“To the Jewish writers, trained to seek counsel only of Jehovah (not even from Christ), the ‘Woman of Endor’ was a dealer with spirits of evil. With us, who have imbibed truth through a thousand channels made turbid by prejudice and error, she is become a distorted being, allied to the hags of a wild and fatal delusion. We confound her with the (fabled) witches of Macbeth, the victims of Salem, and the modern Moll Pitchers.
“The Woman of Endor! That is a strange perversion of taste that would represent her in hideous aspect. To me she seemeth all that is genial and lovely in womanhood.”
“Hearken thou unto the voice of thine handmaid, and let me set a morsel of bread before thee, and eat, that thou mayest have strength when thou goest on thy way.”
Then she made and baked the bread, killed and cooked the meat,—all she had in the house,—and Saul did eat, and his servants.
I see nought in this but an exhibition of rare domestic ability and commendable hospitality; in the previous act (revelation), nothing more than a manifestation of the power of mind over mind (possibly the power of God, manifested through her mind?), wherein she divined the object of Saul’s visit, and, through the same channel, surmised who he was that consulted her.
WEIGHING A WITCH BY BIBLE STANDARD.
Witches are said to be “light weight.” But a little above a hundred years ago, a woman was accused in Wingrove, England, by another, of “bewitching her spinning-wheel, so it would turn neither the one way nor the other.” To this she took oath, and the magistrate, with pomp and dignity, “followed by a great concourse of people, took the woman to the parish church, her husband also being present, and having stripped the accused to her nether garment, put her into the great scales brought for that purpose, with the Bible in the opposite balance, which was the lawful test of a witch, when, to the no small astonishment and mortification of her maligner, she actually outweighed the book, and was honorably acquitted of the charge!”
Just imagine the picture. In an enlightened age, a Christian people, in possession of the Bible, that gives no intimation of such things as witches, stripping and weighing a female in public, to ascertain if she really was heavier than a common Bible!
