The Banned Lecture

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