Discovery of Witches | Page 2

and divers other
persons with sundrie Devilish and grievous torments. And also for the
bewitching to Death of the Lady Crumwell, the like hath not been
heard of in this age. London, Printed by the Widdowe 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