|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: magic powers of the poor wretches whom they tortured to death, as
did, in many cases, the poor wretches themselves.
Everyone, almost, believed in magic. Take two cases. Read the
story which Benvenuto Cellini, the sculptor, tells in his life
(everyone should read it) of the magician whom he consults in the
Coliseum at Rome, and the figure which he sees as he walks back with
the magician, jumping from roof to roof along the tiles of the
houses.
And listen to this story, which Mr. Froude has dug up in his
researches. A Church commissioner at Oxford, at the beginning of
the Reformation, being unable to track an escaped heretic, "caused a
|
