In truth we may be permitted to wonder if the philosopher was altogether true to his own position. In his Scepsis Scientifica he had talked hopefully about the possibility that science might explain what as yet seemed supernatural.[20] This came perilously near to saying that the realms of the supernatural, when explored, would turn out to be natural and subject to natural law. If this were true, what would become of all those bulwarks of religion furnished by the wonders of witchcraft? It looks very much as if Glanvill had let an inconsistency creep into his philosophy.
It was two years after Glanvill's first venture that Meric Casaubon issued his work entitled Of Credulity and Incredulity in Things Natural, Civil, and Divine.[21] On account of illness, however, as he tells the reader in his preface, he had been unable to complete the book, and it dealt only with "Things Natural" and "Things Civil." "Things Divine" became the theme of a separate volume, which appeared in 1670 under the title Of Credulity and Incredulity in Things Divine and Spiritual: wherein ... the business of Witches and Witchcraft, against a late Writer, [is] fully Argued and Disputed. The interest of this scholar in the subject of witchcraft was, as we have seen, by no means recent. When a young rector in Somerset he had attended a trial of witches, quite possibly the identical trial that had moved Bernard to appeal to grand jurymen. We have noted in an earlier chapter[22] that Casaubon in 1654, writing on Enthusiasm, had touched lightly upon the subject. It will be recalled that he had come very near to questioning the value of confessions. Five years later, in prefacing a Relation of what passed between Dr. Dee and some Spirits, he had anticipated the conclusions of his Credulity and Incredulity. Those conclusions were mainly in accord with Glanvill. With a good will he admitted that the denying of witches was a "very plausible cause." Nothing was more liable to be fraud than the exhibitions given at trials, nothing less trustworthy than the accounts of what witches had done. Too many cases originated in the ignorance of ministers who were on the look-out "in every wild notion or phansie" for a "suggestion of the Devil."[23] But, like Glanvill, and indeed like the spiritualists of to-day, he insisted that many cases of fraud do not establish a negative. There is a very large body of narratives so authentic that to doubt them would be evidence of infidelity. Casaubon rarely doubted, although he sought to keep the doubting spirit. It was hard for him not to believe what he had read or had been told. He was naturally credulous, particularly when he read the stories of the classical writers. For this attitude of mind he was hardly to be censured. Criticism was but beginning to be applied to the tales of Roman and Greek writers. Their works were full of stories of magic and enchantment, and it was not easy for a seventeenth-century student to shake himself free from their authority. Nor would Casaubon have wished to do so. He belonged to the past both by religion and raining, and he must be reckoned among the upholders of superstition.[24]
In the next year, 1669, John Wagstaffe, a graduate of Oriel College who had applied himself to "the study of learning and politics," issued a little book, The Question of Witchcraft Debated. Wagstaffe was a university man of no reputation. "A little crooked man and of a despicable presence," he was dubbed by the Oxford wags the little wizard.[25] Nevertheless he had something to say and he gained no small hearing. Many of his arguments were purely theological and need not be repeated. But he made two good points. The notions about witches find their origin in "heathen fables." This was an undercutting blow at those who insisted on the belief in witchcraft as an essential of Christian faith; and Wagstaffe, moreover, made good his case. His second argument was one which no less needed to be emphasized. Coincidence, he believed, accounts for a great deal of the inexplicable in witchcraft narratives.[26]
Within two years the book appeared again, much enlarged, and it was later translated into German. It was answered by two men—by Casaubon in the second part of his Credulity[27] and by an author who signed himself "R. T."[28] Casaubon added nothing new, nor did "R. T.," who threshed over old theological straw. The same can hardly be said of Lodowick Muggleton, a seventeenth-century Dowie who would fain have been a prophet of a new dispensation. He put out an exposition of the Witch of Endor that was entirely rationalistic.[29] Witches, he maintained, had no spirits but their own wicked imaginations. Saul was simply the dupe of a woman pretender.
An antidote to this serious literature may be mentioned in passing. There was published at London, in 1673,[30] A Pleasant Treatise of Witches, in which a delightful prospect was opened to the reader: "You shall find nothing here of those Vulgar, Fabulous, and Idle Tales that are not worth the lending an ear to, nor of those hideous Sawcer-eyed and Cloven-Footed Divels, that Grandmas affright their children withal, but only the pleasant and well grounded discourses of the Learned as an object adequate to thy wise understanding." An outline was offered, but it was nothing more than a thread upon which to hang good stories. They were tales of a distant past. There were witches once, of course there were, but that was in the good old days. Such was the author's implication.
Alas that such light treatment was so rare! The subject was, in the minds of most, not one for laughter. It called for serious consideration. That point of view came to its own again in The Doctrine of Devils proved to be the grand apostacy of these later Times.[31] The Dutch translator of this book tells us that it was written by a New England clergyman.[32] If that be true, the writer must have been one of the least provincial New Englanders of his century, for he evinces a remarkable knowledge of the witch alarms and witch discussions in England. Some of his opinions betray the influence of Scot, as for instance his interpretation of Christ's casting out of devils.[33] The term "having a devil" was but a phrase for one distracted. The author made, however, some new points. He believed that the importance of the New Testament miracles would be overshadowed by the greater miracles wrought by the Devil.[34] A more telling argument, at least to a modern reader, was that the solidarity of society would be endangered by a belief that made every man afraid of his neighbor.[35] The writer commends Wagstaffe's work, and writes of Casaubon, "If any one could possibly have bewitcht me into the Belief of Witchcraft, this reverend person, of all others, was most like to have done it." He decries the "proletarian Rabble," and "the great Philosophers" (More and Glanvill, doubtless), who call themselves Christians and yet hold "an Opinion that Butchers up Men and Women without Fear or Witt, Sense or Reason, Care or Conscience, by droves;" but he praises "the reverend judges of England, now ... much wiser than before," who "give small or no encouragement to such accusations."
We come now to the second great figure among the witch-ologists of the Restoration, John Webster. Glanvill and Webster were protagonist and antagonist in a drama where the others played somewhat the rôle of the Greek chorus. It was in 1677 that Webster put forth The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft.[36] A Non-Conformist clergyman in his earlier life, he seems to have turned in later years to the practice of medicine. From young manhood he had been interested in the subject of witchcraft. Probably that interest dates from an experience of his one Sunday afternoon over forty years before he published his book. It will be recalled that the boy Robinson, accuser of the Lancashire women in 1634, had been brought into his Yorkshire congregation at an afternoon service and had come off very poorly when cross-questioned by the curious minister. From that time Webster had been a doubter. Now and again in the course of his Yorkshire and Lancashire pastorates he had come into contact with superstition. He was no philosopher, this Yorkshire doctor of souls and bodies, nor was he more than a country scientist, and his reasoning against witchcraft fell short—as Professor Kittredge has clearly pointed out[37]—of scientific rationalism. That was a high mark and few there were in the seventeenth century who attained unto it. But it is not too much to say that John Webster was the heir and successor to Scot. He carried weight by the force of his attack, if not by its brilliancy.[38] He was by no means always consistent, but he struck sturdy blows. He was seldom original, but he felled his opponents.
Many of his strongest arguments, of course, were old. It was nothing new that the Witch of Endor was an impostor. It was Muggleton's notion, and it went back indeed to Scot. The emphasizing of the part played by imagination was as old as the oldest English opponent of witch persecution. The explanation of certain strange phenomena as ventriloquism—a matter that Webster had investigated painstakingly—this had been urged before. Webster himself did not believe that new arguments were needed. He had felt that the "impious and Popish opinions of the too much magnified powers of Demons and Witches, in this Nation were pretty well quashed and silenced" by various writers and by the "grave proceedings of many learned judges." But it was when he found that two "beneficed Ministers," Casaubon and Glanvill, had "afresh espoused so bad a cause" that he had been impelled to review their grounds.
As the reader may already have guessed, Webster, like so many of his predecessors, dealt largely in theological and scriptural arguments. It was along this line, indeed, that he made his most important contribution to the controversy then going on. Glanvill had urged that disbelief in witchcraft was but one step in the path to atheism. No witches, no spirits, no immortality, no God, were the sequences of Glanvill's reasoning. In answer Webster urged that the denial of the existence of witches—i. e., of creatures endued with power from the Devil to perform supernatural wonders—had nothing to do with the existence of angels or spirits. We must rely upon other grounds for a belief in the spirit world. Stories of apparitions are no proof, because we cannot be sure that those apparitions are made or caused by spirits. We have no certain ground for believing in a spirit world but the testimony of Scripture.[39]
But if we grant the existence of spirits—to modernize the form of Webster's argument—we do not thereby prove the existence of witches. The New Testament tells of various sorts of "deceiving Imposters, Diviners, or Witches," but amongst them all "there were none that had made a visible league with the Devil." There was no mention of transformation into cats, dogs, or wolves.[40] It is hard to see how the most literal students of the Scriptures could have evaded this argument. The Scriptures said a great deal about the Devil, about demoniacs, and about witches and magicians—whatever they might mean by those terms. Why did they not speak at all of the compacts between the Devil and witches? Why did they leave out the very essential of the witch-monger's lore?