3 io THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



garments, and weighed her against the church Bible ; she outweighed 

 it, and went home in triumph. Here the metaphor of weighing is 

 worked in the opposite way to that in India, but it is quite as intelli- 

 gible, and not a whit the worse for practical purposes. For yet an- 

 other case, how an old magical process may be afterward transformed 

 by bringing in the religious sanction, we may look at the ancient 

 classic sieve and shears, the sieve being suspended by sticking the 

 points of the open shears into the rim, and the handles of the shears 

 balanced on the forefingers of the holders. To discover a thief, or a 

 lover, all that was required was to call over all suspected names, till 

 the instrument turned at the right one. In the course of history, this 

 childish divining-ordeal came to be Christianized into the key and 

 Bible ; the key, of course, to open the secret, the Bible to supply the 

 test of truth. For a thief-ordeal, the proper mode is to tie in the key 

 at the verse of the 50th Psalm, " "When thou sawest a thief, then thou 

 consentedst with him ; " and then, when the names are called over, at 

 the name of the guilty one the instrument makes its sign by swerving 

 or turning in the holders' hands. This is interesting, as being almost 

 the only ordeal which survives in common use in England ; it may be 

 met with in many an out-of-the-way farmhouse. It is some years 

 since English rustics have dared to " swim " a witch, that is, to put in 

 practice the ancient water-ordeal, which our folk-lore remembers in 

 its most archaic Aryan form. Its essential principle is as plainly 

 magical as any : the water, being set to make the trial, shows its 

 decision by rejecting the guilty, who accordingly comes up to the 

 surface. Our ancestors, who did not seize the distinction between 

 weight and specific gravity, used to wonder at the supernatural power 

 with which the water would heave up a wicked fellow, even if he 

 weighed sixteen stone. 



Mediaeval ordeals, by water or fire, by touch of the corpse, or by 

 wager of battle, have fallen to mere curiosities of literature, and it is 

 needless to dwell here on their well-known picturesque details, or to 

 repeat the liturgies of prayer or malediction said or sung by the con- 

 secrating priests. It is not by such accompanying formulas, but by 

 the intention of the act itself, that we must estimate the real position 

 of the religious element in it. Nowhere is this so strong as in what 

 may be called the ordeal by miracle, where the innocent by divine 

 help walks over the nine red-hot ploughshares, or carries the red-hot 

 iron bar in his hand, or drinks a dose of deadly poison, and is none the 

 worse for it ; or, in the opposite way, where the draught of harmless 

 water, cursed or consecrated by the priests, will bring, within a few 

 days, dire disease on him or her who, being guilty, has darned to drink 

 of it. 



Looking at the subject from the statesman's point of view, the 

 survey of the ordeals of all nations and ages enables us to judge w T ith 

 some certainty what their practical effect has been for evil or good. 



