yr, Act III. sc. iii.]

[Footnote 3: Dr. Faustus, Act I. sc. iii.]

[Footnote 4: Othello, Act V. sc. ii. 204.]

79. This leads by a natural sequence to the consideration of another and
more insidious form of attack upon mankind adopted by the evil spirits.
Possession and obsession were methods of assault adopted against the
will of the afflicted person, and hardly to be avoided by him without
the supernatural intervention of the Church. The practice of witchcraft
and magic involved the absolute and voluntary barter of body and soul to
the Evil One, for the purpose of obtaining a few short years of
superhuman power, to be employed for the gratification of the culprit's
avarice, ambition, or desire for revenge.

80. In the strange history of that most inexplicable mental disease, the
witchcraft epidemic, as it has been justly called by a high authority on
such matters,[1] we moderns are, by the nature of our education and
prejudices, completely incapacitated for sympathizing with either the
persecutors or their victims. We are at a loss to understand how
clear-sighted and upright men, like Sir Matthew Hale, could consent to
become parties to a relentless persecution to the death of poor helpless
beings whose chief crime, in most cases, was, that they had suffered
starvation both in body and in mind. We cannot understand it, because
none of us believe in the existence of evil spirits. None; for although
there are still a few persons who nominally hold to the ancient faith,
as they do to many other respectable but effete traditions, yet they
would be at a loss for a reason for the faith that is in them, should
they chance to be asked for one; and not one of them would be prepared
to make the smallest material sacrifice for the sake of it. It is true
that the existence of evil spirits recently received a tardy and
somewhat hesitating recognition in our ecclesiastical courts,[2] which
at first authoritatively declared that a denial of the existence of the
personality of the devil constituted a man a notorious evil liver, and
depraver of the Book of Common Prayer;[3] but this was promptly reversed
by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, under the auspices of
two Low Church law lords and two archbishops, with the very vague
proviso that "they do not mean to decide that those doctrines are
otherwise than inconsistent with the formularities of the Church of
England;"[4] yet the very contempt with which these portentous