and indeed most of the men of learning
in Europe, have given up all accounts of witches and apparitions as mere
old wives' fables. I am sorry for it, and I willingly take this
opportunity of entering my solemn protest against this violent
compliment which so many that believe in the Bible pay to those who do
not believe it. I owe them no such service. I take knowledge that these
are at the bottom of the outcry which has been raised, and with such
insolence spread through the land, in direct opposition, not only to the
Bible, but to the suffrage of the wisest and best of men in all ages and
nations. They well know (whether Christians know it or not) _that the
giving up of witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible_."

Lecky, in that masterful work, "The Rise and Influence of Rationalism in
Europe," from which I have so freely quoted, states, "A disbelief in
ghosts and witches was one of the most prominent characteristics of
Scepticism in the seventeenth century. Yet, for more than fifteen
hundred years it was universally believed that the Bible established in
the clearest manner, the validity of the crime, and that an amount of
evidence, so varied and so ample as to preclude the very possibility of
doubt, attested its continuance and its prevalence.... In our own day,
it may be said with confidence, that it would be altogether impossible
for such an amount of evidence to accumulate around a conception which
has no substantial basis in fact."

And yet today, in the twentieth century, we do have an amount of
"evidence" accumulated around a conception which had no substantial
basis of fact. What a perfect analogy presents itself between one
precept of revealed religion and religion in its entirety. In the
seventeenth century, scepticism confined itself to a disbelief in
witchcraft, one particular of revealed religion; in the twentieth
century, scepticism expands and reveals the absurdity of all revealed
religion. Just as when we read the annals of witchcraft today we sicken
with the horror of this insane conception, so will posterity in the none
too distant future, perhaps three more centuries, do for _all religion_
what three centuries did for witchcraft. Just so will they regard
revealed religion in its entirety as we look upon the one factor, the
_Witchcraft Delusion_.

Men came gradually to disbelieve in witchcraft because they learned
gradually to look upon it as absurd. This new tone of thought appeared
first of