Is as you choose it;
You make take
The stake,
Or you may lose it.
Start in
To win
And keep straight in the way
Unflagging to the end;
Whatever it may be
Is victory.
—William J. Lampton, Success.
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WISDOM OF THE IGNORANT
It is related of the celebrated astronomer,
Tycho Brahe, that one night, on leaving his
observatory, he suddenly found himself surrounded
by a tumultuous crowd which filled
the public square. Upon inquiring the cause
of so great a concourse, they pointed out to
him, in the constellation of Cygnus, a brilliant
star, which he, aided by the best telescopes,
had never perceived. (Text.)
(3477)
Wisdom Rejected—See Intolerance.
Wish, A Boy's—See Retrieved Situation,
A.
Wishes—See Retrieved Situation, A.
Wishes Fulfilled—See Early Religion.
Wit and Business—See Abbreviation.
Wit, Ready—See Eccentricity.
WITCHCRAFT
In two hundred years thirty thousand
witches are said to have been destroyed in
England; and as recently as 1716, when the
town was enjoying the wit and satire of the
"Queen Anne men," a woman and her child
nine years of age were hanged at Huntingdon.
Addison, with a mind that wavered
between superstition and good sense, said he
could not forbear believing "in such a commerce
with evil spirits as that which we
express by the name of witchcraft," while,
at the same time, he could "give no credit to
any particular modern instance of it." Scotland,
which is regarded as an enlightened
part of the empire, held with the utmost
tenacity its faith in witchcraft. The Scotch,
a vigorous people, put their hands to the
work heartily. It was easy to find victims,
since, as we have said already, they tortured
until they confest. It is calculated that
two thousand persons were burned in Scotland
in the last forty years of the sixteenth
century. A century later a witch epidemic
broke out in the village of Mohra, in
Sweden. A number of children were said
to be bewitched, and familiar with the devil,
who was described as wearing a gray coat,
red and blue stockings, a red beard, and a
high-crowned hat. The witches kept this
exacting person supplied with children, and
if they did not procure him a good many,
"they had no peace or quiet for him." The
poor wretches were doomed to have no more
peace or quiet in this world. Seventy were
condemned to death, and twenty-three were
burnt in a single fire at Mohra. It is noteworthy
that a belief in this frightful superstition
which destroyed more innocent persons
than the so-called holy office was held
by men of great intellectual power—by
Erasmus, Bacon, and the judicious Hooker;
by Sir Edward Coke, Sir Thomas Browne,
Baxter, and Sir Matthew Hale. And the
old belief is not yet extinct in country districts.
Only recently a man at Totnes accused
his father of bewitching, or, as a
"white witch" called it, "overlooking" his
daughter, so that she suffered for months
from a disease in the arms; and the people
who live in remote villages may often hear
of similar cases.—London Illustrated News.
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WITCHES, BELIEF IN
Dr. James B. McCord writes in Medical Missions:
The Zulu baby is born into the fear of
witchcraft; in the fear of witchcraft he
grows up, and when he sickens and is about
to die, his one thought is that a spell has
been cast upon him for which the charm
can not be discovered. All his life long he
dreads in lonely places to meet the inswela-*bova—an
inhuman man, lacking only hair or
fur to make him altogether a beast—a sort
of beast in human form who rides backward
on a baboon, ready to pounce upon
and make medicine of the unwary traveler.
In mature manhood he suspects his neighbor,
his friend, his brother, and even his wife of
having dealings with makers of charms and
poisons. He walks with an uneasy feeling
that an enemy may have put medicine in his
path to harm him. From every possible
source, from earth and from sky, from
river and from forest, from friend and from
foe, he is continually apprehensive of evil
influence coming upon him and searching for
a talisman to wear against it.
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