Discovery of Witches | Page 2

Orwin for Thomas Man and John Winnington, and are to be sold in Paternoster Rowe at the Signe of the Talbot." 1593, 4to. My copy was Brand's, and formed Lot 8224 in his Sale Catalogue.]
We find the illustrious author of the Novum Organon sacrificing to courtly suppleness his philosophic truth, and gravely prescribing the ingredients for a witches' ointment;[2]--Raleigh, adopting miserable fallacies at second hand, without subjecting them to the crucible of his acute and vigorous understanding;[3]--Selden, maintaining that crimes of the imagination may be punished with death;[4]--The detector of Vulgar Errors, and the most humane of physicians,[5] giving the casting weight to the vacillating bigotry of Sir Matthew Hale;[6]--Hobbes, ever sceptical, penetrating and sagacious, yet here paralyzed, and shrinking from the subject as if afraid to touch it;[7]--The adventurous explorer, who sounded the depths and channels of the "Intellectual System" along all the "wide watered" shores of antiquity, running after witches to hear them recite the Common Prayer and the Creed, as a rational test of guilt or innocence;[8]--The gentle spirit of Dr. Henry More, girding on the armour of persecution, and rousing itself from a Platonic reverie on the Divine Life, to assume the hood and cloak of a familiar of the Inquisition;[9]--and the patient and enquiring Boyle, putting aside for a while his searches for the grand Magisterium, and listening, as if spell-bound, with gratified attention to stories of witches at Oxford, and devils at Mascon.[10] Nor is it from a retrospect of our own intellectual progress only that we find how capricious, how intermitting, and how little privileged to great names or high intellects, or even to those minds which seemed to possess the very qualifications which would operate as conductors, are those illuminating gleams of common sense which shoot athwart the gloom, and aid a nation on its tardy progress to wisdom, humanity, and justice. If on the Continent there were, in the sixteenth century, two men from whom an exposure of the absurdities of the system of witchcraft might have been naturally and rationally expected, and who seem to stand out prominently from the crowd as predestined to that honourable and salutary office, those two men were John Bodin[11] and Thomas Erastus.[12] The former a lawyer--much exercised in the affairs of men--whose learning was not merely umbratic--whose knowledge of history was most philosophic and exact--of piercing penetration and sagacity--tolerant--liberal minded--disposed to take no proposition upon trust, but to canvass and examine every thing for himself, and who had large views of human nature and society--in fact, the Montesquieu of the seventeenth century. The other, a physician and professor, sage, judicious, incredulous,
"The scourge of impostors, the terror of quacks,"
who had routed irrecoverably empiricism in almost every shape--Paracelsians--Astrologers--Alchemists--Rosicrucians--and who weighed and scrutinized and analyzed every conclusion, from excommunication and the power of the keys to the revolutions of comets and their supposed effects on empires, and all with perfect fearlessness and intuitive insight into the weak points of an argument. Yet, alas! for human infirmity. Bodin threw all the weight of his reasoning and learning and vivacity into the scale of the witch supporters, and made the "hell-broth boil and bubble" anew, and increased the witch furor to downright fanaticism, by the publication of his Demo-manie,[13] a work in which
"Learning, blinded first and then beguiled, Looks dark as ignorance, as frenzy wild;"
but which it is impossible to read without being carried along by the force of mind and power of combination which the author manifests, and without feeling how much ingenious sophistry can perform to mitigate and soften the most startling absurdity. His contemporary, Erastus, after all his victories on the field of imposition, was foiled by the subject of witchcraft at last. This was his pet delusion--almost the only one he cared not to discard--like the dying miser's last reserve:--
---- "My manor, sir? he cried; Not that, I cannot part with that,--and died."
[Footnote 2: Lord Bacon thinks (see his Sylva Sylvarum) that soporiferous medicines "are likeliest" for this purpose, such as henbane, hemlock, mandrake, moonshade, tobacco, opium, saffron, poplar leaves, &c.]
[Footnote 3: See his History of the World.]
[Footnote 4: See his Table Talk, section "Witches."]
[Footnote 5: Sir Thomas Browne's evidence at the trial of Amy Duny and Rose Cullender at Bury St. Edmunds in 1664, is too well known to need an extract from the frequently reprinted report of the case. To adopt the words of an able writer, (Retros. Review, vol. v. p. 118,) "this trial is the only place in which we ever meet with the name of Sir Thomas Browne without pleasurable associations."]
[Footnote 6: Those who wish to have presented to them a faithful likeness of Sir Matthew Hale must not consult Burnet or Baxter, for that great judge, like Sir Epicure Mammon, sought "for his meet flatterers the gravest of divines,"