After the statute against witchcraft had been repealed in England, we must not forget that an act of the Assembly of the Calvinistic Church of Scotland confesses “as a great national sin, the act of the British Parliament abolishing the burning and hanging of witches.”
The name of Reginald Scot does not appear in the “Biographia Britannica;” and it was only from a short notice by Bayle, that Dr. Birch, in his translation of the General Dictionary, was induced to draw up a life of our earliest philosopher. Such was the fate of this “English gentleman,” as Bayle has described him; and the philosophical reader, in what is now before him, may detect the shifting shades of truth, till it settles in its real and enduring colour; the philosopher had demonstrated a truth which it required a century and a half for the world to comprehend.
That such courageous and generous tempers as that of Reginald Scot should fail themselves of being the spectators of that noble revolution in public opinion which was the ripening of their own solitary studies, is the mortifying tale of the benefactors of mankind.
[1] “De Prestigiis Demonum et Incantationibus ac Veneficiis,” 1564.
[2] Webster notices the popular delusions of the country people in the following passage, in which he is speaking of a sound judgment as necessary to a competent witness:—“They ought to be of a sound judgment, and not of a vitiated and distempered phantasie, nor of a melancholic constitution; for these will take a bush to be a bugbear, and a black sheep to be a demon; the noise of the wild swans, flying high in the night, to be spirits—or, as they call them here in the north, Gabriel Ratchets; the calling of a daker hen, in the meadow, to be the whistlers; the howling of the female fox in a gill or clough for the male, to be the cry of fairies.” “The Gabriel Ratchets,” in our author’s time, seem to have been the same with the German Rachtvogel, or Rachtraven. The word and the superstition are well known in Lancashire, though in a sense somewhat different; for the Gable-Rachets are supposed to be something like litters of puppies yelping (gabbling) in the air. Ratch is certainly a dog in general.
The whistlers are the green or whistling plovers, which fly very high in the night uttering their characteristic note.—Whitaker’s “History of Whalley.”
[3] In a correspondence I have read between Dr. More and one of his enthusiastic disciples, the Rev. Edmund Elys, the letters usually turn on the reality of apparitions and magical incantations; both these learned men were hunting about all their lifetimes to find a true ghost. Elys often breaks out in triumph that he has at length discovered an authentic ghost; in subsequent letters the evidence gradually diminishes, and finally the apparition and evidence vanish together. The following pious doubts, addressed to the philosophic More, may amuse the reader:—
“Most honoured dear Sir,
“I should be troublesome to you if I did not repress many strong inclinations to write to you, for I do not take greater comfort in anything than in the thoughts of you and the notions you have communicated to the world.