. There had been long discussion as to
how far through the air witches could go. It was James's opinion that
they could go only so far as they could retain their breath.

But it was seldom that the royal demonologist wandered far from the
beaten road. He was a conformist and he felt that the orthodox case
needed defence: so he set about to answer the objectors. To the argument
that it was a strange thing that witches were melancholy and solitary
women (and so, he would have explained, offer the easiest object of
attack) he interposed a flat denial: they are "some of them rich and
worldly-wise, some of them fat or corpulent in their bodies." To the
point that if witches had the power ascribed to them no one but
themselves would be left alive in the world, he answered that such would
be the case, were not the power of the Devil bridled by God. To the plea
that God would not allow his children to be vexed by the Devil, he
replied that God permits the godly who are sleeping in sin to be
troubled; that He even allows the Evil One to vex the righteous for his
own good--a conventional argument that has done service in many a
theological controversy.

It is a curious circumstance that James seemingly recognized the
reliability of the Romish exorcisms which the Church of England was
about that time beginning to attack. His explanation of them is worthy
of "the wisest fool in Christendom." The Papists could often effect
cures of the possessed, he thought, because "the divell is content to
release the bodily hurting of them, ... thereby to obtain the perpetual
hurt of the soules."

That James should indulge in religious disquisitions rather than in
points of evidence was to be expected. Although he had given up the
Scottish theology, he never succeeded in getting it thoroughly out of
his system. As to the evidence against the accused, the royal writer was
brief. Two sorts of evidence he thought of value, one "the finding of
their marke, and the trying the insensiblenes thereof, the other is
their fleeting [floating] on the water." The latter sign was based, he
said, on the fact that the water refuses to receive a witch--that is to
say, the pure element would refuse to receive those who had renounced
their baptism.[6] We shall see that the influence of the _Daemonologie_
can be fairly appraised by measuring the increased use of these two
tests of guilt within his own reign and that of his son. Hitherto the
evidence of the mark h