What! Were not these holy ministers prompted by their superior learning and humanity, to endeavor to save people? Quite the contrary, they appear to have been there rather to countenance and approve, if not to enjoy, the shocking spectacle. Such as these were the heavenly teachers, who, for more than a thousand years, asserted, preached, and practised, _that the rack was the fittest engine of conviction_, and the stake the most effectual cure for unbelief.* As conservators and upholders of every invention in the delusive machinery of supernaturalism, upon which their trade wholly depends, anything in the shape of human interference in favor of the victims, or any compunctious feelings for the barbarities which these men of peace and love sanctioned, were altogether out of the question on such occasions. No animal has ever been more cruel and remorseless than priests of all religions have been, in supporting those delusions which support them, _whenever they had the power._*** The Jew books being now nullified as authorities for the existence of witchcraft, what sustains their validity in all other matters? * What terrific outrages does superstitious ignorance perpetrate. Thousands have been burnt for witchcraft. Millions have been murdered for being what bad government and Christianity have made them. And hundreds of millions are threatened with eternal tortures for having beliefs which it is impossible for them not to have. ** Belief or disbelief (being the work of the judgment, and not of the will) is involuntary; and there is neither merit nor demerit in either. You believe only that which seems to you to be true, and, in spite of your hypocrisy, I defy you to believe more. What does the Atheist less? And that which appears to you to be a lie, you necessarily reject, and what does the Atheist more. *** Superstition is to be feared only when the authority of iniquitous laws rallies round her standard, for then her cruel and sanguinary nature is gratified. Such has been Jewish and Christian immorality and wickedness, in punishing the guiltless for the fanciful crime of witchcraft; and in other respects we may find in these books innumerable instances of sanctioned cruelty and injustice, both in example and precept:--take the following malevolent sentiment, said to have been uttered by the all-ruling power of the universe; "let his children be fatherless; let them be vagabonds continually, and beg; let them also seek their bread out of their desolate places. Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the stranger spoil his labor, let there be none to extend mercy to him, neither let there be any to favor his fatherless children; let his posterity be cut off," etc., etc. Again, in Exod. xxiii., 3.