What shall we say when we remember that Moses found a refuge with the Midianites for forty years when he was a fugitive from justice for the murder of the Egyptian, and the Midianites were the first to show the Jews hospitality when they escaped from the bondage of Egypt? Moreover, Moses had married a woman of Midian, and might have been supposed to have some regard for her kinswomen. It cannot be claimed that Moses was compelled by the low condition of the people to treat the Midianites thus, for he was the _sole author_ of this extreme butchery of women and children, and was “wroth” with his officers for not committing the atrocity in the first place. True, he charges the women with having “caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor but this could not justify the butchery of some forty-eight thousand women and twenty thousand boys, besides the old men. And then the thirty-two thousand virgins had a fate _worse than death_, though called the ’Lord’s tribute’,” and the priests got their full share of the spoil. For those who would justify such cruelty and wholesale butchery, as they would justify famine and pestilence the effect of natural laws, I can have no very great respect. It has been said, “Cruel as many of the Mosaic punishments undoubtedly were, it is well to remember that two hundred years ago the criminal code of England was almost, if not equally, bloody. If Moses stoned adulteresses to death, it is not very long since we put witches and Quakers to death, while in many other countries the stake and the fagot were the chief arguments in aid of orthodoxy. It would not be just to judge of the punishments inflicted over three thousand years ago from the standpoint of the present century, when the Mosaic dispensation has passed away and that of the law of love substituted. There was no mercy in the smoking rocks of Sinai. There was nothing but the law in all its sternness.” This is all very well, but we should remember that the cruel criminal codes of modern times got their cruelty from the Mosaic code. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Ex. 22: 18) was one of the laws of Moses, and from first to last thirty thousand witches were’ executed in Great Britain and two hundred thousand in Germany. Sir Matthew Hale pronounced the death-sentence on a “witch,” and Blackstone, the great commentator, thought that witchcraft must be real because the Bible said there were witches! Scotland continued to burn witches until 1722, and Germany until 1780, while in 1515 there were five thousand witches burned at Geneva. I am ashamed to speak of our own hanging of witches in Massachusetts, but it is very well known that it was done by authority of the law of Moses: “A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them” (Lev. 20: 27).(1)