The Necessity of Atheism

by David Marshall Brooks

The physical and mental suffering of such a process was sufficient to overcome the resolution of many, and to distract the understanding of not a few. But other and perhaps worse tortures were in reserve. The three principal ones that were habitually applied were the "pennywinks, the boot, and the caschielawis." The first was a kind of thumbscrew; the second was a frame in which the leg was inserted, and in which it was broken by wedges driven in by a hammer; the third was also an iron frame for the leg, which was from time to time heated over a brazier. Fire-matches were sometimes applied to the body of the victim. We read in a contemporary legal register, of one man who was kept for forty-eight hours in "vehement torture" in the caschielawis; and of another who remained in the same frightful machine for eleven days and nights, whose legs were broken daily for fourteen days in the boots, and who was so scourged that the whole skin was torn from his body. This was, it is true, censured as an extreme case, but it was only an excessive application of the common torture.

The witches were commonly strangled before they were burnt, but this merciful provision was very frequently omitted. An Earl of Wear tells how, with a piercing yell, some women once broke half-burnt from the slow fire consuming them, struggled for a few moments with a despairing energy among the spectators, but soon with shrieks of blasphemy and wild protestations of innocence sank writhing in agony amid the flames.

But just picture this scene for a moment! The horror of such a scene! What a crime for one human to commit against another! A burnt offering to the gods! How well pleased the Almighty God must have been with the stench of burning human flesh rising to his nostrils. And how well he must have rewarded his faithful servants, for was this not done in His name? "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."

As Lecky points out in his famous work on the "History of European Morals," such incidents are but illustrations of the great truth that when men have come to regard a certain class of their fellow creatures as doomed by the Almighty to eternal and excruciating agonies, and when their theology directs their minds with intense and realizing earnestness to the contemplation of such agonies, the result will be an indifference to the suffering of those whom they deem the enemies of their God, as absolute as it is perhaps possible for human nature to attain.

It is a historical fact that in 1591, a lady of rank, Eufame Macalyane, sought the assistance of Agnes Sampson for the relief of pain at the time of birth of her two sons. Agnes Sampson was tried before King James for her heresy, was condemned as a witch, and was burned alive on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh.

It is generally said that the last execution in Scotland was in 1722, but Captain Burt, who visited the country in 1730, speaks of a woman who was burnt as late as 1727. As late as 1736, the divines of the Associated Presbytery passed a resolution declaiming their belief in witchcraft, and deploring the scepticism that was then general.

The Pilgrim Fathers brought to our shores the seeds of the Witchcraft Delusion at a time when it was rapidly fading in England, and again history furnishes us with an example of a people with strong religious instincts who, being freed from their persecutors, became in turn the most violent persecutors of those that did not profess their particular creed. It was particularly due to the preaching of Cotton Mather that a panic of fear was created through the New England Colonies. Mrs. Ann Hibbons was tried before the Great and General Court of Massachusetts, sentenced and hanged on the 19th of June, 1656. "Goody Oliver" was executed as a witch on November 16th, 1688.

There were twenty murders in 1692, and these before a civil court. The trials took place before the illegal Court of Oyer and Terminer, appointed by Governor Phipps, at the instigation of the Lieutenant-Governor and Chief Justice Stoughton, and Joseph Dudley, formerly governor, and the Chief Judge of the Court which, in 1688, had sent "Goody Oliver" to her death at the gallows.

Cotton Mather defended this practice in his book, "The Wonders of The Invisible World," and Increase Mather, the father of Cotton, was equally as strenuous in the "Witch Hunt." Increase Mather survived this massacre thirty years, and his son, five years longer, but there is hardly a word of regret or sympathy to be found anywhere, even in their private diaries and correspondence. These executions in Massachusetts form one of the darkest pages in the history of America.

It is not surprising that the clergy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries supported both in practice and theory the Witchcraft Delusion, but when we find the ablest minds of the laity bursting into print with a vehement defense of this belief, it is difficult for us, in the present day, to conceive of such folly. And yet, today, we have able minds defending a precept of which the Witchcraft Delusion is but a part.