NOTES ON WITCHCRAFT.BY GEORGE LYMAN KITTREDGE.We are all specialists now-a-days, I suppose. The good old times of the polymath and the Doctor Universalis are gone forever. Yet signs are not wanting that some of us are alive to the danger of building our party-walls too high. In one respect, at all events, there can be no doubt that the investigators of New England antiquities are aware of their peril, though they occasionally shut their eyes to it,—I mean, the tendency to consider the Colonists as a peculiar people, separated from the Mother Country not only geographically, but also with regard to those currents of thought and feeling which are the most significant facts of history. True, there is more or less justification for that kind of study which looks at the annals of America as ends-in-themselves; but such study is ticklish business, and it now and then distorts the perspective in a rather fantastic way. This is a rank truism. Still, commonplaces are occasionally steadying to the intellect, and Dr. Johnson—whose own truths have been characterized by a brilliant critic as “too true”—knew what he was about when he said that men usually need not so much to be informed as to be reminded.The darkest page of New England history is, by common consent, that which is inscribed with the words Salem Witchcraft. The hand of the apologist trembles as it turns the leaf. The reactionary writer who prefers iconoclasm to hero-worship sharpens his pen and pours fresh gall into his inkpot when he comes to this sinister subject. Let us try to consider the matter, for a few minutes, unemotionally, and to that end let us pass in review a number of facts which may help us to look at the Witchcraft Delusion of 1692 in its due proportions,—not as an abnormal outbreak of fanaticism, not as an isolated tragedy, but as a mere incident, a brief and transitory episode in the biography of a terrible, but perfectly natural, superstition.In the first place, we know that the New Englanders did not invent the belief in witchcraft.[1]It is a universally human belief. No race or nation is exempt from it. Formerly, it was an article in the creed of everybody in the world, and it is still held, in some form or other, and to a greater or less extent, by a large majority of mankind.[2]Further, our own attitude of mind toward witchcraft is a very modern attitude indeed. To us, one who asserts the existence, or even the possibility, of the crime of witchcraft staggers under a burden of proof which he cannot conceivably support. His thesis seems to us unreasonable, abnormal, monstrous; it can scarcely be stated in intelligible terms; it savors of madness. Now, before we can do any kind of justice to our forefathers,—a matter, be it remembered, of no moment to them, for they have gone to their reward, but, I take it, of considerable importance to us,—we must empty our heads of all such rationalistic ideas. To the contemporaries of William Stoughton and Samuel Sewall the existence of this crime was not merely an historical phenomenon, it was a fact of contemporary experience. Whoever denied the occurrence of witchcraft in the past, was an atheist; whoever refused to admit its actual possibility in the present, was either stubbornly incredulous, or destitute of the ability to draw an inference. Throughout the seventeenth century, very few persons could be found—not merely in New England, but in the whole world—who would have ventured to take so radical a position. That there had been witches and sorcerers in antiquity was beyond cavil. That there were, or might be, witches and sorcerers in the present was almost equally certain. The crime was recognized by the Bible, by all branches of the Church, by philosophy, by natural science, by the medical faculty, by the law of England. I do not offer these postulates as novelties. They are commonplaces. They will not be attacked by anybody who has even a slight acquaintance with the mass of testimony that might be adduced to establish them.It is a common practice to ascribe the tenets of the New Englanders in the matter of witchcraft to something peculiar about their religious opinions,—to what is loosely called their Puritan theology. This is a very serious error. The doctrines of our forefathers differed, in this regard, from the doctrines of the Roman and the Anglican Church in no essential,—one may safely add, in no particular. Lord Bacon was not a Puritan,—yet he has left his belief in sorcery recorded in a dozen places. JamesI.was not a Puritan,[3]but his Dæmonologie (1597) is a classic treatise, his zeal in prosecuting sorcerers is notorious, and his statute of 1603[4]was the act under which Matthew Hopkins, in the time of the Commonwealth, sent two hundred witches to the gallows in two years,—nearly ten times as many as perished in Massachusetts from the first settlement to the beginning of the eighteenth century.Matthew Hopkins, the Witch-Finder General, apparentlywasa Puritan. Indeed, it is his career, more than anything that ever happened in New England, which has led to the reiterated statement that Puritanism was especially favorable, by its temper and its tenets, to prosecution for witchcraft. For his activity falls in the time of the Commonwealth, and the Parliament granted a Special Commission of Oyer and Terminer, in 1645, to try some of the witches that he had detected, and Edmund Calamy was associated with the Commission. But, on the other hand, it must be noted that John Gaule, who opposed Hopkins and is usually credited with most influence in putting an end to his performances, was also a Puritan,—and a minister likewise, and a believer in witches as well. The Hopkins outbreak, as we shall see, must be laid to the disturbed condition of the country rather than to the prevalence of any particular system of theology.[5]Under Cromwell’s government, witch trials languished, not because the belief in witchcraft changed, but because there was order once more. So in Scotland, the conquest by Cromwell checked one of the fiercest prosecutions ever known. The Restoration was followed, both in England and in Scotland, by a marked recrudescence of prosecution.[6]But we must return to Matthew Hopkins. Let us see how his discoveries affected James Howell. In 1647 Howell writes to Endymion Porter: “We have likewise multitudes ofWitchesamong us, for inEssexandSuffolkthere were above two hundred indicted within these two years, and above the one half of them executed: More, I may well say, than ever this Island bred since the Creation, I speak it with horror. God guard us from the Devil, for I think he was never so busy upon any part of the Earth that was enlightned with the beams ofChristianity; nor do I wonder at it, for there’s never a Cross left to fright him away.”[7]In the following year, Howell writes to Sir Edward Spencer an elaborate defence of the current tenets in witchcraft and demonology.[8]One striking passage demands quotation:—“Since the beginning of these unnatural Wars, there may be a cloud of Witnesses produc’d for the proof of this black Tenet: For within the compass of two years, near upon three hundred Witches were arraign’d, and the major part executed inEssexandSuffolkonly.Scotlandswarms with them now more than ever, and Persons of good Quality executed daily.”It is confidently submitted that nobody will accuse Howell of Puritanism. The letters from which our extracts are taken were written while he was a prisoner in the Fleet under suspicion of being a Royalist spy.[9]His mention of the disappearance of crosses throughout England will not be overlooked by the discriminating reader. It will be noted also that he seems to have perceived a connection—a real one, as we shall see later—[10]between the increase in witchcraft and the turmoil of the Civil War.Jeremy Taylor was surely no Puritan; but he believed in witchcraft. It is a sin, he tells us, that is “infallibly desperate,”[11]and in his Holy Living (1650) he has even given the weight of his authority to the reality of sexual relations between witches and the devil.[12]It was not in Puritan times, but in 1664, four years after the Restoration, that Sir Matthew Hale, then Chief Baron of the Exchequer, pronounced from the bench the following opinion in the Bury St. Edmunds case:—“That there were such Creatures asWitcheshe made no doubt at all; ForFirst, the Scriptures had affirmed so much.Secondly, The wisdom of all Nations had provided Laws against such Persons, which is an Argument of their confidence of such a crime. And such hath been the judgment of this Kingdom, as appears by that Act of Parliament[13]which hath provided Punishments proportionable to the quality of the Offence. And desired them [the jury], strictly to observe their Evidence; and desired the great God of Heaven to direct their Hearts in this weighty thing they had in hand:For to Condemn the Innocent, and to let the Guilty go free, were both an Abomination to the Lord.”[14]Hale’s words were fraught with momentous consequences, for he was “allowed on all hands to be the most profound lawyer of his time,”[15]and the Bury case became a precedent of great weight. “It was,” writes Cotton Mather, “a Tryal much considered by the Judges of New England.”[16]Hale’s conduct on this occasion has of course subjected him to severe criticism. Lord Campbell, for example, goes so far as to declare that he “murdered” the old women,—a dictum which shows but slight comprehension of the temper of the seventeenth century. More creditable to Campbell’s historical sense is the following passage:—“Although, at the present day, we regard this trial as a most lamentable exhibition of credulity and inhumanity, I do not know that it at all lowered Hale in public estimation in his own life.”[17]Bishop Burnet, as is well-known, makes no mention of the case in his Life of Hale.[18]One might surmise that he omitted it out of respect for his hero’s memory, since his little book is rather an obituary tribute than a biography. More probably, however, Burnet did not regard the case as any more significant than many other decisions of Hale’s which he likewise passed over in silence. Unequivocal evidence that the Bury trial did not injure Hale’s reputation may be found in the silence of Roger North. North’s elaborate character of Hale, in his Life of the Lord Keeper Guilford,[19]is notoriously prejudiced in the extreme. Though admitting Hale’s legal learning and many good qualities, North loses no opportunity to attack his record. Besides, North praises the Lord Keeper for his conduct in procuring the acquittal of an alleged witch. If, then, the Bury case had seemed to him especially discreditable, or if he had thought that it afforded an opening for hostile criticism, we cannot doubt that he would have spoken out in condemnation. His complete silence on the subject is therefore the most emphatic testimony to the general approval of Hale’s proceedings. Highly significant, too, is the fact that even Lord Campbell does not blame Hale for believing in witchcraft, but only for allowing weight to the evidence in this particular case. “I would very readily have pardoned him,” he writes, “for an undoubting belief in witchcraft, and I should have considered that this belief detracted little from his character for discernment and humanity. The Holy Scriptures teach us that, in some ages of the world, wicked persons, by the agency of evil spirits, were permitted, through means which exceed the ordinary powers of nature, to work mischief to their fellow-creatures.... In the reign of CharlesII., a judge who from the bench should have expressed a disbelief in [magic and the black art] would have been thought to show little respect for human laws, and to be nothing better than an atheist.” We may profitably compare what Guilford himself (then Francis North, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas) wrote of the Devonshire witches in 1682,—nearly twenty years after the Bury case:—“We cannot reprieve them, without appearing to deny the very being of witches, which, as it is contrary to law, so I think it would be ill for his Majesty’s service, for it may give the faction occasion to set afoot the old trade of witch-finding, that may cost many innocent persons their lives which the justice will prevent.”[20]Sir Thomas Browne, the author of the Religio Medici, was no Puritan, and he was one of the leading scientific men of his day. Yet he gave his opinion, as an expert, at the request of the Court in this same Bury St. Edmunds case, to the following effect:—“That the Devil in such cases did work upon the Bodies of Men and Women, upon a Natural Foundation, (that is) to stir up, and excite such humours super-abounding in their Bodies to a great excess,”[21]and further, that “he conceived, that these swouning Fits were Natural, and nothing else but what they call the Mother,[22]but only heightned to a great excess by the subtilty of the Devil, co-operating with the Malice of these which we term Witches, at whose Instance he doth these Villanies.”[23]Browne has been much blamed for this dictum, but there is nothing unreasonable or unscientific in it, if one merely grants the actuality of demoniacal possession, which was then to all intents and purposes an article of faith. If the devil can work upon our bodies at all, of course he can intensify any natural fits or spasms from which we happen to be suffering. Thus Browne’s diagnosis of the disease in this case as hysteria, by no means excluded the hypothesis ofmaleficium. But most modern writers refuse to discuss such subjects exceptde haut en bas,—from the vantage-ground of modern science.Sir Thomas Browne’s view was, it seems, substantially identical with that of his predecessor, the famous Robert Burton,—no Puritan either!—who has a whole subsection “Of Witches and Magitians, how they cause Melancholy,” asserting that what “they can doe, is as much almost as the Diuell himselfe, who is still ready to satisfie their desires, to oblige them the more vnto him.”[24]Joseph Glanvill, the author of The Vanity of Dogmatizing, was no Puritan,[25]but a skeptical philosopher, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and Chaplain in Ordinary to King CharlesII.; neither was his friend, Dr. Henry More, the most celebrated of the Cambridge Platonists. Yet these two scholars and latitudinarians joined forces to produce that extraordinary treatise, Saducismus Triumphatus: or, A Full and Plain Evidence concerning Witches and Apparitions. This book, an enlarged form of Glanvill’s Philosophical Considerations concerning Witchcraft (1666), was published in 1681, and went through no less than five editions, the last appearing as late as 1726.[26]It was thought to have put the belief in apparitions and witchcraft on an unshakable basis of science and philosophy.[27]No English work on the subject had a more powerful influence. When theRev.John Hale, of Beverley, wrote his Modest Enquiry,[28]which deplored the Salem excesses and protested against spectral evidence,—a notable treatise, published, with a prefatory epistle from the venerable Higginson,[29]in 1702,—he was able to condense the affirmative part of his argument, because, as he himself says, Glanvill “hath strongly proved the being of Witches.”[30]Dr. Meric Casaubon, Prebend of Canterbury, was not a Puritan; yet the second part of his Credulity and Incredulity (1668) contains a vigorous assertion of demonology and witch-lore, and was republished in 1672 under the alluring title, A Treatise Proving Spirits, Witches and Supernatural Operations by Pregnant Instances and Evidences.[31]Ralph Cudworth, the antagonist of Hobbes, was not a Puritan. Yet in his great Intellectual System he declares for the existence of sorcery, and even admits a distinction between its higher operations—as in theθεουργίαof Apollonius of Tyana[32]—and the vulgar performances of everyday wizards.[33]There is some reason, too, for supposing that Cudworth took part with Henry More in examining certain witches at Cambridge, and heard one of them try to recite the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, as she had offered to do “as an argument she was no witch.”[34]Robert Boyle, the improver of the air-pump and the discoverer of Boyle’s Law, had “particular and considerable advantages to persuade [him], upon good grounds” that some witch stories are true, and he thought that Glanvill’s investigations would do “a good service to religion.”[35]This was in 1677. In the following year Boyle declared his belief[36]in the performances of the devil of Mascon.[37]Boyle’s religious views did not hinder him from being a leader in that fervor of scientific experimentation which is one of the glories of the latter half of the seventeenth century. And he too was not a Puritan.Isaac Barrow, the master of Newton, was not a Puritan. Yet he left on record, in one of his sermons, one of the most powerful and eloquent of all protests against disbelief in the kind of phenomena which our ancestors are so often attacked for crediting. The passage is long, but must be quoted in full, for every word is of weight:—“I may adjoin to the former sorts of extraordinary actions, some other sorts, the consideration of which (although not so directly and immediately) may serve our main design; those (which the general opinion of mankind hath approved, and manifold testimony hath declared frequently to happen) which concern apparitions from another world, as it were, of beings unusual; concerning spirits haunting persons and places, (these discerned by all senses, and by divers kinds of effects;) of which the old world (the ancient poets and historians) did speak so much, and of which all ages have afforded several attestations very direct and plain, and having all advantages imaginable to beget credence; concerning visions made unto persons of especial eminency and influence, (to priests and prophets;) concerning presignifications of future events by dreams; concerning the power of enchantments, implying the cooperation of invisible powers; concerning all sorts of intercourse and confederacy (formal or virtual) with bad spirits: all which things he that shall affirm to be mere fiction and delusion, must thereby with exceeding immodesty and rudeness charge the world with extreme both vanity and malignity; many, if not all, worthy historians, of much inconsiderateness or fraud; most lawgivers, of great silliness and rashness; most judicatories, of high stupidity or cruelty; a vast number of witnesses, of the greatest malice or madness; all which concurred to assert these matters of fact.“It is true, no question, but there have been many vain pretences, many false reports, many unjust accusations, and some undue decisions concerning these matters; that the vulgar sort is apt enough to be abused about them; that even intelligent and considerate men may at a distance in regard to some of them be imposed upon; but, as there would be no false gems obtruded, if there were no true ones found in nature; as no counterfeit coin would appear, were there no true one current; so neither can we well suppose that a confidence in some to feign, or a readiness in most to believe, stories of this kind could arise, or should subsist, without some real ground, or without such things having in gross somewhat of truth and reality. However, that the wiser and more refined sort of men, highest in parts and improvements both from study and experience, (indeed the flower of every commonwealth; statesmen, lawgivers, judges, and priests,) upon so many occasions of great importance, after most deliberate scanning such pretences and reports, should so often suffer themselves to be deluded, to the extreme injury of particular persons concerned, to the common abusing of mankind, to the hazard of their own reputation in point of wisdom and honesty, seems nowise reasonable to conceive. In likelihood rather the whole kind of all these things, were it altogether vain and groundless, would upon so frequent and so mature discussions have appeared to be so, and would consequently long since have been disowned, exploded, and thrust out of the world; for, as upon this occasion it is said in Tully, ‘Time wipeth out groundless conceits, but confirms that which is founded in nature, and real.’“Now if the truth and reality of these things, (all or any of them,) inferring the existence of powers invisible, at least inferior ones, though much superior to us in all sort of ability, be admitted, it will at least (as removing the chief obstacles of incredulity) confer much to the belief of that supreme Divinity, which our Discourse strives to maintain.”[38]Dr. George Hickes, of Thesaurus fame, was one of the most eminent scholars of his time. He was also a Non-juror, and titular Bishop of Thetford. In other words, he was not a Puritan. Yet in 1678 Hickes published an account of the infamous Major Weir, the most celebrated of all Scottish wizards, which betrays no skepticism on the cardinal points of sorcery.[39]There is also an extremely interesting letter from the Doctor to Mr. Pepys, dated June 19, 1700, which indicates a belief in witchcraft and second sight. The most curious part of this letter, however, deals with Elf Arrows. “I have another strange story,” writes Dr. Hickes, “but very well attested, of an Elf arrow, that was shot at a venerable Irish Bishop by an Evil Spirit in a terrible noise, louder than thunder, which shaked the house where the Bishop was; but this I reserve for his son to tell you, who is one of the deprived Irish Clergymen, and very well known, as by other excellent pieces, so by his late book, entitled, ‘The Snake in the Grass.’”[40]What would the critics say if this passage were found in a work of Cotton Mather’s?Finally, it is not amiss to remember that the tolerant, moderate, and scholarly John Evelyn, whom nobody will accuse of being a Puritan, made the following entry in his Diary under February3d, 1692-3:—“Unheard-of stories of the universal increase of Witches in New England; men, women and children devoting themselves to the devil, so as to threaten the subversion of the government. At the same time there was a conspiracy amongst the negroes in Barbadoes to murder all their masters, discovered by overhearing a discourse of two of the slaves, and so preventing the execution of the designe.” There is no indication that Evelyn regarded either of these conspiracies as less possible of occurrence than the other.[41]Most of these passages are sufficiently well known, and their significance in the abstract is cheerfully granted, I suppose, by everybody. But the cumulative effect of so much testimony from non-Puritans is, I fear, now and then disregarded or overlooked by writers who concern themselves principally with the annals of New England. Yet the bearing of the evidence is plain enough. The Salem outbreak was not due to Puritanism; it is not assignable to any peculiar temper on the part of our New England ancestors; it is no sign of exceptional bigotry or abnormal superstition. Our forefathers believed in witchcraft, not because they were Puritans, not because they were Colonials, not because they were New Englanders,—but because they were men of their time. They shared the feelings and beliefs of the best hearts and wisest heads of the seventeenth century. What more can be asked of them?[42]I am well aware that there are a few distinguished names that are always entered on the other side of the account, and some of them we must now consider. It would be unpardonable to detract in anymanner from the dear-bought fame of such forerunners of a better dispensation. But we must not forget that they were forerunners. They occupy a much more conspicuous place in modern books than they occupied in the minds of their contemporaries.[43]Further, if we listen closely to the words of these voices in the wilderness, we shall find that they do not sound in unison, and that then testimony is not in all cases precisely what we should infer from the loose statements often made about them.Johann Wier, or Weyer (1515-1588), deserves all the honor he has ever received. He devoted years to the study of demonology, and brought his great learning, and his vast experience as a physician, to bear on the elucidation of the whole matter.[44]He held that many of the performances generally ascribed to devils and witches were impossible, and that the witches themselves were deluded. But there is another side to the picture. Wier’s book is crammed full of what we should now-a-days regard as the grossest superstition. He credited Satan and his attendant demons with extensive powers. He believed that the fits of the so-called bewitched persons were due in large part to demoniacal possession or obsession, and that the witches themselves, though innocent of what was alleged against them, were in many cases under the influence of the devil, who made them think that they had entered into infernal compacts, and ridden through the air on broomsticks, and killed their neighbors’ pigs, and caused disease or death by occult means. And further, he was convinced that such persons as Faust, whom he calledmagi, were acquainted with strange and damnable arts, and that they were worthy of death and their books of the fire. One example may serve to show the world-wide difference between Wier’s mental attitude and our own.One of the best known symptoms of bewitchment was the vomiting of bones, nails, needles, balls of wool, bunches of hair, and other things, some of which were so large that they could not have passed through the throat by any natural means.[45]Such phenomena, Wier tells us, he had himself seen. How were they to be explained? Easily, according to Wier’s general theory. Such articles, he says, are put into the patient’s mouth by the devil; one after another, as fast as they come out. We cannot see him do this,—either because he acts so rapidly that his motions are invisible, or because he fascinates our sight, or because he darkens our eyes, perhaps by interposing between them and the patient some aërial body.[46]The instability of Wier’s position should not be brought against him as a reproach, since he was far in advance of his contemporaries, and since his arguments against the witch dogma are the foundation of all subsequent skepticism on the subject.[47]Besides, it is certain that such a thorough-going denial of the devil’s power as Bekker made a century later would have utterly discredited Wier’s book and might even have prevented it from being published at all.[48]Yet, when all is said and done, it must be admitted that Wier’s doctrines have a half-hearted appearance, and that they seemed to most seventeenth-century scholars to labor under a gross inconsistency. This inconsistency was emphasized by Meric Casaubon. “As for them,” writes Dr. Casaubon, “who allow and acknowledgesupernatural operationsby Devils and Spirits, asWierius;who tells as many strange stories of them, and asincredible, as are to be found in any book; but stick at the business ofWitchesonly, whom they would not have thought the Authors of those mischiefs, that are usually laid to their charge, but the Devil only; though this opinion may seem to some, to have more ofcharity, thanIncredulity; yet the contrary will easily appear to them, that shall look into it more carefully.” And Casaubon dwells upon the fact that Wier grants “no small part of what we drive at, when he doth acknowledgesupernatural operations, by Devils and Spirits.”[49]Indeed, the apparent contradiction in Wier’s theories may also excuse Casaubon for the suggestion he makes that Wier’s intention “was not so much to favourwomen, as theDevilhimself, with whom, it is to be feared, that he was too well acquainted.”[50]This reminds us of what King James had already written of “Wierus, a German Physition,” who “sets out a publike Apologie for all these craftes-folkes, whereby, procuring for their impunitie, he plainely bewrayes himselfe to have bene one of that profession.”[51]Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft appeared in 1584. Scot, who was largely indebted to Wier, goes much farther than his Continental predecessor. Of course he does not deny the existence of evil spirits;[52]but he does not believe, like Wier, that evil spirits are continually occupied in deluding mankind by all manner of false (or præstigious) appearances. Such deceits he ascribes to juggling, and he accordingly gives elaborate directions for the performance of various tricks of legerdemain.[53]There seems to be a more or less prevalent impression that Scot’s book explodes witchcraft so thoroughly that the whole delusion might soon have come to an end in England if JamesI.had not mounted the throne a short time after it was published. True, King James’s Dæmonologie is expressly directed “against the damnable opinions” of Wier and Scot.[54]But, to tell the truth, Scot’s treatise did not require a royal refutation. To us moderns, who are converted already and need no repentance, its general air of reasonableness, together with its humor and the raciness of the style, makes the Discoverie seem convincing enough. But this is to look at the matter from a mistaken point of view. The question is, not how Scot’s arguments affect us, but how they were likely to affect his contemporaries. Now, if the truth must be told, the Discoverie is deficient in one very important respect. It makes no satisfactory answer to the insistent questions: “What are these evil spirits of which the Bible and the philosophers tell us, and which everybody believes in, and always has believed in, from the beginning of time? And what are they about? If they are powerful and malignant, why is it not likely that the effects which everybody ascribes to them are really their work? And if they are eager not only to torment but to seduce mankind, why is it not reasonable to suppose that they accomplish both ends at the same time—kill two birds with one stone—by procuring such evil effects by means of witches, or by allowing themselves to be utilized by witches as instruments of malice?” It was quite proper to ask these questions of Scot. He admitted the existence of evil spirits, but declared that we know little or nothing about them, denied that they can produce the phenomena then generally ascribed to their agency, and alleged fraud and delusion to account for such phenomena. Even to us, with our extraordinary and very modern incredulity toward supernatural occurrences, the lacuna in Scot’s reasoning is clear enough if we only look at his argument as a whole. This we are not inclined to do; at least, no historian of witchcraft has ever done it. It is easier and more natural for us to accept such portions of Scot’s argument as agree with our own view, to compliment him for his perspicacity, and to pass on, disregarding the inadequacy of what he says about evil spirits. Or, if we notice that his utterances on this topic are halting and uncertain, we are tempted to regard such hesitancy as further evidence of his rational temper. He could not quite deny the existence of devils, we feel,—that would have been too much to expect of him; but he waves them aside like a sensible man.[55]A moment’s consideration, however, will show us that this defect in Scot’s case, trifling as it appears to us now-a-days, was in fact a very serious thing. To us, who never think of admitting the intervention of evil spirits in the affairs of this world, the question whether there are any such spirits at all has a purely theoretical interest. Indeed, we practically deny their existence when we ignore them as we do:de non apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est lex.—But to Scot’s contemporaries, the question of the existence of evil spirits involved the whole matter in debate,—and Scot granted their existence.A curious particular in the history of Scot’s Discoverie should also be considered in estimating its effect on the seventeenth century. The appearance of a new edition in 1665, shortly after the famous Bury St. Edmunds case,[56]may at first sight seem to indicate powerful and continuing influence on the part of the Discoverie. When we observe from the title-page, however, that the publisher has inserted nine chapters at the beginning of BookXV, and has added a second book to the Treatise on Divels and Spirits, our curiosity is excited. Investigation soon shows that these additions were calculated to destroy or minimize the total effect of Scot’s book. The prefixed chapters contain directions for making magical circles, for calling up “the ghost of one that hath hanged himself,” and for raising various orders of spirits. These chapters are thrust in without any attempt to indicate that they are not consistent with Scot’s general plan and his theories. They appear to be, and are, practical directions for magic and necromancy. The additional book is even more dangerous to Scot’s design. It is prefaced by the remark:—“Because the Author in his foregoing Treatise, upon theNature of Spirits and Devils, hath only touched the subject thereof superficially, omitting the more material part; and with a brief and cursory Tractat, hath concluded to speak the least of this subject which indeed requires most amply to be illustrated; therefore I thought fit to adjoyn this subsequent discourse; as succedaneous to the fore-going, and conducing to the compleating of the whole work.”[57]How far “this subsequent discourse” is really fitted to complete Scot’s work may be judged by a statement which it makes on the very first page, to the effect that bad spirits “are the grand Instigators, stirring up mans heart to attempt the inquiry after the darkest, and most mysterious part of Magick, or Witchcraft.” And again a little later:—“Great is the villany of Necromancers, and wicked Magicians, in dealing with the spirits of men departed; whom they invocate, with certain forms, and conjurations, digging up their Carkasses again, or by the help of Sacrifices, and Oblations to the infernal Gods; compelling the Ghost to present it self before them.”[58]All this is quite opposed to Scot’s view and the whole intention of his book. The insertion of such worthless matter was, of course, a mere trick of the bookseller to make a new edition go off well. But the fact of its insertion shows that Scot was thought to have left his treatise incomplete or unsatisfactory in a most important point. And the inserted matter itself must have gone far to neutralize the effect of republication in a witch-haunted period. And so we may leave Reginald Scot, with our respect for his courage and common sense undiminished, but with a clear idea of the slight effect which his treatise must have had on the tone and temper of the age that we are studying.John Webster’s Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, which appeared in 1677—the Preface is dated “February 23. 1673”—was particularly directed against Glanvill and Meric Casaubon. It holds a distinguished place in the history of witchcraft, and demands our careful scrutiny. What is usually thought of it has been eloquently expressed by the late Mr. James Crossley. “In this memorable book,” writes Mr. Crossley, “he exhausts the subject, as far as it is possible to do so, by powerful ridicule, cogent arguments, and the most varied and well applied learning, leaving to [Francis] Hutchinson, and others who have since followed in his track, little further necessary than to reproduce his facts and reasonings in a more popular, it can scarcely be said, in a more effective form.”[59]A few of Webster’s opinions must be specified, that the reader may judge how far The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft deserves to rank as a work of sober and scientific reason, and to what extent the author merits the position that seems to be traditionally assigned to him as an uncompromising assailant of superstition.Angels, good and bad, are “really and truly corporeal” and not spirits, except “in a relative and respective” sense.[60]Since devils are corporeal, Webster admits that “they may move and agitate other bodies.” Their strength, however, is limited, “for though one Devil may be supposed to move or lift up that which would load an Horse, yet it will not follow that he can move or lift up as much as would load a Ship of a thousand Tun.”[61]Webster grants that “God doth make use of evil Angels to punish the wicked, and to chastise and afflict the godly, and in the effecting of these things that they have a power given them to hurt the earth and the Sea and things therein, as to bring tempests, thunder, lightning, plague, death, drought and the like.”[62]Webster has a profound belief in apparitions and tells some capital ghost stories[63]—“unquestionable testimonies,” he calls them, “either from our own Annals, or matters of fact that we know to be true of our own certain knowledge, that thereby it may undoubtedly appear, that there are effects that exceed the ordinary power of natural causes, and may for ever convince all Atheisticall minds.”[64]One of these tales concerns the murder of one Fletcher by Ralph Raynard, an innkeeper, and Mark Dunn, a hired assassin. One day “the spirit ofFletcherin his usual shape and habit did appear unto [Raynard], and said, OhRaph, repent, repent, for my revenge is at hand.” The result was a full confession. “I have recited this story punctually,” writes Webster, “as a thing that hath been very much fixed in my memory, being then but young, and as a certain truth, I being (with many more) an ear-witness of their confessions and an eye-witness of their Executions, and likewise sawFletcherwhen he was taken up, where they had buried him in his cloaths, which were a green fustian doublet pinkt upon white, gray breeches, and his walking boots and brass spurrs without rowels.” The spectre, Webster is convinced, was an “extrinsick apparition toRaynard,” and not the mere effect of a guilty conscience “which represented the shape ofFletcherin his fancy.” The thing could not, he thinks, “be brought to pass either by the Devil, orFletchersSoul,” and therefore he “concludes that either it was wrought by the Divine Power, ... or that it was the Astral or Sydereal Spirit ofFletcher, seeking revenge for the murther.”[65]Webster also believes fully in the “bleeding or cruentation of the bodies of those that have been murthered,” particularly at the touch of the murderer or in his presence, and he gives a very curious collection of examples, in some of which “the murtherers had not been certainly known but by the bleeding of the body murthered.”[66]The most probable explanation of such phenomena he finds in the existence of the astral spirit, “that, being a middle substance, betwixt the Soul and the Body doth, when separated from the Body, wander or hover near about it, bearing with it the irascible and concupiscible faculties, wherewith being stirred up to hatred and revenge, it causeth that ebullition and motion in the blood, that exudation of blood upon the weapon, and those other wonderful motions of the Body, Hands, Nostrils and Lips, thereby to discover the murtherer, and bring him to condign punishment.”[67]In some cases, however, Webster holds that the soul has not actually departed, “and God may in his just judgment suffer the Soul to stay longer in the murthered Body, that the cry of blood may make known the murtherer, or may not so soon, for the same reason, call it totally away.”[68]These specimens of Webster’s temper of mind might perhaps suffice to show with what slight justification he has been regarded as a scientific rationalist. We must not dismiss him, however, until we have scrutinized his views on the subject of witchcraft itself. He passes for a strong denier of the whole business of sorcery. We shall find that this is a great mistake. So far from denying the existence of witches, Webster is indignant at the imputation that his theories and those of other like-minded scholars should be interpreted in any such sense. “If I deny that a Witch cannot flye in the air, nor be transformed or transubstantiated into a Cat, a Dog, or an Hare, or that the Witch maketh any visible Covenant with the Devil, or that he sucketh on their bodies, or that the Devil hath carnal Copulation with them; I do not thereby deny either the Being of Witches, nor other properties that they may have, for which they may be so called: no more than if I deny that a dog hath rugibility (which is only proper to a Lion) doth it follow that I deny the being of a Dog, or that he hath latrability?”[69]This sentence contains, in effect, the sum and substance of Webster’s negative propositions on the subject.[70]Let us see what he holds as affirmatives.Though rejecting the theory of an external covenant between the devil and a witch, Webster acknowledges “an internal, mental, and spiritual League or Covenant betwixt the Devil and all wicked persons.” Further, “this spiritual League in some respects and in some persons may be, and is an explicit League, that is, the persons that enter into it, are or may be conscious of it, and know it to be so.”[71]Now there are certain persons, commonly called witches, who are full of “hatred, malice, revenge and envy,” of which the devil is the “author and causer,”[72]and these, by Satan’s instigation, “do secretly and by tradition learn strange poysons, philters and receipts whereby they do much hurt and mischief. Which most strange wayes of poysoning, tormenting, and breeding of unwonted things in the stomach and bellies of people, have not been unknown unto many learned men and Philosophers.”[73]Among these effects of “an art more than Diabolical,” which has “been often practiced by most horrible, malevolent, and wicked persons,” is the production of the plague. There is no doubt of the fact. There are “undeniable examples.” An unguent may be prepared which is of such power that when it is smeared upon the handles of doors, “those that do but lightly touch them are forthwith infected.” In 1536 there was a conspiracy of some forty persons in Italy, who caused the death of many in this way.[74]To such arts Webster ascribes the dreadful outbreak of jail-fever at the Oxford assizes in 1579. This was not, and could not be, the ordinary “prison infection.” It was brought about by the contrivances of one Roland Jenks, “a Popish recusant,” who was condemned for seditious words against the queen. Jenks, it seems, had procured strange poisons of a local apothecary, and had made a kind of candle out of them. As soon as he was condemned, he lighted his candle, from which there arose such a “damp,” or steam, that the pestilence broke out as we have seen.[75]It is manifest, Webster holds, “that these kind of people that are commonly called Witches, are indeed (as both the Greek and Latin names doe signifie) Poysoners, and in respect of their Hellish designs are Diabolical, but the effects they procure flow from natural Causes.”[76]This last proposition is, indeed, perhaps the chief point of Webster’s book. Witches exist, and they do horrible things, but they accomplish their ends, not by the actual intervention of the devil and his imps, but by virtue of an acquaintance with little-known laws of nature. Another example, which cannot be quoted in detail, will make Webster’s position perfectly clear. A man was afflicted with a dreadful disease. The cause was discovered to be the presence of an oaken pin in the corner of a courtyard. The pin was destroyed and the man drank birchen ale. He made a complete recovery. It is plain, according to Webster, that the pulling up and burning of the oaken pin “was with the help of the Birchen Ale the cure; but it can no wayes be judged necessary that the Devil should fix the Oak pin there, but that the Witch might do it himself. Neither can it be thought to be any power given by the Devil to the Oaken pin, that it had not by nature, for in all probability it will constantly by a natural power produce the same effect; only thus far the Devil had a hand in the action, to draw some wicked person to fix the pin there ..., thereby to hurt and torture him.”[77]One is tempted to still further quotations from Webster’s utterances on this topic, especially because his book has been much oftener mentioned than read. But we must rest content with one passage which sums up the whole matter:—“The opinions that we reject as foolish and impious are those we have often named before, to wit, that those that are vulgarly accounted Witches, make a visible and corporeal contract with the Devil, that he sucks upon their bodies, that he hath carnal copulation with them, that they are transubstantiated into Cats, Dogs, Squirrels, and the like, or that they raise tempests, and fly in the air. Other powers we grant unto them, to operate and effect whatsoever the force of natural imagination joyned with envy, malice and vehement desire of revenge, can perform or perpetrate, or whatsoever hurt may be done by secret poysons and such like wayes that work by meer natural means.”[78]It is true that Webster opposed some of the current witch dogmas of his time. There are passages enough in his elaborate treatise which insist on the prevalence of fraud and melancholia. In his Epistle Dedicatory, which is addressed to five Yorkshire justices of the peace, he lays particular stress on the necessity of distinguishing between impostors and those unfortunate persons who are “under a mere passive delusion” that they are witches, and warns the magistrates not to believe impossible confessions. For all this he deserves honor.[79]Nor do I intend for a moment to suggest that the queer things (as we regard them now-a-days) which I have cited are in any manner discreditable to Webster. He was not exceptionally credulous, and he belonged to that advanced school of English physicians who, in the second half of the seventeenth century, upheld the general theories of Paracelsus and van Helmont in opposition to the outworn follies of the Galenists or regulars. He was a man of great erudition, of vast and varied experience, of uncommon mental gifts, and of passionate devotion to the truth. I admire him, but I must be pardoned if I am unable to see how he can be regarded as a tower of skeptical strength in the great witchcraft controversy. Even his admissions on the subject of the fallen angels are enough to destroy the efficiency of his denial of current notions about witchcraft. Once grant, as Webster does, that our atmosphere is peopled by legions upon legions of evil angels, delighting in sin, eager to work mischief, inimical to God and man, furnished with stores of acquired knowledge, and able to devise wicked thoughts and put them into our minds,[80]and it was idle to deny—in the face of the best philosophic and theological opinion of the ages—that these demonic beings can make actual covenants with witches or furnish them with the means of doing injury to their fellow-creatures.“A Witch,” according to Glanvill’s definition, “is one, who can do or seems to do strange things, beyond the known Power of Art and ordinary Nature, by vertue of a Confederacy with Evil Spirits.... Thestrange thingsarereallyperformed, and are not allImposturesandDelusions. The Witchoccasions, but is not thePrincipalEfficient, she seems to do it, but theSpiritperforms the wonder, sometimes immediately, as inTransportationsandPossessions, sometimes by applying other Natural Causes, as in raisingStorms, and inflictingDiseases, sometimes using theWitchas anInstrument, and either by the Eyes or Touch, conveying Malign Influences: And these things are done by vertue of aCovenant, orCompactbetwixt theWitchand anEvil Spirit. ASpirit,viz.anIntelligent Creatureof the Invisible World, whether one of the Evil Angels calledDevils, or an InferiourDæmonorSpirit, or a wickedSouldeparted; but one that is able and ready for mischief, and whether altogether Incorporeal or not, appertains not to this Question.”[81]Glanvill’s book was well known to the Mathers. So was Webster’s Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft.[82]Could there be a moment’s doubt which of the two would appeal the more powerfully to their logical sense? Why, even we ourselves, if we look at the matter fairly,—taking into consideration Webster’s whole case, and not merely such parts of it as accord with our preconceived opinions,—are forced to admit that Glanvill’s position is much the stronger.In a well-known passage, in which the intellectual temper of Massachusetts before 1660 is contrasted with that of the next generation,[83]our classic New England essayist remarks that after 1660 the Colonists “sank rapidly into provincials, narrow in thought, in culture, in creed.” “Such a pedantic portent as Cotton Mather,” Lowell continues, “would have been impossible in the first generation; he was the natural growth of the third.” To discuss these epigrammatic theses would take us far beyond the limits of our present subject. One thing, however, must be said. Pedantry in the latter half of the seventeenth century was not confined to New England, nor to the ranks of those who were controversially styled the witchmongers. Meric Casaubon and Joseph Glanvill were not pedantic, but John Webster’s Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft—which in some respects comes very near to being a great book—is a monument of pedantry, and John Webster was not a product of New England.In Thomas Hobbes, whom we may next consider, we find a philosopher who was altogether incredulous on the subject of witchcraft. “As for witches,” he writes, “I think not that their witchcraft is any real power; but yet that they are justly punished, for the false belief that they have that they can do such mischief, joined with their purpose to do it if they can; their trade being nearer to a new religion than to a craft or science.”[84]This dictum may accord with reason, but one must admit that it was cold comfort for persons accused of diabolical arts. And so was the more famous remark of Selden: “The Law against Witches does not prove there be any; but it punishes the Malice of those people, that use such means, to take away mens lives. If one should profess that by turning his Hat thrice, and crying Buz; he could take away a man’s life (though in truth he could do no such thing) yet this were a just Law made by the State, that whosoever should turn his Hat thrice, and cry Buz; with an intention to take away a man’s life, shall be put to death.”[85]Bayle, shortly after the beginning of the eighteenth century, agreed with Selden as to the justice of putting “sorciers imaginaires” to death.[86]Thomas Ady, believing (like Scot, to whom he often refers) that the witches and sorcerers of the Bible were mere cheats, and that the same is true of all who pretend to similar arts in modern times, is ready to admit the justice of the death penalty in cases of fraud. In describing the case of a certain Master of Arts who was “condemned only for using himself to the study and practice of the Jugling craft,” he concludes:—“If he had been a Jugler, or practiser of that Craft to this end, to withstand the Prophets when they wrought true miracles, asPharaohsJuglers withstoodMoses, or if he were one that practised it to seduce the people after lying delusions, to magnifie himself as a false Prophet, likeSimon Magusin theActs, or to cause people to ascribe miraculous power to him, or to seek to the Devil as our common Deceivers, called good Witches, do, he was deservedly condemned.”[87]Four dissenters from the current witchcraft dogma we must pass over in silence—John Wagstaffe, Sir Robert Filmer, Robert Calef, and Dr. Francis Hutchinson. Calef came too late to be really significant in our discussion; Filmer’s tract is a kind ofjeu d’esprit, not likely to have had any influence except upon lawyers;[88]and Wagstaffe’s book is a quite inconsiderable affair. Yet, in parting, we must not neglect an odd remark concerning two out of the four—as well as one other, John Webster, whose lucubrations we have already criticised—a remark which, occurring as it does in a work of much learning and unusual distinction, illustrates in striking fashion the inaccuracy which we have already had occasion to notice, now and again, in recent writers who have busied themselves with the abstruse and complicated subject of witchcraft. President White, in his Warfare of Science with Theology, expresses his admiration for Webster, Wagstaffe, and Hutchinson in the following terms:—“But especially should honour be paid to the younger men in the Church, who wrote at length against the whole system: such men as Wagstaffe and Webster and Hutchinson, who in the humbler ranks of the clergy stood manfully for truth, with the certainty that by so doing they were making their own promotion impossible.”[89]Of the three men whom Dr. White thus commends for renouncing all hope of ecclesiastical preferment, the first, John Webster, was sixty-seven years old when he published his book; he had long been a Non-Conformist, and he describes himself on his title-page as “Practitioner in Physick.” The second, John Wagstaffe, was a gentleman of independent means who damaged his health by “continual bibbing of strong and high tasted liquors”[90]and who was not in orders at all; the third. Dr. Francis Hutchinson, was Chaplain in Ordinary to King GeorgeI.when he published his Essay and was advanced to a bishopric two years after the first edition of the book appeared.[91]When in 1692 and 1693, we come to The Enchanted World (De Betoverde Weereld)[92]of the Dutch preacher and theologian Balthasar Bekker, we arrive at a method of opposing the witch dogma different from anything we have so far examined. Bekker was fully aware of the difficulties of his theme, and he had an uncommonly logical head. His method is perfect. He first sets forth the spiritual beliefs of the Greeks and Romans and their practices in the way of sorcery. Then he shows—with an anticipation of the process so often used by the modern anthropological school—that the same doctrines and practices are found among “the pagans of the present day,”—in Northern Europe, in Asia, in Africa, and in America, as well as among the ancient Jews. The Manichæan heresy, he contends, was a mélange of pagan and Jewish doctrines. These doctrines—heathen, Jewish, and Manichæan—early became current among Christians. Hence, Christians in general now hold that all sorts of extraordinary happenings are due to the activity of the devil. Thus Bekker succeeds in explaining the primary conceptions of modern demonology and witchcraft as derived from heathen sources.[93]Bekker’s next task is to define body and spirit, according to reason and the Bible. Both body and spirit are creatures. God, being perfect and increate, is neither body nor spirit, but superior to both. He is called a spirit in the Bible, simply because there is no better word to express the divine nature, but that nature is different from what is ordinarily meant by the term. God being the governor of the world, we have no ground for believing that there are demigods (dæmonsin the Greek sense) or vice-gods. Apart from the Scriptures, reason affords us no proof that there are any spirits except men’s souls. The Scriptures, however, teach that there are good angels, of whom Michael is the chief, and bad angels, whose prince is the devil. Beyond this, we learn practically nothing from the Bible with regard to a hierarchy of angels or of devils. Demoniacal possession was a natural disease: it had nothing to do with evil spirits. Such devils as are mentioned in Scripture are not said to be vassals of Satan; in many cases we are to understand the word “devil” merely as a figure of speech for a wicked man. There is no warrant in Holy Writ for the belief that Satan can appear to mortals under different forms, nor for the powers vulgarly ascribed to him and his supposed demonic household. In particular, there is no scriptural warrant for the opinion that Satan or his imps can injure men bodily or even suggest evil thoughts to them. The devil and the evil angels are damned in hell; they have not the power to move about in this world. The only way in which Satan is responsible for the sins which we commit is through his having brought about the fall of Adam, so that men are now depraved creatures, prone to sin. There is no place in the divine government for particular suggestions to wickedness, made from time to time, since the Fall, either by Satan himself or by any of his train. Diabolical influence upon mankind was confined to the initial temptation in Eden. Since Adam, neither Satan nor any evil spirit has been active in this world in any manner whatever, spiritual or corporeal. God rules, and the devil is not a power to be reckoned with at all. These revolutionary propositions Bekker proves, to his own satisfaction, not only from reason, but from the Word of God.[94]Here at last we have a rational method. Bekker is not content with half-measures; he lays the axe to the root. There is a devil, to be sure, and there are fallen angels; but neither the one nor the other can have anything to do with the life and actions of mortal men. Practically, then, the devil is non-existent. We may disregard him entirely. If Bekker’s propositions are admitted, the stately fabric of demonology and witchcraft crumbles in an instant. And nothing less drastic than such propositions will suffice to make witchcraft illogical or incredible. Bekker’s argument, we see at once, is utterly different from anything that his predecessors had attempted.It now becomes necessary for Bekker to proceed to discuss those passages in the Bible which appear to justify the common beliefs in sorcery and witchcraft. These beliefs are contrary to reason, but, if they rest upon revelation, they must still be accepted, for Bekker regards himself as an orthodox Christian of the Dutch Reformed Church. Accordingly Bekker takes up every scriptural passage which mentions witches, enchanters, diviners, and the like, and interprets them all in such a way that they lend no support to current beliefs in the reality of compacts with the devil, of magic, or of witchcraft. Whatever magicians and witches, so-called, may think of their own performances, there is nothing in Scripture, as interpreted by this bold and expert theologian and unsurpassed dialectician, to warrant us in believing in intercourse with Satan, or in his intervention, with or without the mediation of sorcerers and witches, in human life as it is to-day.[95]But, Bekker hastens to admit, there remains a huge mass of recent testimony which is regarded by almost everybody as sufficient to establish the existence of sorcery and witchcraft, whether such things are recognized in the Bible or not. To this testimony Bekker devotes the Fourth (and last) Book of his treatise.He first points out that all such testimony is prejudiced, since it comes from persons who have a fixed and, so to speak, an inherited belief in the truth of the marvels whose very existence is in question. He then examines a great body of material, with splendid sobriety and common sense. This is perhaps the most interesting part of his work to us,—though in fact it is less original than much of what precedes, since all opponents of the witch dogma, beginning with Wier, had attacked the evidence in many particulars, and since even those scholars and theologians who supported the dogma most effectively—like Glanvill—had granted without hesitation that fraud and delusion played a large part in the accumulation of testimony. Bekker’s treatment of the subject, however, is better than anything of the kind that had been written before. Fraud, terror, hysteria, insanity, illusion of the senses,—due to disease or to what we should now call hypnotic or semi-hypnotic conditions,—unknown laws of nature—these are the sources from which he derives his interpretation of the evidence. This part of his work, then, has a singularly modern tone, and gives the author a valid claim to rank as an enlightened psychologist.It has seemed advisable to give particular attention to Bekker’s Enchanted World because of its singular merits, as well as on account of the distinguished position which it deservedly holds among the books which oppose the belief in witchcraft. In strictness, however, we are not bound to include this work in our survey of seventeenth-century opinion, since it did not appear in season to exert any influence on New England at the time of the Salem prosecution. The first two Books of Bekker’s work were published in 1691; the second two, which deal specifically with witchcraft, in 1693. The trouble in Salem began in February, 1692, and the prosecution collapsed in January, 1693. It is certain that New England scholars knew nothing about the first two Books when they were engaged in witch trials, and the last two were not published until the trials had come to an end. But this matter of dates need not be insisted on. Even if our ancestors had received advance sheets of The Enchanted World, their opinions would not, in all probability, have been in the slightest degree affected. Indeed, the reception which Bekker’s treatise met with in his own country is a plain indication of the temper of the times in this business of witchcraft. The publication of the first two Books in 1691 was the signal for a storm of denunciation. The Dutch press teemed with replies and attacks. Bekker was instantly called to account by the authorities of the Reformed Church. Complicated ecclesiastical litigation ensued, with the result that the Synod of North Holland issued a decree declaring Bekker “intolerable as teacher in the Reformed Church” and expelling him from his ministerial office (August 7, 1692).[96]Soon after, the Church Council of Amsterdam voted to exclude him from the Lord’s Supper (August 17),[97]and he was never admitted to communion again. He died on June 11, 1698.[98]
BY GEORGE LYMAN KITTREDGE.
We are all specialists now-a-days, I suppose. The good old times of the polymath and the Doctor Universalis are gone forever. Yet signs are not wanting that some of us are alive to the danger of building our party-walls too high. In one respect, at all events, there can be no doubt that the investigators of New England antiquities are aware of their peril, though they occasionally shut their eyes to it,—I mean, the tendency to consider the Colonists as a peculiar people, separated from the Mother Country not only geographically, but also with regard to those currents of thought and feeling which are the most significant facts of history. True, there is more or less justification for that kind of study which looks at the annals of America as ends-in-themselves; but such study is ticklish business, and it now and then distorts the perspective in a rather fantastic way. This is a rank truism. Still, commonplaces are occasionally steadying to the intellect, and Dr. Johnson—whose own truths have been characterized by a brilliant critic as “too true”—knew what he was about when he said that men usually need not so much to be informed as to be reminded.
The darkest page of New England history is, by common consent, that which is inscribed with the words Salem Witchcraft. The hand of the apologist trembles as it turns the leaf. The reactionary writer who prefers iconoclasm to hero-worship sharpens his pen and pours fresh gall into his inkpot when he comes to this sinister subject. Let us try to consider the matter, for a few minutes, unemotionally, and to that end let us pass in review a number of facts which may help us to look at the Witchcraft Delusion of 1692 in its due proportions,—not as an abnormal outbreak of fanaticism, not as an isolated tragedy, but as a mere incident, a brief and transitory episode in the biography of a terrible, but perfectly natural, superstition.
In the first place, we know that the New Englanders did not invent the belief in witchcraft.[1]It is a universally human belief. No race or nation is exempt from it. Formerly, it was an article in the creed of everybody in the world, and it is still held, in some form or other, and to a greater or less extent, by a large majority of mankind.[2]
Further, our own attitude of mind toward witchcraft is a very modern attitude indeed. To us, one who asserts the existence, or even the possibility, of the crime of witchcraft staggers under a burden of proof which he cannot conceivably support. His thesis seems to us unreasonable, abnormal, monstrous; it can scarcely be stated in intelligible terms; it savors of madness. Now, before we can do any kind of justice to our forefathers,—a matter, be it remembered, of no moment to them, for they have gone to their reward, but, I take it, of considerable importance to us,—we must empty our heads of all such rationalistic ideas. To the contemporaries of William Stoughton and Samuel Sewall the existence of this crime was not merely an historical phenomenon, it was a fact of contemporary experience. Whoever denied the occurrence of witchcraft in the past, was an atheist; whoever refused to admit its actual possibility in the present, was either stubbornly incredulous, or destitute of the ability to draw an inference. Throughout the seventeenth century, very few persons could be found—not merely in New England, but in the whole world—who would have ventured to take so radical a position. That there had been witches and sorcerers in antiquity was beyond cavil. That there were, or might be, witches and sorcerers in the present was almost equally certain. The crime was recognized by the Bible, by all branches of the Church, by philosophy, by natural science, by the medical faculty, by the law of England. I do not offer these postulates as novelties. They are commonplaces. They will not be attacked by anybody who has even a slight acquaintance with the mass of testimony that might be adduced to establish them.
It is a common practice to ascribe the tenets of the New Englanders in the matter of witchcraft to something peculiar about their religious opinions,—to what is loosely called their Puritan theology. This is a very serious error. The doctrines of our forefathers differed, in this regard, from the doctrines of the Roman and the Anglican Church in no essential,—one may safely add, in no particular. Lord Bacon was not a Puritan,—yet he has left his belief in sorcery recorded in a dozen places. JamesI.was not a Puritan,[3]but his Dæmonologie (1597) is a classic treatise, his zeal in prosecuting sorcerers is notorious, and his statute of 1603[4]was the act under which Matthew Hopkins, in the time of the Commonwealth, sent two hundred witches to the gallows in two years,—nearly ten times as many as perished in Massachusetts from the first settlement to the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Matthew Hopkins, the Witch-Finder General, apparentlywasa Puritan. Indeed, it is his career, more than anything that ever happened in New England, which has led to the reiterated statement that Puritanism was especially favorable, by its temper and its tenets, to prosecution for witchcraft. For his activity falls in the time of the Commonwealth, and the Parliament granted a Special Commission of Oyer and Terminer, in 1645, to try some of the witches that he had detected, and Edmund Calamy was associated with the Commission. But, on the other hand, it must be noted that John Gaule, who opposed Hopkins and is usually credited with most influence in putting an end to his performances, was also a Puritan,—and a minister likewise, and a believer in witches as well. The Hopkins outbreak, as we shall see, must be laid to the disturbed condition of the country rather than to the prevalence of any particular system of theology.[5]Under Cromwell’s government, witch trials languished, not because the belief in witchcraft changed, but because there was order once more. So in Scotland, the conquest by Cromwell checked one of the fiercest prosecutions ever known. The Restoration was followed, both in England and in Scotland, by a marked recrudescence of prosecution.[6]
But we must return to Matthew Hopkins. Let us see how his discoveries affected James Howell. In 1647 Howell writes to Endymion Porter: “We have likewise multitudes ofWitchesamong us, for inEssexandSuffolkthere were above two hundred indicted within these two years, and above the one half of them executed: More, I may well say, than ever this Island bred since the Creation, I speak it with horror. God guard us from the Devil, for I think he was never so busy upon any part of the Earth that was enlightned with the beams ofChristianity; nor do I wonder at it, for there’s never a Cross left to fright him away.”[7]In the following year, Howell writes to Sir Edward Spencer an elaborate defence of the current tenets in witchcraft and demonology.[8]One striking passage demands quotation:—“Since the beginning of these unnatural Wars, there may be a cloud of Witnesses produc’d for the proof of this black Tenet: For within the compass of two years, near upon three hundred Witches were arraign’d, and the major part executed inEssexandSuffolkonly.Scotlandswarms with them now more than ever, and Persons of good Quality executed daily.”
It is confidently submitted that nobody will accuse Howell of Puritanism. The letters from which our extracts are taken were written while he was a prisoner in the Fleet under suspicion of being a Royalist spy.[9]His mention of the disappearance of crosses throughout England will not be overlooked by the discriminating reader. It will be noted also that he seems to have perceived a connection—a real one, as we shall see later—[10]between the increase in witchcraft and the turmoil of the Civil War.
Jeremy Taylor was surely no Puritan; but he believed in witchcraft. It is a sin, he tells us, that is “infallibly desperate,”[11]and in his Holy Living (1650) he has even given the weight of his authority to the reality of sexual relations between witches and the devil.[12]
It was not in Puritan times, but in 1664, four years after the Restoration, that Sir Matthew Hale, then Chief Baron of the Exchequer, pronounced from the bench the following opinion in the Bury St. Edmunds case:—“That there were such Creatures asWitcheshe made no doubt at all; ForFirst, the Scriptures had affirmed so much.Secondly, The wisdom of all Nations had provided Laws against such Persons, which is an Argument of their confidence of such a crime. And such hath been the judgment of this Kingdom, as appears by that Act of Parliament[13]which hath provided Punishments proportionable to the quality of the Offence. And desired them [the jury], strictly to observe their Evidence; and desired the great God of Heaven to direct their Hearts in this weighty thing they had in hand:For to Condemn the Innocent, and to let the Guilty go free, were both an Abomination to the Lord.”[14]Hale’s words were fraught with momentous consequences, for he was “allowed on all hands to be the most profound lawyer of his time,”[15]and the Bury case became a precedent of great weight. “It was,” writes Cotton Mather, “a Tryal much considered by the Judges of New England.”[16]
Hale’s conduct on this occasion has of course subjected him to severe criticism. Lord Campbell, for example, goes so far as to declare that he “murdered” the old women,—a dictum which shows but slight comprehension of the temper of the seventeenth century. More creditable to Campbell’s historical sense is the following passage:—“Although, at the present day, we regard this trial as a most lamentable exhibition of credulity and inhumanity, I do not know that it at all lowered Hale in public estimation in his own life.”[17]Bishop Burnet, as is well-known, makes no mention of the case in his Life of Hale.[18]One might surmise that he omitted it out of respect for his hero’s memory, since his little book is rather an obituary tribute than a biography. More probably, however, Burnet did not regard the case as any more significant than many other decisions of Hale’s which he likewise passed over in silence. Unequivocal evidence that the Bury trial did not injure Hale’s reputation may be found in the silence of Roger North. North’s elaborate character of Hale, in his Life of the Lord Keeper Guilford,[19]is notoriously prejudiced in the extreme. Though admitting Hale’s legal learning and many good qualities, North loses no opportunity to attack his record. Besides, North praises the Lord Keeper for his conduct in procuring the acquittal of an alleged witch. If, then, the Bury case had seemed to him especially discreditable, or if he had thought that it afforded an opening for hostile criticism, we cannot doubt that he would have spoken out in condemnation. His complete silence on the subject is therefore the most emphatic testimony to the general approval of Hale’s proceedings. Highly significant, too, is the fact that even Lord Campbell does not blame Hale for believing in witchcraft, but only for allowing weight to the evidence in this particular case. “I would very readily have pardoned him,” he writes, “for an undoubting belief in witchcraft, and I should have considered that this belief detracted little from his character for discernment and humanity. The Holy Scriptures teach us that, in some ages of the world, wicked persons, by the agency of evil spirits, were permitted, through means which exceed the ordinary powers of nature, to work mischief to their fellow-creatures.... In the reign of CharlesII., a judge who from the bench should have expressed a disbelief in [magic and the black art] would have been thought to show little respect for human laws, and to be nothing better than an atheist.” We may profitably compare what Guilford himself (then Francis North, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas) wrote of the Devonshire witches in 1682,—nearly twenty years after the Bury case:—“We cannot reprieve them, without appearing to deny the very being of witches, which, as it is contrary to law, so I think it would be ill for his Majesty’s service, for it may give the faction occasion to set afoot the old trade of witch-finding, that may cost many innocent persons their lives which the justice will prevent.”[20]
Sir Thomas Browne, the author of the Religio Medici, was no Puritan, and he was one of the leading scientific men of his day. Yet he gave his opinion, as an expert, at the request of the Court in this same Bury St. Edmunds case, to the following effect:—“That the Devil in such cases did work upon the Bodies of Men and Women, upon a Natural Foundation, (that is) to stir up, and excite such humours super-abounding in their Bodies to a great excess,”[21]and further, that “he conceived, that these swouning Fits were Natural, and nothing else but what they call the Mother,[22]but only heightned to a great excess by the subtilty of the Devil, co-operating with the Malice of these which we term Witches, at whose Instance he doth these Villanies.”[23]
Browne has been much blamed for this dictum, but there is nothing unreasonable or unscientific in it, if one merely grants the actuality of demoniacal possession, which was then to all intents and purposes an article of faith. If the devil can work upon our bodies at all, of course he can intensify any natural fits or spasms from which we happen to be suffering. Thus Browne’s diagnosis of the disease in this case as hysteria, by no means excluded the hypothesis ofmaleficium. But most modern writers refuse to discuss such subjects exceptde haut en bas,—from the vantage-ground of modern science.
Sir Thomas Browne’s view was, it seems, substantially identical with that of his predecessor, the famous Robert Burton,—no Puritan either!—who has a whole subsection “Of Witches and Magitians, how they cause Melancholy,” asserting that what “they can doe, is as much almost as the Diuell himselfe, who is still ready to satisfie their desires, to oblige them the more vnto him.”[24]
Joseph Glanvill, the author of The Vanity of Dogmatizing, was no Puritan,[25]but a skeptical philosopher, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and Chaplain in Ordinary to King CharlesII.; neither was his friend, Dr. Henry More, the most celebrated of the Cambridge Platonists. Yet these two scholars and latitudinarians joined forces to produce that extraordinary treatise, Saducismus Triumphatus: or, A Full and Plain Evidence concerning Witches and Apparitions. This book, an enlarged form of Glanvill’s Philosophical Considerations concerning Witchcraft (1666), was published in 1681, and went through no less than five editions, the last appearing as late as 1726.[26]It was thought to have put the belief in apparitions and witchcraft on an unshakable basis of science and philosophy.[27]No English work on the subject had a more powerful influence. When theRev.John Hale, of Beverley, wrote his Modest Enquiry,[28]which deplored the Salem excesses and protested against spectral evidence,—a notable treatise, published, with a prefatory epistle from the venerable Higginson,[29]in 1702,—he was able to condense the affirmative part of his argument, because, as he himself says, Glanvill “hath strongly proved the being of Witches.”[30]
Dr. Meric Casaubon, Prebend of Canterbury, was not a Puritan; yet the second part of his Credulity and Incredulity (1668) contains a vigorous assertion of demonology and witch-lore, and was republished in 1672 under the alluring title, A Treatise Proving Spirits, Witches and Supernatural Operations by Pregnant Instances and Evidences.[31]
Ralph Cudworth, the antagonist of Hobbes, was not a Puritan. Yet in his great Intellectual System he declares for the existence of sorcery, and even admits a distinction between its higher operations—as in theθεουργίαof Apollonius of Tyana[32]—and the vulgar performances of everyday wizards.[33]There is some reason, too, for supposing that Cudworth took part with Henry More in examining certain witches at Cambridge, and heard one of them try to recite the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, as she had offered to do “as an argument she was no witch.”[34]
Robert Boyle, the improver of the air-pump and the discoverer of Boyle’s Law, had “particular and considerable advantages to persuade [him], upon good grounds” that some witch stories are true, and he thought that Glanvill’s investigations would do “a good service to religion.”[35]This was in 1677. In the following year Boyle declared his belief[36]in the performances of the devil of Mascon.[37]Boyle’s religious views did not hinder him from being a leader in that fervor of scientific experimentation which is one of the glories of the latter half of the seventeenth century. And he too was not a Puritan.
Isaac Barrow, the master of Newton, was not a Puritan. Yet he left on record, in one of his sermons, one of the most powerful and eloquent of all protests against disbelief in the kind of phenomena which our ancestors are so often attacked for crediting. The passage is long, but must be quoted in full, for every word is of weight:—
“I may adjoin to the former sorts of extraordinary actions, some other sorts, the consideration of which (although not so directly and immediately) may serve our main design; those (which the general opinion of mankind hath approved, and manifold testimony hath declared frequently to happen) which concern apparitions from another world, as it were, of beings unusual; concerning spirits haunting persons and places, (these discerned by all senses, and by divers kinds of effects;) of which the old world (the ancient poets and historians) did speak so much, and of which all ages have afforded several attestations very direct and plain, and having all advantages imaginable to beget credence; concerning visions made unto persons of especial eminency and influence, (to priests and prophets;) concerning presignifications of future events by dreams; concerning the power of enchantments, implying the cooperation of invisible powers; concerning all sorts of intercourse and confederacy (formal or virtual) with bad spirits: all which things he that shall affirm to be mere fiction and delusion, must thereby with exceeding immodesty and rudeness charge the world with extreme both vanity and malignity; many, if not all, worthy historians, of much inconsiderateness or fraud; most lawgivers, of great silliness and rashness; most judicatories, of high stupidity or cruelty; a vast number of witnesses, of the greatest malice or madness; all which concurred to assert these matters of fact.“It is true, no question, but there have been many vain pretences, many false reports, many unjust accusations, and some undue decisions concerning these matters; that the vulgar sort is apt enough to be abused about them; that even intelligent and considerate men may at a distance in regard to some of them be imposed upon; but, as there would be no false gems obtruded, if there were no true ones found in nature; as no counterfeit coin would appear, were there no true one current; so neither can we well suppose that a confidence in some to feign, or a readiness in most to believe, stories of this kind could arise, or should subsist, without some real ground, or without such things having in gross somewhat of truth and reality. However, that the wiser and more refined sort of men, highest in parts and improvements both from study and experience, (indeed the flower of every commonwealth; statesmen, lawgivers, judges, and priests,) upon so many occasions of great importance, after most deliberate scanning such pretences and reports, should so often suffer themselves to be deluded, to the extreme injury of particular persons concerned, to the common abusing of mankind, to the hazard of their own reputation in point of wisdom and honesty, seems nowise reasonable to conceive. In likelihood rather the whole kind of all these things, were it altogether vain and groundless, would upon so frequent and so mature discussions have appeared to be so, and would consequently long since have been disowned, exploded, and thrust out of the world; for, as upon this occasion it is said in Tully, ‘Time wipeth out groundless conceits, but confirms that which is founded in nature, and real.’“Now if the truth and reality of these things, (all or any of them,) inferring the existence of powers invisible, at least inferior ones, though much superior to us in all sort of ability, be admitted, it will at least (as removing the chief obstacles of incredulity) confer much to the belief of that supreme Divinity, which our Discourse strives to maintain.”[38]
“I may adjoin to the former sorts of extraordinary actions, some other sorts, the consideration of which (although not so directly and immediately) may serve our main design; those (which the general opinion of mankind hath approved, and manifold testimony hath declared frequently to happen) which concern apparitions from another world, as it were, of beings unusual; concerning spirits haunting persons and places, (these discerned by all senses, and by divers kinds of effects;) of which the old world (the ancient poets and historians) did speak so much, and of which all ages have afforded several attestations very direct and plain, and having all advantages imaginable to beget credence; concerning visions made unto persons of especial eminency and influence, (to priests and prophets;) concerning presignifications of future events by dreams; concerning the power of enchantments, implying the cooperation of invisible powers; concerning all sorts of intercourse and confederacy (formal or virtual) with bad spirits: all which things he that shall affirm to be mere fiction and delusion, must thereby with exceeding immodesty and rudeness charge the world with extreme both vanity and malignity; many, if not all, worthy historians, of much inconsiderateness or fraud; most lawgivers, of great silliness and rashness; most judicatories, of high stupidity or cruelty; a vast number of witnesses, of the greatest malice or madness; all which concurred to assert these matters of fact.
“It is true, no question, but there have been many vain pretences, many false reports, many unjust accusations, and some undue decisions concerning these matters; that the vulgar sort is apt enough to be abused about them; that even intelligent and considerate men may at a distance in regard to some of them be imposed upon; but, as there would be no false gems obtruded, if there were no true ones found in nature; as no counterfeit coin would appear, were there no true one current; so neither can we well suppose that a confidence in some to feign, or a readiness in most to believe, stories of this kind could arise, or should subsist, without some real ground, or without such things having in gross somewhat of truth and reality. However, that the wiser and more refined sort of men, highest in parts and improvements both from study and experience, (indeed the flower of every commonwealth; statesmen, lawgivers, judges, and priests,) upon so many occasions of great importance, after most deliberate scanning such pretences and reports, should so often suffer themselves to be deluded, to the extreme injury of particular persons concerned, to the common abusing of mankind, to the hazard of their own reputation in point of wisdom and honesty, seems nowise reasonable to conceive. In likelihood rather the whole kind of all these things, were it altogether vain and groundless, would upon so frequent and so mature discussions have appeared to be so, and would consequently long since have been disowned, exploded, and thrust out of the world; for, as upon this occasion it is said in Tully, ‘Time wipeth out groundless conceits, but confirms that which is founded in nature, and real.’
“Now if the truth and reality of these things, (all or any of them,) inferring the existence of powers invisible, at least inferior ones, though much superior to us in all sort of ability, be admitted, it will at least (as removing the chief obstacles of incredulity) confer much to the belief of that supreme Divinity, which our Discourse strives to maintain.”[38]
Dr. George Hickes, of Thesaurus fame, was one of the most eminent scholars of his time. He was also a Non-juror, and titular Bishop of Thetford. In other words, he was not a Puritan. Yet in 1678 Hickes published an account of the infamous Major Weir, the most celebrated of all Scottish wizards, which betrays no skepticism on the cardinal points of sorcery.[39]There is also an extremely interesting letter from the Doctor to Mr. Pepys, dated June 19, 1700, which indicates a belief in witchcraft and second sight. The most curious part of this letter, however, deals with Elf Arrows. “I have another strange story,” writes Dr. Hickes, “but very well attested, of an Elf arrow, that was shot at a venerable Irish Bishop by an Evil Spirit in a terrible noise, louder than thunder, which shaked the house where the Bishop was; but this I reserve for his son to tell you, who is one of the deprived Irish Clergymen, and very well known, as by other excellent pieces, so by his late book, entitled, ‘The Snake in the Grass.’”[40]What would the critics say if this passage were found in a work of Cotton Mather’s?
Finally, it is not amiss to remember that the tolerant, moderate, and scholarly John Evelyn, whom nobody will accuse of being a Puritan, made the following entry in his Diary under February3d, 1692-3:—“Unheard-of stories of the universal increase of Witches in New England; men, women and children devoting themselves to the devil, so as to threaten the subversion of the government. At the same time there was a conspiracy amongst the negroes in Barbadoes to murder all their masters, discovered by overhearing a discourse of two of the slaves, and so preventing the execution of the designe.” There is no indication that Evelyn regarded either of these conspiracies as less possible of occurrence than the other.[41]
Most of these passages are sufficiently well known, and their significance in the abstract is cheerfully granted, I suppose, by everybody. But the cumulative effect of so much testimony from non-Puritans is, I fear, now and then disregarded or overlooked by writers who concern themselves principally with the annals of New England. Yet the bearing of the evidence is plain enough. The Salem outbreak was not due to Puritanism; it is not assignable to any peculiar temper on the part of our New England ancestors; it is no sign of exceptional bigotry or abnormal superstition. Our forefathers believed in witchcraft, not because they were Puritans, not because they were Colonials, not because they were New Englanders,—but because they were men of their time. They shared the feelings and beliefs of the best hearts and wisest heads of the seventeenth century. What more can be asked of them?[42]
I am well aware that there are a few distinguished names that are always entered on the other side of the account, and some of them we must now consider. It would be unpardonable to detract in anymanner from the dear-bought fame of such forerunners of a better dispensation. But we must not forget that they were forerunners. They occupy a much more conspicuous place in modern books than they occupied in the minds of their contemporaries.[43]Further, if we listen closely to the words of these voices in the wilderness, we shall find that they do not sound in unison, and that then testimony is not in all cases precisely what we should infer from the loose statements often made about them.
Johann Wier, or Weyer (1515-1588), deserves all the honor he has ever received. He devoted years to the study of demonology, and brought his great learning, and his vast experience as a physician, to bear on the elucidation of the whole matter.[44]He held that many of the performances generally ascribed to devils and witches were impossible, and that the witches themselves were deluded. But there is another side to the picture. Wier’s book is crammed full of what we should now-a-days regard as the grossest superstition. He credited Satan and his attendant demons with extensive powers. He believed that the fits of the so-called bewitched persons were due in large part to demoniacal possession or obsession, and that the witches themselves, though innocent of what was alleged against them, were in many cases under the influence of the devil, who made them think that they had entered into infernal compacts, and ridden through the air on broomsticks, and killed their neighbors’ pigs, and caused disease or death by occult means. And further, he was convinced that such persons as Faust, whom he calledmagi, were acquainted with strange and damnable arts, and that they were worthy of death and their books of the fire. One example may serve to show the world-wide difference between Wier’s mental attitude and our own.
One of the best known symptoms of bewitchment was the vomiting of bones, nails, needles, balls of wool, bunches of hair, and other things, some of which were so large that they could not have passed through the throat by any natural means.[45]Such phenomena, Wier tells us, he had himself seen. How were they to be explained? Easily, according to Wier’s general theory. Such articles, he says, are put into the patient’s mouth by the devil; one after another, as fast as they come out. We cannot see him do this,—either because he acts so rapidly that his motions are invisible, or because he fascinates our sight, or because he darkens our eyes, perhaps by interposing between them and the patient some aërial body.[46]
The instability of Wier’s position should not be brought against him as a reproach, since he was far in advance of his contemporaries, and since his arguments against the witch dogma are the foundation of all subsequent skepticism on the subject.[47]Besides, it is certain that such a thorough-going denial of the devil’s power as Bekker made a century later would have utterly discredited Wier’s book and might even have prevented it from being published at all.[48]Yet, when all is said and done, it must be admitted that Wier’s doctrines have a half-hearted appearance, and that they seemed to most seventeenth-century scholars to labor under a gross inconsistency. This inconsistency was emphasized by Meric Casaubon. “As for them,” writes Dr. Casaubon, “who allow and acknowledgesupernatural operationsby Devils and Spirits, asWierius;who tells as many strange stories of them, and asincredible, as are to be found in any book; but stick at the business ofWitchesonly, whom they would not have thought the Authors of those mischiefs, that are usually laid to their charge, but the Devil only; though this opinion may seem to some, to have more ofcharity, thanIncredulity; yet the contrary will easily appear to them, that shall look into it more carefully.” And Casaubon dwells upon the fact that Wier grants “no small part of what we drive at, when he doth acknowledgesupernatural operations, by Devils and Spirits.”[49]Indeed, the apparent contradiction in Wier’s theories may also excuse Casaubon for the suggestion he makes that Wier’s intention “was not so much to favourwomen, as theDevilhimself, with whom, it is to be feared, that he was too well acquainted.”[50]This reminds us of what King James had already written of “Wierus, a German Physition,” who “sets out a publike Apologie for all these craftes-folkes, whereby, procuring for their impunitie, he plainely bewrayes himselfe to have bene one of that profession.”[51]
Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft appeared in 1584. Scot, who was largely indebted to Wier, goes much farther than his Continental predecessor. Of course he does not deny the existence of evil spirits;[52]but he does not believe, like Wier, that evil spirits are continually occupied in deluding mankind by all manner of false (or præstigious) appearances. Such deceits he ascribes to juggling, and he accordingly gives elaborate directions for the performance of various tricks of legerdemain.[53]
There seems to be a more or less prevalent impression that Scot’s book explodes witchcraft so thoroughly that the whole delusion might soon have come to an end in England if JamesI.had not mounted the throne a short time after it was published. True, King James’s Dæmonologie is expressly directed “against the damnable opinions” of Wier and Scot.[54]But, to tell the truth, Scot’s treatise did not require a royal refutation. To us moderns, who are converted already and need no repentance, its general air of reasonableness, together with its humor and the raciness of the style, makes the Discoverie seem convincing enough. But this is to look at the matter from a mistaken point of view. The question is, not how Scot’s arguments affect us, but how they were likely to affect his contemporaries. Now, if the truth must be told, the Discoverie is deficient in one very important respect. It makes no satisfactory answer to the insistent questions: “What are these evil spirits of which the Bible and the philosophers tell us, and which everybody believes in, and always has believed in, from the beginning of time? And what are they about? If they are powerful and malignant, why is it not likely that the effects which everybody ascribes to them are really their work? And if they are eager not only to torment but to seduce mankind, why is it not reasonable to suppose that they accomplish both ends at the same time—kill two birds with one stone—by procuring such evil effects by means of witches, or by allowing themselves to be utilized by witches as instruments of malice?” It was quite proper to ask these questions of Scot. He admitted the existence of evil spirits, but declared that we know little or nothing about them, denied that they can produce the phenomena then generally ascribed to their agency, and alleged fraud and delusion to account for such phenomena. Even to us, with our extraordinary and very modern incredulity toward supernatural occurrences, the lacuna in Scot’s reasoning is clear enough if we only look at his argument as a whole. This we are not inclined to do; at least, no historian of witchcraft has ever done it. It is easier and more natural for us to accept such portions of Scot’s argument as agree with our own view, to compliment him for his perspicacity, and to pass on, disregarding the inadequacy of what he says about evil spirits. Or, if we notice that his utterances on this topic are halting and uncertain, we are tempted to regard such hesitancy as further evidence of his rational temper. He could not quite deny the existence of devils, we feel,—that would have been too much to expect of him; but he waves them aside like a sensible man.[55]A moment’s consideration, however, will show us that this defect in Scot’s case, trifling as it appears to us now-a-days, was in fact a very serious thing. To us, who never think of admitting the intervention of evil spirits in the affairs of this world, the question whether there are any such spirits at all has a purely theoretical interest. Indeed, we practically deny their existence when we ignore them as we do:de non apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est lex.—But to Scot’s contemporaries, the question of the existence of evil spirits involved the whole matter in debate,—and Scot granted their existence.
A curious particular in the history of Scot’s Discoverie should also be considered in estimating its effect on the seventeenth century. The appearance of a new edition in 1665, shortly after the famous Bury St. Edmunds case,[56]may at first sight seem to indicate powerful and continuing influence on the part of the Discoverie. When we observe from the title-page, however, that the publisher has inserted nine chapters at the beginning of BookXV, and has added a second book to the Treatise on Divels and Spirits, our curiosity is excited. Investigation soon shows that these additions were calculated to destroy or minimize the total effect of Scot’s book. The prefixed chapters contain directions for making magical circles, for calling up “the ghost of one that hath hanged himself,” and for raising various orders of spirits. These chapters are thrust in without any attempt to indicate that they are not consistent with Scot’s general plan and his theories. They appear to be, and are, practical directions for magic and necromancy. The additional book is even more dangerous to Scot’s design. It is prefaced by the remark:—“Because the Author in his foregoing Treatise, upon theNature of Spirits and Devils, hath only touched the subject thereof superficially, omitting the more material part; and with a brief and cursory Tractat, hath concluded to speak the least of this subject which indeed requires most amply to be illustrated; therefore I thought fit to adjoyn this subsequent discourse; as succedaneous to the fore-going, and conducing to the compleating of the whole work.”[57]
How far “this subsequent discourse” is really fitted to complete Scot’s work may be judged by a statement which it makes on the very first page, to the effect that bad spirits “are the grand Instigators, stirring up mans heart to attempt the inquiry after the darkest, and most mysterious part of Magick, or Witchcraft.” And again a little later:—“Great is the villany of Necromancers, and wicked Magicians, in dealing with the spirits of men departed; whom they invocate, with certain forms, and conjurations, digging up their Carkasses again, or by the help of Sacrifices, and Oblations to the infernal Gods; compelling the Ghost to present it self before them.”[58]All this is quite opposed to Scot’s view and the whole intention of his book. The insertion of such worthless matter was, of course, a mere trick of the bookseller to make a new edition go off well. But the fact of its insertion shows that Scot was thought to have left his treatise incomplete or unsatisfactory in a most important point. And the inserted matter itself must have gone far to neutralize the effect of republication in a witch-haunted period. And so we may leave Reginald Scot, with our respect for his courage and common sense undiminished, but with a clear idea of the slight effect which his treatise must have had on the tone and temper of the age that we are studying.
John Webster’s Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, which appeared in 1677—the Preface is dated “February 23. 1673”—was particularly directed against Glanvill and Meric Casaubon. It holds a distinguished place in the history of witchcraft, and demands our careful scrutiny. What is usually thought of it has been eloquently expressed by the late Mr. James Crossley. “In this memorable book,” writes Mr. Crossley, “he exhausts the subject, as far as it is possible to do so, by powerful ridicule, cogent arguments, and the most varied and well applied learning, leaving to [Francis] Hutchinson, and others who have since followed in his track, little further necessary than to reproduce his facts and reasonings in a more popular, it can scarcely be said, in a more effective form.”[59]
A few of Webster’s opinions must be specified, that the reader may judge how far The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft deserves to rank as a work of sober and scientific reason, and to what extent the author merits the position that seems to be traditionally assigned to him as an uncompromising assailant of superstition.
Angels, good and bad, are “really and truly corporeal” and not spirits, except “in a relative and respective” sense.[60]Since devils are corporeal, Webster admits that “they may move and agitate other bodies.” Their strength, however, is limited, “for though one Devil may be supposed to move or lift up that which would load an Horse, yet it will not follow that he can move or lift up as much as would load a Ship of a thousand Tun.”[61]Webster grants that “God doth make use of evil Angels to punish the wicked, and to chastise and afflict the godly, and in the effecting of these things that they have a power given them to hurt the earth and the Sea and things therein, as to bring tempests, thunder, lightning, plague, death, drought and the like.”[62]
Webster has a profound belief in apparitions and tells some capital ghost stories[63]—“unquestionable testimonies,” he calls them, “either from our own Annals, or matters of fact that we know to be true of our own certain knowledge, that thereby it may undoubtedly appear, that there are effects that exceed the ordinary power of natural causes, and may for ever convince all Atheisticall minds.”[64]One of these tales concerns the murder of one Fletcher by Ralph Raynard, an innkeeper, and Mark Dunn, a hired assassin. One day “the spirit ofFletcherin his usual shape and habit did appear unto [Raynard], and said, OhRaph, repent, repent, for my revenge is at hand.” The result was a full confession. “I have recited this story punctually,” writes Webster, “as a thing that hath been very much fixed in my memory, being then but young, and as a certain truth, I being (with many more) an ear-witness of their confessions and an eye-witness of their Executions, and likewise sawFletcherwhen he was taken up, where they had buried him in his cloaths, which were a green fustian doublet pinkt upon white, gray breeches, and his walking boots and brass spurrs without rowels.” The spectre, Webster is convinced, was an “extrinsick apparition toRaynard,” and not the mere effect of a guilty conscience “which represented the shape ofFletcherin his fancy.” The thing could not, he thinks, “be brought to pass either by the Devil, orFletchersSoul,” and therefore he “concludes that either it was wrought by the Divine Power, ... or that it was the Astral or Sydereal Spirit ofFletcher, seeking revenge for the murther.”[65]
Webster also believes fully in the “bleeding or cruentation of the bodies of those that have been murthered,” particularly at the touch of the murderer or in his presence, and he gives a very curious collection of examples, in some of which “the murtherers had not been certainly known but by the bleeding of the body murthered.”[66]The most probable explanation of such phenomena he finds in the existence of the astral spirit, “that, being a middle substance, betwixt the Soul and the Body doth, when separated from the Body, wander or hover near about it, bearing with it the irascible and concupiscible faculties, wherewith being stirred up to hatred and revenge, it causeth that ebullition and motion in the blood, that exudation of blood upon the weapon, and those other wonderful motions of the Body, Hands, Nostrils and Lips, thereby to discover the murtherer, and bring him to condign punishment.”[67]In some cases, however, Webster holds that the soul has not actually departed, “and God may in his just judgment suffer the Soul to stay longer in the murthered Body, that the cry of blood may make known the murtherer, or may not so soon, for the same reason, call it totally away.”[68]
These specimens of Webster’s temper of mind might perhaps suffice to show with what slight justification he has been regarded as a scientific rationalist. We must not dismiss him, however, until we have scrutinized his views on the subject of witchcraft itself. He passes for a strong denier of the whole business of sorcery. We shall find that this is a great mistake. So far from denying the existence of witches, Webster is indignant at the imputation that his theories and those of other like-minded scholars should be interpreted in any such sense. “If I deny that a Witch cannot flye in the air, nor be transformed or transubstantiated into a Cat, a Dog, or an Hare, or that the Witch maketh any visible Covenant with the Devil, or that he sucketh on their bodies, or that the Devil hath carnal Copulation with them; I do not thereby deny either the Being of Witches, nor other properties that they may have, for which they may be so called: no more than if I deny that a dog hath rugibility (which is only proper to a Lion) doth it follow that I deny the being of a Dog, or that he hath latrability?”[69]This sentence contains, in effect, the sum and substance of Webster’s negative propositions on the subject.[70]Let us see what he holds as affirmatives.
Though rejecting the theory of an external covenant between the devil and a witch, Webster acknowledges “an internal, mental, and spiritual League or Covenant betwixt the Devil and all wicked persons.” Further, “this spiritual League in some respects and in some persons may be, and is an explicit League, that is, the persons that enter into it, are or may be conscious of it, and know it to be so.”[71]Now there are certain persons, commonly called witches, who are full of “hatred, malice, revenge and envy,” of which the devil is the “author and causer,”[72]and these, by Satan’s instigation, “do secretly and by tradition learn strange poysons, philters and receipts whereby they do much hurt and mischief. Which most strange wayes of poysoning, tormenting, and breeding of unwonted things in the stomach and bellies of people, have not been unknown unto many learned men and Philosophers.”[73]Among these effects of “an art more than Diabolical,” which has “been often practiced by most horrible, malevolent, and wicked persons,” is the production of the plague. There is no doubt of the fact. There are “undeniable examples.” An unguent may be prepared which is of such power that when it is smeared upon the handles of doors, “those that do but lightly touch them are forthwith infected.” In 1536 there was a conspiracy of some forty persons in Italy, who caused the death of many in this way.[74]To such arts Webster ascribes the dreadful outbreak of jail-fever at the Oxford assizes in 1579. This was not, and could not be, the ordinary “prison infection.” It was brought about by the contrivances of one Roland Jenks, “a Popish recusant,” who was condemned for seditious words against the queen. Jenks, it seems, had procured strange poisons of a local apothecary, and had made a kind of candle out of them. As soon as he was condemned, he lighted his candle, from which there arose such a “damp,” or steam, that the pestilence broke out as we have seen.[75]It is manifest, Webster holds, “that these kind of people that are commonly called Witches, are indeed (as both the Greek and Latin names doe signifie) Poysoners, and in respect of their Hellish designs are Diabolical, but the effects they procure flow from natural Causes.”[76]This last proposition is, indeed, perhaps the chief point of Webster’s book. Witches exist, and they do horrible things, but they accomplish their ends, not by the actual intervention of the devil and his imps, but by virtue of an acquaintance with little-known laws of nature. Another example, which cannot be quoted in detail, will make Webster’s position perfectly clear. A man was afflicted with a dreadful disease. The cause was discovered to be the presence of an oaken pin in the corner of a courtyard. The pin was destroyed and the man drank birchen ale. He made a complete recovery. It is plain, according to Webster, that the pulling up and burning of the oaken pin “was with the help of the Birchen Ale the cure; but it can no wayes be judged necessary that the Devil should fix the Oak pin there, but that the Witch might do it himself. Neither can it be thought to be any power given by the Devil to the Oaken pin, that it had not by nature, for in all probability it will constantly by a natural power produce the same effect; only thus far the Devil had a hand in the action, to draw some wicked person to fix the pin there ..., thereby to hurt and torture him.”[77]
One is tempted to still further quotations from Webster’s utterances on this topic, especially because his book has been much oftener mentioned than read. But we must rest content with one passage which sums up the whole matter:—“The opinions that we reject as foolish and impious are those we have often named before, to wit, that those that are vulgarly accounted Witches, make a visible and corporeal contract with the Devil, that he sucks upon their bodies, that he hath carnal copulation with them, that they are transubstantiated into Cats, Dogs, Squirrels, and the like, or that they raise tempests, and fly in the air. Other powers we grant unto them, to operate and effect whatsoever the force of natural imagination joyned with envy, malice and vehement desire of revenge, can perform or perpetrate, or whatsoever hurt may be done by secret poysons and such like wayes that work by meer natural means.”[78]
It is true that Webster opposed some of the current witch dogmas of his time. There are passages enough in his elaborate treatise which insist on the prevalence of fraud and melancholia. In his Epistle Dedicatory, which is addressed to five Yorkshire justices of the peace, he lays particular stress on the necessity of distinguishing between impostors and those unfortunate persons who are “under a mere passive delusion” that they are witches, and warns the magistrates not to believe impossible confessions. For all this he deserves honor.[79]Nor do I intend for a moment to suggest that the queer things (as we regard them now-a-days) which I have cited are in any manner discreditable to Webster. He was not exceptionally credulous, and he belonged to that advanced school of English physicians who, in the second half of the seventeenth century, upheld the general theories of Paracelsus and van Helmont in opposition to the outworn follies of the Galenists or regulars. He was a man of great erudition, of vast and varied experience, of uncommon mental gifts, and of passionate devotion to the truth. I admire him, but I must be pardoned if I am unable to see how he can be regarded as a tower of skeptical strength in the great witchcraft controversy. Even his admissions on the subject of the fallen angels are enough to destroy the efficiency of his denial of current notions about witchcraft. Once grant, as Webster does, that our atmosphere is peopled by legions upon legions of evil angels, delighting in sin, eager to work mischief, inimical to God and man, furnished with stores of acquired knowledge, and able to devise wicked thoughts and put them into our minds,[80]and it was idle to deny—in the face of the best philosophic and theological opinion of the ages—that these demonic beings can make actual covenants with witches or furnish them with the means of doing injury to their fellow-creatures.
“A Witch,” according to Glanvill’s definition, “is one, who can do or seems to do strange things, beyond the known Power of Art and ordinary Nature, by vertue of a Confederacy with Evil Spirits.... Thestrange thingsarereallyperformed, and are not allImposturesandDelusions. The Witchoccasions, but is not thePrincipalEfficient, she seems to do it, but theSpiritperforms the wonder, sometimes immediately, as inTransportationsandPossessions, sometimes by applying other Natural Causes, as in raisingStorms, and inflictingDiseases, sometimes using theWitchas anInstrument, and either by the Eyes or Touch, conveying Malign Influences: And these things are done by vertue of aCovenant, orCompactbetwixt theWitchand anEvil Spirit. ASpirit,viz.anIntelligent Creatureof the Invisible World, whether one of the Evil Angels calledDevils, or an InferiourDæmonorSpirit, or a wickedSouldeparted; but one that is able and ready for mischief, and whether altogether Incorporeal or not, appertains not to this Question.”[81]Glanvill’s book was well known to the Mathers. So was Webster’s Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft.[82]Could there be a moment’s doubt which of the two would appeal the more powerfully to their logical sense? Why, even we ourselves, if we look at the matter fairly,—taking into consideration Webster’s whole case, and not merely such parts of it as accord with our preconceived opinions,—are forced to admit that Glanvill’s position is much the stronger.
In a well-known passage, in which the intellectual temper of Massachusetts before 1660 is contrasted with that of the next generation,[83]our classic New England essayist remarks that after 1660 the Colonists “sank rapidly into provincials, narrow in thought, in culture, in creed.” “Such a pedantic portent as Cotton Mather,” Lowell continues, “would have been impossible in the first generation; he was the natural growth of the third.” To discuss these epigrammatic theses would take us far beyond the limits of our present subject. One thing, however, must be said. Pedantry in the latter half of the seventeenth century was not confined to New England, nor to the ranks of those who were controversially styled the witchmongers. Meric Casaubon and Joseph Glanvill were not pedantic, but John Webster’s Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft—which in some respects comes very near to being a great book—is a monument of pedantry, and John Webster was not a product of New England.
In Thomas Hobbes, whom we may next consider, we find a philosopher who was altogether incredulous on the subject of witchcraft. “As for witches,” he writes, “I think not that their witchcraft is any real power; but yet that they are justly punished, for the false belief that they have that they can do such mischief, joined with their purpose to do it if they can; their trade being nearer to a new religion than to a craft or science.”[84]This dictum may accord with reason, but one must admit that it was cold comfort for persons accused of diabolical arts. And so was the more famous remark of Selden: “The Law against Witches does not prove there be any; but it punishes the Malice of those people, that use such means, to take away mens lives. If one should profess that by turning his Hat thrice, and crying Buz; he could take away a man’s life (though in truth he could do no such thing) yet this were a just Law made by the State, that whosoever should turn his Hat thrice, and cry Buz; with an intention to take away a man’s life, shall be put to death.”[85]Bayle, shortly after the beginning of the eighteenth century, agreed with Selden as to the justice of putting “sorciers imaginaires” to death.[86]Thomas Ady, believing (like Scot, to whom he often refers) that the witches and sorcerers of the Bible were mere cheats, and that the same is true of all who pretend to similar arts in modern times, is ready to admit the justice of the death penalty in cases of fraud. In describing the case of a certain Master of Arts who was “condemned only for using himself to the study and practice of the Jugling craft,” he concludes:—“If he had been a Jugler, or practiser of that Craft to this end, to withstand the Prophets when they wrought true miracles, asPharaohsJuglers withstoodMoses, or if he were one that practised it to seduce the people after lying delusions, to magnifie himself as a false Prophet, likeSimon Magusin theActs, or to cause people to ascribe miraculous power to him, or to seek to the Devil as our common Deceivers, called good Witches, do, he was deservedly condemned.”[87]
Four dissenters from the current witchcraft dogma we must pass over in silence—John Wagstaffe, Sir Robert Filmer, Robert Calef, and Dr. Francis Hutchinson. Calef came too late to be really significant in our discussion; Filmer’s tract is a kind ofjeu d’esprit, not likely to have had any influence except upon lawyers;[88]and Wagstaffe’s book is a quite inconsiderable affair. Yet, in parting, we must not neglect an odd remark concerning two out of the four—as well as one other, John Webster, whose lucubrations we have already criticised—a remark which, occurring as it does in a work of much learning and unusual distinction, illustrates in striking fashion the inaccuracy which we have already had occasion to notice, now and again, in recent writers who have busied themselves with the abstruse and complicated subject of witchcraft. President White, in his Warfare of Science with Theology, expresses his admiration for Webster, Wagstaffe, and Hutchinson in the following terms:—“But especially should honour be paid to the younger men in the Church, who wrote at length against the whole system: such men as Wagstaffe and Webster and Hutchinson, who in the humbler ranks of the clergy stood manfully for truth, with the certainty that by so doing they were making their own promotion impossible.”[89]Of the three men whom Dr. White thus commends for renouncing all hope of ecclesiastical preferment, the first, John Webster, was sixty-seven years old when he published his book; he had long been a Non-Conformist, and he describes himself on his title-page as “Practitioner in Physick.” The second, John Wagstaffe, was a gentleman of independent means who damaged his health by “continual bibbing of strong and high tasted liquors”[90]and who was not in orders at all; the third. Dr. Francis Hutchinson, was Chaplain in Ordinary to King GeorgeI.when he published his Essay and was advanced to a bishopric two years after the first edition of the book appeared.[91]
When in 1692 and 1693, we come to The Enchanted World (De Betoverde Weereld)[92]of the Dutch preacher and theologian Balthasar Bekker, we arrive at a method of opposing the witch dogma different from anything we have so far examined. Bekker was fully aware of the difficulties of his theme, and he had an uncommonly logical head. His method is perfect. He first sets forth the spiritual beliefs of the Greeks and Romans and their practices in the way of sorcery. Then he shows—with an anticipation of the process so often used by the modern anthropological school—that the same doctrines and practices are found among “the pagans of the present day,”—in Northern Europe, in Asia, in Africa, and in America, as well as among the ancient Jews. The Manichæan heresy, he contends, was a mélange of pagan and Jewish doctrines. These doctrines—heathen, Jewish, and Manichæan—early became current among Christians. Hence, Christians in general now hold that all sorts of extraordinary happenings are due to the activity of the devil. Thus Bekker succeeds in explaining the primary conceptions of modern demonology and witchcraft as derived from heathen sources.[93]
Bekker’s next task is to define body and spirit, according to reason and the Bible. Both body and spirit are creatures. God, being perfect and increate, is neither body nor spirit, but superior to both. He is called a spirit in the Bible, simply because there is no better word to express the divine nature, but that nature is different from what is ordinarily meant by the term. God being the governor of the world, we have no ground for believing that there are demigods (dæmonsin the Greek sense) or vice-gods. Apart from the Scriptures, reason affords us no proof that there are any spirits except men’s souls. The Scriptures, however, teach that there are good angels, of whom Michael is the chief, and bad angels, whose prince is the devil. Beyond this, we learn practically nothing from the Bible with regard to a hierarchy of angels or of devils. Demoniacal possession was a natural disease: it had nothing to do with evil spirits. Such devils as are mentioned in Scripture are not said to be vassals of Satan; in many cases we are to understand the word “devil” merely as a figure of speech for a wicked man. There is no warrant in Holy Writ for the belief that Satan can appear to mortals under different forms, nor for the powers vulgarly ascribed to him and his supposed demonic household. In particular, there is no scriptural warrant for the opinion that Satan or his imps can injure men bodily or even suggest evil thoughts to them. The devil and the evil angels are damned in hell; they have not the power to move about in this world. The only way in which Satan is responsible for the sins which we commit is through his having brought about the fall of Adam, so that men are now depraved creatures, prone to sin. There is no place in the divine government for particular suggestions to wickedness, made from time to time, since the Fall, either by Satan himself or by any of his train. Diabolical influence upon mankind was confined to the initial temptation in Eden. Since Adam, neither Satan nor any evil spirit has been active in this world in any manner whatever, spiritual or corporeal. God rules, and the devil is not a power to be reckoned with at all. These revolutionary propositions Bekker proves, to his own satisfaction, not only from reason, but from the Word of God.[94]
Here at last we have a rational method. Bekker is not content with half-measures; he lays the axe to the root. There is a devil, to be sure, and there are fallen angels; but neither the one nor the other can have anything to do with the life and actions of mortal men. Practically, then, the devil is non-existent. We may disregard him entirely. If Bekker’s propositions are admitted, the stately fabric of demonology and witchcraft crumbles in an instant. And nothing less drastic than such propositions will suffice to make witchcraft illogical or incredible. Bekker’s argument, we see at once, is utterly different from anything that his predecessors had attempted.
It now becomes necessary for Bekker to proceed to discuss those passages in the Bible which appear to justify the common beliefs in sorcery and witchcraft. These beliefs are contrary to reason, but, if they rest upon revelation, they must still be accepted, for Bekker regards himself as an orthodox Christian of the Dutch Reformed Church. Accordingly Bekker takes up every scriptural passage which mentions witches, enchanters, diviners, and the like, and interprets them all in such a way that they lend no support to current beliefs in the reality of compacts with the devil, of magic, or of witchcraft. Whatever magicians and witches, so-called, may think of their own performances, there is nothing in Scripture, as interpreted by this bold and expert theologian and unsurpassed dialectician, to warrant us in believing in intercourse with Satan, or in his intervention, with or without the mediation of sorcerers and witches, in human life as it is to-day.[95]
But, Bekker hastens to admit, there remains a huge mass of recent testimony which is regarded by almost everybody as sufficient to establish the existence of sorcery and witchcraft, whether such things are recognized in the Bible or not. To this testimony Bekker devotes the Fourth (and last) Book of his treatise.
He first points out that all such testimony is prejudiced, since it comes from persons who have a fixed and, so to speak, an inherited belief in the truth of the marvels whose very existence is in question. He then examines a great body of material, with splendid sobriety and common sense. This is perhaps the most interesting part of his work to us,—though in fact it is less original than much of what precedes, since all opponents of the witch dogma, beginning with Wier, had attacked the evidence in many particulars, and since even those scholars and theologians who supported the dogma most effectively—like Glanvill—had granted without hesitation that fraud and delusion played a large part in the accumulation of testimony. Bekker’s treatment of the subject, however, is better than anything of the kind that had been written before. Fraud, terror, hysteria, insanity, illusion of the senses,—due to disease or to what we should now call hypnotic or semi-hypnotic conditions,—unknown laws of nature—these are the sources from which he derives his interpretation of the evidence. This part of his work, then, has a singularly modern tone, and gives the author a valid claim to rank as an enlightened psychologist.
It has seemed advisable to give particular attention to Bekker’s Enchanted World because of its singular merits, as well as on account of the distinguished position which it deservedly holds among the books which oppose the belief in witchcraft. In strictness, however, we are not bound to include this work in our survey of seventeenth-century opinion, since it did not appear in season to exert any influence on New England at the time of the Salem prosecution. The first two Books of Bekker’s work were published in 1691; the second two, which deal specifically with witchcraft, in 1693. The trouble in Salem began in February, 1692, and the prosecution collapsed in January, 1693. It is certain that New England scholars knew nothing about the first two Books when they were engaged in witch trials, and the last two were not published until the trials had come to an end. But this matter of dates need not be insisted on. Even if our ancestors had received advance sheets of The Enchanted World, their opinions would not, in all probability, have been in the slightest degree affected. Indeed, the reception which Bekker’s treatise met with in his own country is a plain indication of the temper of the times in this business of witchcraft. The publication of the first two Books in 1691 was the signal for a storm of denunciation. The Dutch press teemed with replies and attacks. Bekker was instantly called to account by the authorities of the Reformed Church. Complicated ecclesiastical litigation ensued, with the result that the Synod of North Holland issued a decree declaring Bekker “intolerable as teacher in the Reformed Church” and expelling him from his ministerial office (August 7, 1692).[96]Soon after, the Church Council of Amsterdam voted to exclude him from the Lord’s Supper (August 17),[97]and he was never admitted to communion again. He died on June 11, 1698.[98]