were now professing to expiate those errors by a gloomy and ferocious
asceticism. Both had a grudge against Sharp. Balfour had been accused of
malversation in the management of some property for which he was the
Archbishop's factor, and Hackston, his brother-in-law, had been
arrested as his bail and forced to make the money good. Russell, who has
left a curiously minute and cold-blooded narrative of this murder,[23]
was a man of headstrong and fiery temper. They had all those dangerous
gifts of eloquence which, coarse and uncouth as it sounds to our ears,
was, when liberally garnished with texts of Scripture, precisely such as
to inflame the heated tempers of an illiterate peasantry to madness. It
is important to distinguish men of this stamp from the genuine sufferers
for conscience' sake. The latter men were, indeed, often wrought up by
their crafty leaders to a pitch of blind and brutal fury which has done
much to lessen the sympathy that is justly theirs. But they were at the
bottom simple, sincere, and pious; and they can at least plead the
excuse of a long and relentless persecution for acts which the others
inspired and directed for motives which it would be difficult, perhaps,
to correctly analyse, but assuredly were not founded on an unmixed love
either for their country or their faith. Stripped of the veil of
religious enthusiasm which they knew so well how to assume, men of the
stamp of Sharp's murderers were in truth no other than those brawling
and selfish demagogues whom times of stir and revolution always have
brought and always will bring to the front. There need, in these days,
be no difficulty in understanding the characters of men who dress Murder
in the cloak of Religion and call her Liberty.

Every child knows the story of the tragedy on Magus Moor. It will be
enough here to remind my readers, once more, that it was no preconcerted
plan, but a pure accident--or, as the murderers themselves called it, a
gift from God. The men I have named, with a few others, were really