Letters on demonology and witchcraft / [Sir Walter Scott].

  • Walter Scott
Date:
1841
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Letters on demonology and witchcraft / [Sir Walter Scott]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    89/344 (page 87)
    — — DEMONOLOGY AND WITCHCRAFT. 87 baroarous tribes receive the necessary religious in- formation from some zealous and enthusiastic preacher, who christened them by hundreds in one day1? Still less could we imagine them to have acquired a knowledge of Christianity, in the genuine and perfect sense of the word, when, as was fre- quently the case, they only assumed the profession of the religion that had become the choice of some favoured chief, whose example they followed in mere love and loyalty, without, perhaps, attaching more consequence to a change of religion than to a change of garments. Such hasty converts, profess- ing themselves Christians, but neither weaned from their old belief, nor instructed in their new one, en- tered the sanctuary without laying aside the super- stitions with which their young minds had been imbued; and, accustomed to a plurality of deities, some of them, who bestowed unusual thought on the matter, might be of opinion, that, in adopting the God of the Christians, they had not renounced the service of every inferior power. If, indeed, the laws of the empire could have been supposed to have had any influence over those fierce barbarians, who conceived that the empire itself lay before them as a spoil, they might have been told that Constantine, taking the offence of alleged magi- cians and sorcerers in the same light in which it was viewed in the law of Moses, had denounced death against any one who used these unlawful inquiries into futurity. “ Let the unlawful curiosity of prying into futurity,” says the law, “ be silent in every one henceforth and for ever.* For, subjected to the avenging sword of the law, he shall be punished capitally who disobeys our commands in this matter.” If, however, we look more closely into this enact- ment, we shall be led to conclude that the civil law does not found upon the prohibitions and penalties