THE CAUSES OF PERSECUTION 



cruelty as this. It has been said that we need 

 but to imagine the state of mind which attrib- 

 uted a similar course of action to Eternal Jus- 

 tice, and conceived it as part and parcel of the 

 essential order of the universe, to render all this 

 explicable. No doubt the self-same ingenuity 

 which men displayed speculatively in theologi- 

 cal descriptions of the next world was also dis- 

 played practically in such inventions as the rack 

 and the boot, the Virgin armed with knives, or 

 the cell whose walls gradually approached each 

 other and crushed the wretched prisoner into a 

 jelly. It is significant, too, that execution by 

 fire was openly defended as being symbolical 

 of the everlasting punishment destined for the 

 heretic hereafter. At the execution of the lad 

 William Hunter, in 1555, as the fagots were 

 set on fire one of the attendant priests ex- 

 claimed, " Behold, as thou burnest here, so shalt 

 thou burn in hell ! " 



To cite the atrocious theology, however, as 

 the sufficient explanation of the atrocious be- 

 haviour, would be, I think, to invert the rela- 

 tions of cause and effect, in homely phrase, 

 to get the cart before the horse. It was only in 

 a cruel age that the doctrine of hell-fire could 

 have acquired that hold upon men's minds 

 which it had acquired in the Middle Ages. In 

 recent times the doctrine has become almost 

 universally discredited throughout the more en- 

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