ation, which was
endangered by the reaction against Puritanism. Among the fruits of
Puritanism, and of that frenzied state of mind which accompanied the
Civil War, was a furious persecution of 'witches'. In a rare little
book, Select Cases of Conscience, touching Witches and Witchcraft,
by John Gaule, 'preacher of the Word at Great Staughton in the
county of Huntington' (London, 1646), we find the author not denying
the existence of witchcraft, but pleading for calm, learned and
judicial investigation. To do this was to take his life in his
hand, for Matthew Hopkins, a fanatical miscreant, was ruling in a
Reign of Terror through the country. The clergy of the Church of
England, as Hutchinson proves in his Treatise of Witchcraft (second
edition, London, 1720), had been comparatively cautious in their
treatment of the subject. Their record is far from clean, but they
had exposed some impostures, chiefly, it is fair to say, where
Nonconformists, or Catholics, had detected the witch. With the
Restoration the general laxity went so far as to scoff at
witchcraft, to deny its existence, and even, in the works of
Wagstaff and Webster, to minimise the leading case of the Witch of
Endor. Against the 'drollery of Sadducism,' the Psychical
Researchers within the English Church, like Glanvill and Henry More,
or beyond its pale, like Richard Baxter and many Scotch divines,
defended witchcraft and apparitions as outworks of faith in general.
The modern Psychical Society, whatever the predisposition of some of
its members may be, explores abnormal phenomena, not in the
interests of faith, but of knowledge. Again, the old inquirers were
dominated by a belief in the devil. They saw witchcraft and
demoniacal possession, where the moderns see hysterics and hypnotic
conditions.

For us the topic is rather akin to mythology, and 'folk-psychology,'
as the Germans call it. We are interested, as will be shown, in a
most curious question of evidence, and the value of evidence. It
will again appear that the phenomena reported by Glanvill, More,
Sinclair, Kirk, Telfair, Bovet, are identical with those examined by
Messrs. Gurney, Myers, Kellar (the American professional conjurer),
and many others. The differences, though interesting, are rather
temporary and accidental than essential.

A few moments of attention to the table talk of the party assembled
at Ragley will enable us to understand the aims, the methods, and
the ideas of th