ry. Throughout Europe
penalties and prosecutions were being continually enacted. The
popes in Italy fulminated abroad their decrees, and the
parliaments of France were almost daily engaged in pronouncing
sentence.

Where the papal yoke had been thrown off in Northern Germany, in
Scotland, and in England, the belief and the persecution remained
in full force, indeed greatly increased; and it is obvious to
inquire the cause of the retention, with many additions, of the
doctrine of witchcraft by those who had at last finally rejected
with scorn most of the grosser religious dogmas of the old
Church, who were so loud in their just denunciation of Catholic
tyranny and superstition. A general answer might be given that
the Reformation of the sixteenth century, while it swept away in
those countries in which it was effected the most injurious
principles of ecclesiasticism, the principles of infallibility
and authority in matters of faith, for the destruction of which
gratitude is due to the independent minds of Luther, Zuinglius,
and others, was yet far from complete in its negations. The
leaders of that great revolution, with all their genius and
boldness, could only partially free themselves from the
prejudices of education and of the age. To develope the important
principles they established, the rights of private judgment and
religious freedom, was the legacy and duty of their successors; a
duty which they failed to perform, to the incalculable misfortune
of succeeding generations. The Sacred Scriptures, the common
and only authority on faith among the different sections
of Protestantism, unfortunately seemed to inculcate the dread
power of the devil and his malicious purposes, and both the
Jewish and Christian Scriptures apparently taught the reality
of witchcraft. Theologians of all parties would have as easily
dared to question the existence of God himself as to doubt the
actual power of that other deity, and the unbelievers in his
universal interference were not illogically stigmatised as
atheists. With the Protestants some adventitious circumstances
might make a particular church more fanatical and furious than
another, and the Calvinists have deserved the palm for the
bitterest persecution of witchcraft. But neither the Lutheran nor
the Anglican section is exempt from the odious imputation.[114]

[114] Lord Peter, and his humbler brothers Martin and Jack,
in different degrees, are all of them obnoxious to th