden, in the year 1670, and has many times been reprinted in this country, (England,) is, on several accounts, one of the most interesting and deplorable that has ever been recorded. The scene lies in Dalecarlia, a country forever memorable as having witnessed some of the earliest adventures of Gustavus Vasa, his deepest humiliation, and the first commencement of his prosperous fortune. The Dalecarlians are represented to us as the simplest, the most faithful, and the bravest of the sons of men;—men, undebauched and unsuspicious, but who devoted themselves in the most disinterested manner for a cause that appeared to them worthy of support, the cause of liberty and independence against the cruellest of tyrants. At least, such they were in 1520, one hundred and fifty years before the date of the story we are going to recount. The site of these events was at Mohra and Elfdale, in the province that has just been mentioned. The Dalecarlians, simple and ignorant, but of exemplary integrity and honesty, who dwelt amid impracticably mountains and spacious mines of copper and iron, were distinguished for superstition among the countries of the north, where all were superstitious. They were probably subject, at intervals, to the periodical visitation of alarms of witches, when whole races of men became wild with the infection, without any one’s being able to account for it.
“In the year 1670, and one or two preceding years, there was a great alarm of witches in the town of Mohra. There were always two or three witches existing in some of the obscure quarters of this place; but now they increased in number, and showed their faces with the utmost audacity. Their mode, on the present occasion, was, to make a journey through the air to Blockula, an imaginary scene of retirement, which none but the witches and their dupes had ever seen. Here they met with feasts and various entertainments, which it seems had particular charms for the persons who partook of them. The witches used to go into a field, in the environs of Mohra, and cry aloud to the Devil in a peculiar sort of recitation, “Antecessor! come and carry us to Blockula.” Then appeared a multitude of strange beasts: men, spits, posts, and goats with spits run through their entrails, and projecting behind, that all might have room. The witches mounted these beasts of burden, as vehicles, and were conveyed through the air over high walls and mountains, and through churches and chimneys, without perceptible impediment, till they arrived at the place of their destination.
“Here the Devil feasted them with various compounds and confections; and, having feasted to their heart’s content, they danced and then fought. The Devil made them ride on spits, from which they were thrown; and the Devil beat them with the spits and laughed at them. He then caused them to build a house to protect them against the day of judgment, and presently overturned the walls of the house, and derided them again. All sorts of obscenities were reported to follow upon these scenes. The Devil begot on the witches sons and daughters; this new generation intermarried again, and the issue of this further conjunction appears to have been toads and serpents. How all this pedigree proceeded, in the two or three years in which Blockula had never been heard of, I know not that the witches were ever called on to explain. But what was most of all to be deplored, the Devil was not content with seducing the witches to go and celebrate this infernal Sabbath; he further insisted that they should bring the children of Mohra along with them.
“At first, he was satisfied, if each witch brought one: but now, he demanded that each witch should bring six or seven for her quota. How the witches managed with the minds of the children, we are at a loss to guess. These poor, harmless innocents, steeped to the very lips in ignorance and superstition, were, by some means, kept in continual alarm by the wicked, or, to speak more truly, the insane old women, and said as their prompters said. It does not appear that the children ever left their beds, at the time they reported they had been to Blockula. Their parents watched them with fearful anxiety. At a certain time of the night, the children were seized with a strange shuddering; their limbs were agitated, and their skins covered with a profuse perspiration. When they came to themselves, they related that they had been to Blockula, and the strange things they had seen, similar to what had already been described by the women. Three hundred children, of various ages, are said to have been seized with this epidemic.
“The whole town of Mohra became subject to the infection, and were overcome with the deepest affliction. They consulted together, and drew up a petition to the royal counsel at Stockholm, entreating that they would discover some remedy, and that the government would interpose its authority to put an end to a calamity to which otherwise they could find no limit. The King of Sweden, at that time, was Charles the Eleventh, father of Charles the Twelfth, and was only fourteen years of age. His council, in their wisdom, deputed two commissioners to Morah, and furnished them with powers to examine witnesses, and take whatever proceedings they might judge necessary to put an end to so unspeakable a calamity. They entered on the business of their commission, on the thirteenth of August, the ceremony having been begun with two sermons in the great church of Mohra, in which we may be sure the damnable sin of witchcraft was fully dilated on, and concluded with prayers to Almighty God, that, in his mercy, he would speedily bring to an end the tremendous misfortune with which, for their sins, he had seen fit to afflict the poor people of Mohra. The next day they opened their commission. Seventy witches were brought before them. They were all, at first, steadfast in their denial, alleging that the charges were wantonly brought against them, solely from malice and ill-will. But the judges were earnest in pressing them, till, at length, first one, and then another, burst into tears, and confessed all. Twenty-three were prevailed on thus to disburden their consciences; but nearly the whole, those who owned the justice of their sentence, as well as those who protested their innocence to the last, were executed. Fifteen children confessed their guilt, and were also executed. Thirty-six other children, (who, we may infer, did confess,) between the ages of nine and sixteen, were condemned to run the gauntlet, and to be whipped on their hands at the church door every Sunday for a year together. Twenty others were whipped on their hands for three Sundays.”
This is certainly a very deplorable scene; and is made the more so, by the previous character which history has imposed on us, of the simplicity, integrity, and generous love of liberty of the Dalecarlians. For the children and their parents, we can feel nothing but unmingled pity. The case of the witches is different. That three hundred children should have been made the victims of this imaginary witchcraft, is doubtless a grievous calamity. And that a number of women should be found, so depraved and so barbarous, as by their incessant suggestions to have practised on the minds of these children, so as to have robbed them of their sober sense, to have frightened them into fits and disease, and made them believe the most odious impossibilities, argued a most degenerate character, and well merited severe reprobation, but not death. Add to which, many of those women may be believed innocent; otherwise, a great majority of those who were executed would not have died protesting their entire freedom from what was imputed to them. Some of the parents, no doubt from folly and ill-judgment, aided the alienation of mind in their children, which they afterward so deeply deplored, and gratified their senseless aversion to the old women, when they were themselves in many cases more the real authors of the evil than those who suffered.
The honest and serious reader is now recommended to pause, and, for a moment, reflect on the foregoing recital; for if ten thousand real devils had been let loose and turned out on the earth in a visible and bodily form, and had been permitted to do their worst against the human race, if such a thing had actually taken place, the evils inflicted by them would have been little compared to what has really taken place by men’s believing in the existence of an invisible Devil, who never had a being but in the imagination of mortals. The destructive influence which has spread over the whole earth has brought to a premature grave thousands and tens of thousands of harmless beings, who have been charged with holding converse with this supposed enemy of God and man. Of all the crimes which have been committed on earth, to sin against Orthodox faith has been considered the worst; when, in fact, it is no sin at all. There is nothing immoral in it. To differ from any man, or from all men, about religion, cannot be a crime. It is the inherent right of every human being; and to rob him of that right is the worst of felony. But to punish a man with death in addition, is to unite robbery and murder. And what makes it worse is, that religious offenders are put to death without pity or mercy. Few, very few tears of compassion ever have fallen for them, where Christianity has been the prosecutor.
The baneful influence which has spread over the world, by believing in the existence of the Devil, is shocking to humanity. It has been computed that as many as one million persons have suffered, in various ways, since the commencement of the Christian era. Some have been banished; some have been branded and imprisoned; others put to death, after having been tortured in the most cruel manner; and thousands have been out-lawed and driven from their peaceful homes without pity. All this has taken place because the Scriptures teach and support the existence of a Devil, the inveterate enemy of God and men. There is no doctrine more fully carried out in the New Testament than the existence and hostile activity of the Devil. Jesus, it is said, “cast them out.” He also was tempted to rebel against God, and to worship the Devil. In the Book of Job, the Devil is represented as being permitted to afflict Job. And Jesus threatens the ungodly with a punishment in connection with the Devil and his angels. If a devil has no being whatever, why should Jesus pretend to cast out devils? And if there be, in truth, such a personage as the Devil, possessing such power, and, also, forever opposing Almighty power, can it be possible that a God of goodness would permit him to live and annoy God and men?