break from Rebecca's pew. Then the preacher had raised his hands above
bowed heads. The service was over. The people crowded solemnly out,
and I was left alone in the gathering darkness--alone with the ghosts
of youth's illusions mocking from the gloom. Religion, then, did not
always mean right! There were tyrants of souls as well as tyrants of
sword. Prayers were uttered that were fitter for hearing in hell than
in Heaven. Good men could deceive themselves into crime cloaking
spiritual malice, sect jealousy, race hatred with an unctuous text.
Here, in New England, where men had come for freedom, was tyranny
masking in the guise of religion. Preachers as jealous of the power
slipping from their hands as ever was primate of England! A poor
gentleman hounded to his death because he practised the sciences!
Millions of victims all the world over burned for witchcraft,
sacrificed to a Moloch of superstition in the name of a Christ who came
to let in the light of knowledge on all superstition!

Could I have found a wilderness where was no human face, I think I had
fled to it that night. And, indeed, when you come to think of my
breaking with Eli Kirke, 'twas the witch trial that drove me to the
wilderness.

There was yet a respite. But the Church still dominated the civil
courts, and a transfer of the case meant that the Church would throw
the onus of executing sentence on those lay figures who were the
puppets of a Pharisaical oligarchy.

There was no time to appeal to England. There was no chance of sudden
rescue. New England had not the stuff of which mobs are made.

I thought of appealing to the mercy of the judges; but what mercy had