Those who are labouring, either as individuals or in social institutions, to raise the level and improve the tone of life among the mass of the people, are repeatedly confronted by disheartening evidence that gross superstition and ignorant credulity still exist amongst us to a lamentable extent.
Even comfortable farmers with their wives and children, small shopkeepers in the country towns, and working men and women in large towns, are to be found among the dupes of fortune-tellers and witch-finders.
Whether, through the agency of School Boards, education will reach down deeper into society than it does at present the next generation must show; but nothing less than mental improvement, whether by school, by healthy literature, or other agencies, will cure the evil.
It is a few years over the century and a half since the last execution for the “crime of witchcraft” took place in these islands.
Caithness was the scene of this legal murder, and the victim was a miserable old woman, who was done to death by order and warrant of David Ross, sheriff of the shire.
It was the last tragedy of something like four thousand, for this is the computation of those who were sacrificed to Caledonian superstition between the Act of Queen Mary “Anentis Witchcraftes” in 1563, and the final brutality perpetrated in 1722.
We are assured, indeed, that the glamour of the ancient necromancy has not yet died out among our northern neighbours. Just before the rebellion of ’45 the Dissenters published an Act of Presbytery, formally denouncing the repeal of the penal statutes against witchcraft as “contrary to the express law of God,” and the reason of all the misfortunes that afflicted the nation.
It is curious, by the way, to note how prominent priests and preachers have been in battling the magicians, and with what particular ferocity of spirit they urged the crusade.
While the Popes invoked the tortures of the Inquisition and promulgated the famous Malleus Maleficiarum, or “Hammer for Witches,” the clergy after as well as before the Reformation took their cue from the persecuting Pontiffs.
Even in the United States they led the merciless war against the children of Satan, and pious fanatics, like Cotton Mather and the minister of Salem, were guilty, with the best intent, of barbarities unspeakable.