Witch's Bridle, Forfar.
It would not be difficult to add to these common instruments of punishment and of torture others equally characteristic of the spirit of the age, though not brought into such general use. Registers of various kirk-sessions recently printed by the Abbotsford Club, the Spottiswoode Society, and others of the Scottish literary book clubs, disclose much curious evidence of the petty tyranny and cruelty too frequently exercised by these courts in the enforcement of ecclesiastical discipline, most frequently by means little calculated to promote reformation or good morals. In these, however, as in the traces of earlier manners which we have sought to recover, the historian finds a key to the character of the age to which they belong, and indications of its degree of advancement in civilisation, such as no contemporary historian could furnish, since it supplies elements for comparing and for contrasting the present with the past, no less available than the rude pottery and the implements of flint or bone which reveal to us the simple arts of aboriginal races. The great difference in point of value between the two classes of relics is, that those more recent indices of obsolete customs supply to us only an additional element wherewith to test and to supplement the invaluable records which the printing press supplies, while the latter are the sole chronicles we possess of ages more intimately associated with our human sympathies than all the geological periods of the preadamite earth.
FOOTNOTES:
[702] New Statist. Account, vol. v. p. 279.
[703] Journ. Archæol. Assoc., vol. iii. p. 63.
[704] New Stat. Account, vol. iv. p. 71.
[705] Ibid. vol. vi. p. 581.
[706] Ibid. vol. v. p. 430.