At length a wholesome reaction took place; the public grew weary of the number of executions, and, encouraged by this change of sentiment, persons accused of witchcraft boldly rebutted the charge, and laid complaints against their accusers for defamation of character. In official circles, it is true, a belief in the alleged crime lingered long. As late as 1669, ‘the new and old Councils taking into their serious consideration that many malefices were committed and done by several persons in this town, who are mala fama, and suspected guilty of witchcraft upon many of the inhabitants of this town, several ways, and that it will be necessary for suppressing the like in time coming, and for punishing the said persons who shall be found guilty; therefore they do unanimously conclude and ordain that any such person, who is suspect of the like malefices, may be seized upon, and put in prisoun, and that a Commission be sent for, for putting of them to trial, that condign justice may be executed upon them, as the nature of the offence does merit.’ No more victims, however, were sacrificed; nor does it appear that any accusation of witchcraft was preferred.
According to Sir Walter Scott, a woman was burnt as a witch in Scotland as late as 1722, by Captain Ross, sheriff-depute of Sutherland; but this was, happily, an exceptional barbarity, and for some years previously the pastime of witch-burning had practically been extinct. It is a curious fact that educated Scotchmen, as I have already noted, retained their superstition long after the common people had abandoned it. In 1730, Professor Forbes, of Glasgow, published his ‘Institutes of the Law of Scotland,’ in which he spoke of witchcraft as ‘that black art whereby strange and wonderful things are wrought by power derived from the devil,’ and added: ‘Nothing seems plainer to me than that there may be and have been witches, and that perhaps such are now actually existing.’ Six years later, the Seceders from the Church of Scotland, who professed to be the true representatives of its teaching, strongly condemned the repeal of the laws against witchcraft, as ‘contrary,’ they said, ‘to the express letter of the law of God.’ But they were hopelessly behind the time; public opinion, as the result of increased intelligence, had numbered witchcraft among the superstitions of the past, and we may confidently predict that its revival is impossible.
FOOTNOTE
[52] From the ‘Records of the Burgh of Aberdeen,’ printed for the Spalding Club, 1841.
CHAPTER V.
THE LITERATURE OF WITCHCRAFT.
It should teach us humility when we find a belief in witchcraft and demonology entertained not only by the uneducated and unintelligent classes, but also by the men of light and leading, the scholar, the philosopher, the legislator, who might have been expected to have risen above so degrading a superstition. It would be manifestly unfair to direct our reproaches at the credulous prejudices of the multitude when Francis Bacon, the great apostle of the experimental philosophy, accepts the crude teaching of his royal master’s ‘Demonologie,’ and actually discusses the ingredients of the celebrated ‘witches’ ointment,’ opining that they should all be of a soporiferous character, such as henbane, hemlock, moonshade, mandrake, opium, tobacco, and saffron. The weakness of Sir Matthew Hale, to which reference has been made in a previous chapter, we cannot very strongly condemn, when we know that it was shared by Sir Thomas Browne, who had so keen an eye for the errors of the common people, and whose fine and liberal genius throws so genial a light over the pages of the ‘Religio Medici.’ In his ‘History of the World,’ that consummate statesman, poet, and scholar, Sir Walter Raleigh, gravely supports the vulgar opinions which nowadays every Board School alumnus would reject with disdain. Even the philosopher of Malmesbury, the sagacious author of ‘The Leviathan,’ Thomas Hobbes, was infected by the prevalent delusion. Dr. Cudworth, to whom we owe the acute reasoning of the treatises on ‘Moral Good and Evil,’ and ‘The True Intellectual System of the Universe,’ firmly holds that the guilt of a reputed witch might be determined by her inability or unwillingness to repeat the Lord’s Prayer. Strangest of it all is it to find the pure and lofty spirit of Henry More, the founder of the school of English Platonists, yielding to the general superstition. With large additions of his own, he republished the Rev. Joseph Glanvill’s notorious work, ‘Sadducismus Triumphatus’—a pitiful example of the extent to which a fine intellect may be led astray, though Mr. Lecky thinks it the most powerful defence of witchcraft ever published. And the sober and fair-minded Robert Boyle, in the midst of his scientific researches, found time to listen, with breathless interest, to ‘stories of witches at Oxford, and devils at Muston.’
Among the Continental authorities on witchcraft, the chief of those who may be called its advocates are, Martin Antonio Delrio (1551-1608), who published, in the closing years of the sixteenth century, his ‘Disquisitionarum Magicarum Libri Sex,’ a formidable folio, brimful of credulity and ingenuity, which was translated into French by Duchesne in 1611, and has been industriously pilfered from by numerous later writers. Delrio has no pretensions to critical judgment; he swallows the most monstrous inventions with astounding facility.
Reference must also be made to the writings of Remigius, included in Pez’ ‘Thesaurus Anecdotorum Novissimus,’ and to the great work by H. Institor and J. Sprenger, ‘Malleus Maleficarum,’ as well as to Basin, Molitor (‘Dialogus de Lamiis’), and other authors, to be found in the 1582 edition of ‘Mallei quorundam Maleficarum,’ published at Frankfort.
On the same side we find the great philosophical lawyer and historian John Bodin (1530-1596), the author of the ‘Republicæ,’ and the ‘Methodus ad facilem Historiarum Cognitionem.’ In his ‘Demonomanie des Sorcius’ he recommends the burning of witches and wizards with an earnestness which should have gone far to compensate for his heterodoxy on other points of belief and practice. He informs us that from his thirty-seventh year he had been attended by a familiar spirit or demon, which touched his ear whenever he was about to do anything of which his conscience disapproved; and he quotes passages from the Psalms, Job, and Isaiah, to prove that spirits indicate their presence to men by touching and even pulling their ears, and not only by vocal utterances.