ged that probably the Devil had sent a
spirit to take the apparent form of the hare while he had hurried the
woman to the bush and had presumably kept her invisible until she was
found by the boy. It was the Nemesis of a bad cause that its greatest
defender should have let himself indulge in such absurdities.

In truth we may be permitted to wonder if the philosopher was altogether
true to his own position. In his _Scepsis Scientifica_ he had talked
hopefully about the possibility that science might explain what as yet
seemed supernatural.[20] This came perilously near to saying that the
realms of the supernatural, when explored, would turn out to be natural
and subject to natural law. If this were true, what would become of all
those bulwarks of religion furnished by the wonders of witchcraft? It
looks very much as if Glanvill had let an inconsistency creep into his
philosophy.

It was two years after Glanvill's first venture that Meric Casaubon
issued his work entitled _Of Credulity and Incredulity in Things
Natural, Civil, and Divine_.[21] On account of illness, however, as he
tells the reader in his preface, he had been unable to complete the
book, and it dealt only with "Things Natural" and "Things Civil."
"Things Divine" became the theme of a separate volume, which appeared in
1670 under the title _Of Credulity and Incredulity in Things Divine and
Spiritual: wherein ... the business of Witches and Witchcraft, against a
late Writer, [is] fully Argued and Disputed_. The interest of this
scholar in the subject of witchcraft was, as we have seen, by no means
recent. When a young rector in Somerset he had attended a trial of
witches, quite possibly the identical trial that had moved Bernard to
appeal to grand jurymen. We have noted in an earlier chapter[22] that
Casaubon in 1654, writing on _Enthusiasm_, had touched lightly upon the
subject. It will be recalled that he had come very near to questioning
the value of confessions. Five years later, in prefacing a _Relation of
what passed between Dr. Dee and some Spirits_, he had anticipated the
conclusions of his _Credulity and Incredulity_. Those conclusions were
mainly in accord with Glanvill. With a good will he admitted that the
denying of witches was a "very plausible cause." Nothing was more liable
to be fraud than the exhibitions given at trials, nothing less
trustworthy than the accounts of what witches had done. Too many cases
originated in the ignorance of mini