.. Another of my lords (my lord of Ely)
hath assented thereunto, and _maleficium_ must be gone. Now I for my
part will not absolutely deny that witches by God's permission may have
a power over men, to hurt all, or part in them, as by God they shall be
limited; but how shall it appear that this is such a thing in the person
of a man." This was not, of course, an expression of disbelief in the
reality or culpability of witchcraft. It was an expression of great
reluctance to lay much stress upon charges of witchcraft--an expression
upon the part of the highest ecclesiastical authority in England.

In the reign of Charles I prior to the Civil Wars we have to analyze but
a single contribution to the literature of our subject, that made by
Richard Bernard. Bernard had preached in Nottinghamshire and had gone
from there to Batcombe in Somerset. While yet in Nottinghamshire, in the
early years of James's reign, he had seen something of the
exorcizers.[23] Later he had had to do with the Taunton cases of 1626;
indeed, he seems to have had a prominent part in this affair.[24]
Presumably he had displayed some anxiety lest the witches should not
receive fair treatment, for in his _Guide to Grand-Jurymen ... in cases
of Witchcraft_, published in 1627, he explained the book as a "plaine
countrey Minister's testimony." Owing to his "upright meaning" in his
"painstaking" with one of the witches, a rumor had spread that he
favored witches or "were of Master Scots erroneous opinion that Witches
were silly Melancholikes."[25] He had undertaken in consequence to
familiarize himself with the whole subject and had read nearly all the
discussions in English, as well as all the accounts of trials published
up to that time. His work he dedicated to the two judges at Taunton, Sir
John Walter and Sir John Denham, and to the archdeacon of Wells and the
chancellor of the Bishop of Bath and Wells. The book was, indeed, a
truly remarkable patchwork. All shades of opinion from that of the
earnestly disbelieving Scot to that of the earnestly believing Roberts
were embodied. Nevertheless Bernard had a wholesome distrust of
possessions and followed Cotta in thinking that catalepsy and other
related diseases accounted for many of them.[26] He thought, too, that
the Devil very often acted as his own agent without any
intermediary.[27] Like Cotta, he was skeptical as to the water
ordeal;[28] but, strange to say, he accepted the use of a magical glass
to di