If true that every age, like every person, has its own sins and short-comings to answer for, and that is the happiest which best succeeds in hiding them for a time,[82] then the age of the trial by ordeal, according to our twentieth century standard, was guilty of a sin that the past centuries must atone for, if atonement is essential for the wayward customs of a pagan race, struggling without compass or needle, amid the darkness of a barbarous age, to steer a straight course. They should not be held to more than the ordinary standards of right and wrong then prevailing, in their efforts to find the higher law for society, when just able to attempt to clamber up the mountain heights of wisdom. The inhabitants of the centuries who utilized the trial by ordeal had not then perfected their judicial system so that very high ideals of individual right obtained, but they had made wonderful strides in the arts and sciences, while practicing this hideous custom of trusting to the wisdom of God, in the trials of men and women for their offenses against society, as judged by man made laws. We have elevated the standards of the judicial system somewhat, since that period, but in our own time, a large number of people, instead of further establishing the independence of the judiciary, are favorable to submitting to popular vote, the correctness of a given decision, or the judicial fitness of a judge; mormonism only recently was abolished and instead of the superstition and delusion which invoked the judgment of God in trials of witches and others accused of unproven crimes, we have spiritualism and other similar protests against rationalism and reason, so we are not yet in a position to condemn, in unmeasured terms, our older brothers of the day of trials by ordeal. FOOTNOTES: [1] Pattetta, Ordalia, c. I. [2] From the Anglo-Saxon, _Ordaal_, _or_, primitive, and _daal_, judgment, meaning “primitive judgment,” or _urtheil_, according to the German. [3] Thayer says: “Nothing is older,” Harvard Law Review, Vol. V., p. 63; II. Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, 392. [4] Numbers, V., 14, 15, 19, 24, 27, 28. This same ordeal is in use among the Africans, of the Gold Coast, to determine incontinence on the part of a woman. From Herodotus it would seem that the ancient Egyptians believed in ordeals, with other divine power, to solve the guilt of prisoners, in cases where the evidence was doubtful, as he narrates instances where Aames II. who led a dissolute life, was convicted on the supposed divine judgment of the oracle. Herodotus II., 174. In their excellent history of English Law, Pollock and Maitland say, of the trial by ordeal: “The history of ordeals is a long chapter in the history of mankind; we must not attempt to tell it. Men of many, if not all races, have carried the red-hot iron or performed some similar feat, in proof of their innocence.” (Vol. II., p. 598.) [5] Sophocles’ _Antigone_, 264; Aeschylus, fr. 284.