82. But the persecuted, far more than the persecutors, deserve our
sympathy, although they rarely obtain it. It is frequently asserted that
the absolute truth of a doctrine is the only support that will enable
its adherents successfully to weather the storms of persecution. Those
who assent to this proposition must be prepared to find a large amount
of truth in the beliefs known to us under the name of witchcraft, if the
position is to be successfully maintained; for never was any sect
persecuted more systematically, or with more relentlessness, than these
little-offending heretics. Protestants and Catholics, Anglicans and
Calvinists, so ready at all times to commit one another to the flames
and to the headsman, found in this matter common ground, upon which all
could heartily unite for the grand purpose of extirpating error. When,
out of the quiet of our own times, we look back upon the terrors of the
Tower, and the smoke and glare of Smithfield, we think with mingled pity
and admiration of those brave men and women who, in the sixteenth
century, enriched with their blood and ashes the soil from whence was to
spring our political and religious freedom. But no whit of admiration,
hardly a glimmer of pity, is even casually evinced for those poor
creatures who, neglected, despised, and abhorred, were, at the same
time, dying the same agonizing death, and passing through the torment of
the flames to that "something after death--the undiscovered country,"
without the sweet assurance which sustained their better-remembered
fellow-sufferers, that beyond the martyr's cross was waiting the
martyr's crown.
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