28th November, 1606.—The compulsory enforcement of what were held to be religious obligations was not the outcome of particular forms of faith, or of special times. The Aberdeen magistrates ordain:—“That the haill inhabitants shall repair to the preaching in St. Machars Kirk, on Sunday and Wednesday, under the pains following—viz., the goodman and goodwife of the house contravening, 6s. 8d.; and ilk servant, 2s., Scots.”
In the records of the Kirk-Session of Aberdeen, we read:—
“It is thocht expedient that ane baillie with two of the sessioun pass thro the toun every Sabbath-day, and nott sic as they find absent from the sermones; that for that effect they serche sic houses as they think maist meit; and chiefly that now, during the symmer seasoun, they attend, or caus ane to attend, at the ferrie boat, and nott the names of such as gang to Downie; that they may be punishit, conform to the Act, against brackaris of the Sabbath.”
The tendency of the following order would be towards good digestion:—
“It is ordanit that na disputation nir reasonying of the Scriptures be at dennar or supper or oppin table, quhair throw arises gryte contentioun and debate; and that na flyting nor chiding be at time of meit; under the payne of tua s. to the puyr.”
Witchcraft in Scotland.
Common-sense and everyday experience are at constant war with superstition. But superstition dies hard; like a noxious weed which has spread in a fair garden, if plucked up in one place it will appear unexpectedly in another. The Reformers rejected the alleged daily miracle of the Romish mass; in spite of the prayers, the genuflections, and the Hoc est Corpus of the priest, the bread and wine still remained bread and wine. They rejected other alleged miracles of the Catholic Church—the healings and other benefits from relics, and pilgrimages, and holy wells. But an influx of belief in witchcraft set in on the ebb-tide of the old faith. Men and women—especially women—were supposed to have entered into league with the spirit of evil; by selling their souls to him, they had conferred upon them in return certain supernatural powers,—generally to the injury of their fellows.
In the latter portion of the sixteenth, and throughout the seventeenth century, a belief in witchcraft was very general in Scotland; and prosecutions for the alleged crime very frequent. That royal pedant, James VI., wrote a treatise against witchcraft. He had himself been the object of witchly machinations. Witches conspired with Satan to raise a tempest and wreck the ship in which, in 1590, he was bringing home his bride, Anne of Denmark. In May, 1591, a Convention sat in Edinburgh, “anent order to be tane with sorcerers and certain practisers against his Majesty’s person.” An assize was then sitting upon witches, in the business of which the King took an active part. Under torture the wretched creatures made extraordinary confessions,—one was of a meeting which they had with the Devil in North Berwick Church, when, after casting sundry spells upon the King and Queen, they concluded their revels with a dance, the music for which was played by one of the women on a jew’s-harp,—and this she repeated at the trial, upon his Majesty’s request, for his particular delectation!
As to the punishment on conviction,—about this there could be no dispute. Had not Moses, more than two thousand years previously, written in his law:—“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live?” No use saying that this law had only reference to circumstances in old Hebrew history, or that the newer teaching was the more enlightened, the more humane, the more generally applicable gospel of Christ. What were now called witches had to die.