EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST 



smallest compunctions and upon very small pro- 

 vocation. The feelings with which we regard 

 to-day the needless infliction of physical suffer- 

 ing would be utterly unintelligible to them. To 

 such men murder and torture are common in- 

 cidents of life, which no more interrupt the even 

 tenor of their ways than ours are interrupted by 

 railway accidents. A man born in such a state 

 of society expects to meet a violent death, as is 

 shown by our own Norse progenitors, who re- 

 garded it as disgraceful to die in one's bed, 

 and an end which a man was willing to encoun- 

 ter himself he might readily be supposed to be 

 willing to inflict upon others. In this way, I 

 think, the excessive cruelty which characterized 

 the persecutions of the Middle Ages is com- 

 pletely explained. When we read of the fright- 

 ful tortures inflicted upon Arabs, Jews, and 

 Protestants by the Inquisition ; when we re- 

 member the fiendish outrages perpetrated by 

 the Spanish armies in Holland and by the Im- 

 perial armies at Magdeburg ; when we recollect 

 that in Spain an auto-de-fe was one of the most 

 imposing ceremonies of the Church, and that, 

 on the marriage of Philip II., burning heretics 

 served as nuptial torches, we are at first inclined 

 to exclaim that such cruelties could never have 

 been. In human nature, as we know it to-day, 

 mean and bad as it too often is, we do not seem 

 to find anything like a parallel to such horrible 

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