77. The more violent or uncommon of the bodily diseases were, as the quotation from Cotta's book shows[1], attributed to the same diabolic source. In an era when the most profound ignorance prevailed with regard to the simplest laws of health; when the commoner diseases were considered as God's punishment for sin, and not attributable to natural causes; when so eminent a divine as Bishop Hooper could declare that "the air, the water, and the earth have no poison in themselves to hurt their lord and master man,"[2] unless man first poisoned himself with sin; and when, in consequence of this ignorance and this false philosophy, and the inevitable neglect attendant upon them, those fearful plagues known as "the Black Death" could, almost without notice, sweep down upon a country, and decimate its inhabitants—it is not wonderful that these terrible scourges were attributed to the malevolence of the Evil One.
[Footnote 1: See §§ 63, 64.]
[Footnote 2: I Hooper, p. 308. Parker Society.]
78. But it is curious to notice that, although possessing such terrible powers over the bodies and minds of mortals, devils were not believed to be potent enough to destroy the lives of the persons they persecuted unless they could persuade their victims to renounce God. This theory probably sprang out of the limitation imposed by the Almighty upon the power of Satan during his temptation of Job, and the advice given to the sufferer by his wife, "Curse God, and die." Hence, when evil spirits began their assaults upon a man, one of their first endeavours was to induce him to do some act that would be equivalent to such a renunciation. Sometimes this was a bond assigning the victim's soul to the Evil One in consideration of certain worldly advantages; sometimes a formal denial of his baptism; sometimes a deed that drives away the guardian angel from his side, and leaves the devil's influence uncounteracted. In "The Witch of Edmonton,"[1] the first act that Mother Sawyer demands her familiar to perform after she has struck her bargain, is to kill her enemy Banks; and the fiend has reluctantly to declare that he cannot do so unless by good fortune he could happen to catch him cursing. Both Harpax[2] and Mephistophiles[3] suggest to their victims that they have power to destroy their enemies, but neither of them is able to exercise it. Faust can torment, but not kill, his would-be murderers; and Springius and Hircius are powerless to take Dorothea's life. In the latter case it is distinctly the protection of the guardian angel that limits the diabolic power; so it is not unnatural that Gratiano should think the cursing of his better angel from his side the "most desperate turn" that poor old Brabantio could have done himself, had he been living to hear of his daughter's cruel death.[4] It is next to impossible for people in the present day to have any idea what a consolation this belief in a good attendant spirit, specially appointed to guard weak mortals through life, to ward off evils, and guide to eternal safety, must have been in a time when, according to the current belief, any person, however blameless, however holy, was liable at any moment to be possessed by a devil, or harried and tortured by a witch.
[Footnote 1: Act II. sc. i.]
[Footnote 2: The Virgin Martyr, Act III. sc. iii.]
[Footnote 3: Dr. Faustus, Act I. sc. iii.]
[Footnote 4: Othello, Act V. sc. ii. 204.]
79. This leads by a natural sequence to the consideration of another and more insidious form of attack upon mankind adopted by the evil spirits. Possession and obsession were methods of assault adopted against the will of the afflicted person, and hardly to be avoided by him without the supernatural intervention of the Church. The practice of witchcraft and magic involved the absolute and voluntary barter of body and soul to the Evil One, for the purpose of obtaining a few short years of superhuman power, to be employed for the gratification of the culprit's avarice, ambition, or desire for revenge.
80. In the strange history of that most inexplicable mental disease, the witchcraft epidemic, as it has been justly called by a high authority on such matters,[1] we moderns are, by the nature of our education and prejudices, completely incapacitated for sympathizing with either the persecutors or their victims. We are at a loss to understand how clear-sighted and upright men, like Sir Matthew Hale, could consent to become parties to a relentless persecution to the death of poor helpless beings whose chief crime, in most cases, was, that they had suffered starvation both in body and in mind. We cannot understand it, because none of us believe in the existence of evil spirits. None; for although there are still a few persons who nominally hold to the ancient faith, as they do to many other respectable but effete traditions, yet they would be at a loss for a reason for the faith that is in them, should they chance to be asked for one; and not one of them would be prepared to make the smallest material sacrifice for the sake of it. It is true that the existence of evil spirits recently received a tardy and somewhat hesitating recognition in our ecclesiastical courts,[2] which at first authoritatively declared that a denial of the existence of the personality of the devil constituted a man a notorious evil liver, and depraver of the Book of Common Prayer;[3] but this was promptly reversed by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, under the auspices of two Low Church law lords and two archbishops, with the very vague proviso that "they do not mean to decide that those doctrines are otherwise than inconsistent with the formularities of the Church of England;"[4] yet the very contempt with which these portentous declarations of Church law have been received shows how great has been the fall of the once almost omnipotent minister of evil. The ancient Satan does indeed exist in some few formularies, but in such a washed-out and flimsy condition as to be the reverse of conspicuous. All that remains of him and of his subordinate legions is the ineffectual ghost of a departed creed, for the resuscitation of which no man will move a finger.