ce of
'three very bad arguments we are always using--This has been
shown to be so; This is customary; This is universal:
Therefore it must be kept to.' Sir Thomas Browne, unable, as
a man of science, to accept in every particular alleged the
actual bona fide reality of the devil's power, makes a
compromise, and has 'recourse to a fraud of Satan,'
explaining that he is in reality but a clever juggler, a
transcendent physician who knows how to accomplish what is
in relation to us a prodigy, in knowing how to use natural
forces which our knowledge has not yet discovered. Such an
unworthy compromise was certainly not fitted to arouse men
from their 'cauchemar demonologique.'--See _Revue des Deux
Mondes_, Aug. 1, 1858.

John Selden, a learned lawyer, but of a liberal mind, was gifted
with a large amount of common sense, and it might be juster to
attribute the _dictum_ which has been supposed to betray 'a
lurking belief' to an excess of legal, rather than to a defect of
intellectual, perception. Selden, inferring that 'the law against
witches does not prove there be any, but it punishes the malice
of those people that use such means to take away men's lives,'
proceeds to assert that 'if one should profess that by turning
his hat thrice and crying "Buz," he could take away a man's life
(though in truth he could do no such thing), yet this were a just
law made by the state, that whosoever shall turn his hat ... with
an intention to take away a man's life, should be put to
death.'[140]

[140] _Table Talk or Discourses_ of John Selden. Although it
must be excepted to the lawyer's summary mode of dealing
with an imaginary offence, we prefer to give that eminent
patriot at least the benefit of the doubt, as to his belief
in witchcraft.

If men of more liberal sentiments were thus enslaved to old
prejudices, it is not surprising that the Church, not leading but
following, should firmly maintain them. Fortunately for the
witches, without the motives actuating in different ways
Catholics and Calvinists, and placed midway between both parties,
the reformed English Church was not so much interested in
identifying her crimes with sorcerers as in maintaining the less
tremendous formulae of Divine right, Apostolical succession, and
similar pretensions. Yet if they did not so furiously engage
themselves in actual witch-prosecutions, Anglican divines have
not been slow in expressly or impliedly aff