In the Name of Sweet JESUS,
I take thee from the ground.”“Bleeding at the touch,” has been accepted in several countries as a revelation of
guilt. A man suspected of murder was brought to the side of the murdered man’s
body, and forced to touch it; if the suspicions were just, blood immediately
oozed from the wound, or at the mouth, or nose. Even at the man’s approach this
sign of crime would appear. It is easy to see how precarious and dangerous a test
was this; how readily it might release the guilty, and betray the innocent.
Naturally therefore it was not accepted without reluctance. A man and his sister
had quarrelled; he died suddenly, and his body was found in his own house,
naked, and with a wound on the face, but bloodless. “Although many of the
neighbours in the town came into the house to see the dead corpse, yet she, the
sister, never offered to come, howbeit her dwelling was next door, nor had she
so much as any seeming grief for his death. But the minister and bailiffs of the
town taking great suspicion of her in respect of her carriage, commanded that
she should be brought in. But when she came, she came trembling all the way to
the house; she refused to come nigh to the corpse, or to touch, saying, that she
never touched a dead corpse in her life. But being earnestly entreated by the
minister and bailiffs, and her brother’s friends, who was killed, that she would
but touch the corpse softly, she granted to do it. But before she did it, the sun
shining in at the house, she expressed herself thus: ‘Humbly desiring, as the
LORD made the sun to shine and give light into that house, that also He would
give light in discovering that murder.’ And with these words, she touching the
wound of the dead man very softly, it being white and clean, without any spot of
blood or the like, yet immediately, while her finger was upon it, the blood rushed
out of it, to the great admiration of all the beholders, who took it as one
discovery of the murder, according to her own prayer.”
It will seem astonishing to readers of the present day that a poor creature’s life
could be taken away on such fanciful and uncertain evidence.
We read that a Sir James Standsfield was found lying dead in a stream. His body
was interred precipitately. Two days afterwards it was exhumed and partially
dissected, the neck in particular being laid open, in order to ascertain the cause
of death. After being well cleansed, blood burst from that side supported by his
son Philip, on returning the body to the coffin for re-interment—not an unlikely
result from the straining of the incisions—and it deeply stained his hand. He was
arraigned, on this slight ground, for parricide; and in the course of the trial it was
gravely argued that it was the will of Providence to disclose by this peculiar