II. The torture was abolished in England after 1640, in Prussia 1740, in Tuscany 1786, in
France 1789, in Russia 1801, in various German states partly earlier, partly later (between 1740
and 1831), in Japan 1873. Thomasius, Hommel, Voltaire, Howard, used their influence against it.
Exceptional cases of judicial torture occurred in the nineteenth century in Naples, Palermo, Roumania
(1868), and Zug (1869). See Lea, p. 389 sqq., and the chapter on Witchcraft in Lecky’s History of
Rationalism (vol. I. 27–154). The extreme difficulty of proof in trials of witchcraft seemed to make
a resort to the torture inevitable. English witchcraft reached its climax during the seventeenth
century, and was defended by King James I., and even such wise men as Sir Matthew Hale, Sir
Thomas Browne, and Richard Baxter. When it was on the decline in England it broke out afresh
in Puritan New England, created a perfect panic, and led to the execution of twenty-seven persons.
In Scotland it lingered still longer, and as late as 1727 a woman was burnt there for witchcraft. In
the Canton Glarus a witch was executed in 1782, and another near Danzig in Prussia in 1836. Lecky
concludes his chapter with an eloquent tribute to those poor women, who died alone, hated, and
unpitied, with the prospect of exchanging their torments on earth with eternal torments in hell.
I add a noble passage on torture from Brace’s Gesta Christi, p. 274 sq. "Had the ’Son of
Man’ been in body upon the earth during the Middle Ages, hardly one wrong and injustice would
have wounded his pure soul like the system of torture. To see human beings, with the consciousness
of innocence, or professing and believing the purest truths, condemned without proof to the most
harrowing agonies, every groan or admission under pain used against them, their confessions
distorted, their nerves so racked that they pleaded their guilt in order to end their tortures, their last
hours tormented by false ministers of justice or religion, who threaten eternal as well as temporal
damnation, and all this going on for ages, until scarce any innocent felt themselves safe under this
mockery of justice and religion—all this would have seemed to the Founder of Christianity as the
worst travesty of his faith and the most cruel wound to humanity. It need not be repeated that his
spirit in each century struggled with this tremendous evil, and inspired the great friends of humanity
who labored against it. The main forces in mediaeval society, even those which tended towards its
improvement, did not touch this abuse. Roman law supported it. Stoicism was indifferent to it;
Greek literature did not affect it; feudalism and arbitrary power encouraged a practice which they
could use for their own ends; and even the hierarchy and a State Church so far forgot the truths
they professed as to employ torture to support the ’Religion of Love.’ But against all these powers
were the words of Jesus, bidding men ’Love your enemies’ ’Do good to them that despitefully use
you!’ and the like commands. working everywhere on individual souls, heard from pulpits and in
monasteries, read over by humble believers, and slowly making their way against barbaric passion
and hierarchic cruelty. Gradually, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the books containing
the message of Jesus circulated among all classes, and produced that state of mind and heart in
which torture could not be used on a fellow-being, and in which such an abuse and enormity as the
Inquisition was hurled to the earth."
§ 81. Christian Charity.
See the Lit. in vol. II. § 88, p. 311 sq. Chastel: Études historiques sur l’influence de la charité (Paris
1853, English transl., Philad. 1857—for the first three centuries). Häser: Geschichte der christl.
Krankenpflege und Pflegerschaften (Berlin 1857). Ratzinger: Gesch. der christl. Armenpflege