qeard, of whom, even were he real, we know nothing 
much beyond that he reacted in the most manly way 
to the problem of domestic infelicity. 
A moment’s digression ;  in fact, the main 
point.  What is the most precise and most atrocious 
charge that is made against him ?  That he sacrificed, 
in the course of Alchemical and magical experiments, 
a matter of 800 children ?  I submit that, a priori, 
this sounds a little improbable.  Gilles de Rais 
was the lord of a district whose population could 
not have been very extensive, and even in that age 
of slavery, dirt, disease, debauchery, poverty and 
ignorance, which seems to Mr. G. K. Chesterton 
the one ideal state of society, it must have been 
a little difficult to carry out abductions and murders 
on such wholesale principles. 
Whenever questions arise with regard to black 
magic or black masses, invocations of the devil, 
etc., etc., it must never be forgotten that these 
practices are strictly functions of Christianity.  Where 
ignorant savages perform propitiatory rites, there 
and there only Christianity takes hold.  But under 
the great systems of the civilised parts of the world, 
there is no trace of any such perversion in religious 
feeling.  It is only the bloodthirsty and futile Jehovah 
who has achieved such monstrous births.  Such 
upas-trees can only grow in the poisonous mire of 
fear and shame where thought has putrefied to 
Christianity. 
There is thus no antecedent improbability that 
Gilles de Rais (or any other person of that place 
and period) was addicted to black magical practices, 
for they were all Catholics.  The power of the Church 
was, at that time, absolute, and even research was