"God is bigger than the Boogy-Man"

A couple of weeks ago I unexpectedly stranded myself at a friend's house for several days without any of my usual paraphernalia. This meant I had to read her books, something worth doing even without the excuse of shortsightedness. So I picked up an anthology of Elizabeth Gaskell's short stories and was suddenly catapulted into a reverie on one of my favorite concepts: Grace.
Lois the Witch is a catchy title. That's why I started it. But I finished it because Ms. Gaskell drew an excellent portrait of the Salem Witch Trials of 1691-92, from the inside, from an historical point of view, from a psychological point of view, and from a spiritual point of view. With her fictional accuracies she deftly illustrated that the whole thing spiraled back to grace. Men feared that God was not large enough to protect them from the Devil. Eventually they also assumed He was unwilling to protect them because of their “unforgivable transgression” of committing witchcraft. Disbelieving in His grace led to an acute attack of fear. Fear led to mercilessness, and no mercy led inevitably to no grace on their own part. This story had much of the same brooding, almost demonic feel of Hawthorn's Scarlet Letter. Which segues me nicely into the other book I read while stranded: Randy Alcorn's Why Pro-Life?
One chapter in particular pointed out the Biblical precedent for grace even for “women like these.” The woman caught in adultery received it. Hester did not. Now days, sexual sin is often followed by the sin of murder. But are those sins any more or different than the sins of pride and self-righteousness?
Certainly in the case of the witch trials, as dramatized by Gaskell, pride and self-righteousness almost certainly resulted in the sins of murder (for the hanging of 20 people on such “evidence” can hardly be called anything else). Grace was not given because they feared to be merciful, and that fear, working backwards, caused manifestations of pride, malice, hate, jealousy, envy, spite, and cruelty. Belief in the Lord's ability to beat the Devil, to redeem a person— completely— even out of witchcraft, would have saved the lives of many. They forgot that God is bigger. And if we would not end up in the same shallow grave we would do well to remember that this is, in fact, the essence of grace.