and that, “if she please not her master” she may be bought back again, or if he “take him another” (translator supplying “wife” as throwing an air of respectability over the transaction) she may go free (Ibid. 7-11).  It was under these circumstances that God taught that if a man should beat a male or female slave to death, he should not be punished, providing the slave did not die till “a day or two” after, because the slave was only “his money” (Ibid. 20, 21).  Why blame a Legree, when he only acts on the permission given by God from Mount Sinai?  Dr. Colenso writes:  “I shall never forget the revulsion of feeling with which a very intelligent Christian native, with whose help I was translating these words into the Zulu tongue, first heard them as words said to be uttered by the same great and gracious Being whom I was teaching him to trust in and adore.  His whole soul revolted against the notion, that the great and blessed God, the merciful Father of all mankind, would speak of a servant, or maid, as mere ‘money,’ and allow a horrible crime to go unpunished, because the victim of the brutal usage had survived a few hours.  My own heart and conscience at the time fully sympathised with his” ("The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua,” p. 9, ed. 1862).  It was under these circumstances that God taught that a thief, who possessed nothing of his own, should “be sold for his theft” (Ex. xxii. 3).  It was under these circumstances that God taught:  “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Ibid 18).  To this cruel and wicked command myriads of unfortunate human beings have been sacrificed; in the course of the Middle Ages hundreds of thousands perished; in France and Germany “many districts and large towns burned two, three, and four hundred witches every year, in some the annual executions destroyed nearly one per cent. of the whole population....  The Reformation, which swept away so many superstitions, left this, the most odious of all, in full activity.  The Churchmen of England, the Lutherans of Germany, the Calvinists of Geneva, Scotland, and New England rivalled the most bigoted Roman Catholics in their severities.  Indeed, the Calvinists, though the most opposite of all to the Church of Rome, were in this respect perhaps the most implicit imitators of her delusions” ("The Bible; What it is,” by C. Bradlaugh, p. 262).  “During the seventeenth century, 40,000 persons are said to have been put to death for witchcraft in England alone.  In Scotland the number was probably, in proportion to the population, much greater; for it is certain that even in the last forty years of the sixteenth century the executions were not fewer than 17,000” (Ibid, p. 263).  The Puritans in New England signalised themselves by their merciless severity towards wizards and witches.  France was the first country to stem the tide of cruelty.  In 1680 Louis XIV. “issued a proclamation prohibiting all future prosecutions for witchcraft; and directing that even those who might profess the art should only