league with Satan. Hence they
threw on their antagonists the offensive names of witch-patrons and
witch-advocates, as if it were impossible for any to hold the opinion of
Naudaeus, Wierus, Scot, &c., without patronizing the devil and the
witches against their brethren of mortality. Assailed by such heavy
charges, the philosophers themselves lost patience, and retorted abuse
in their turn, calling Bodin, Delrio, and others who used their
arguments, witch-advocates, and the like, as the affirming and defending
the existence of the crime seemed to increase the number of witches, and
assuredly augmented the list of executions. But for a certain time the
preponderance of the argument lay on the side of the Demonologists, and
we may briefly observe the causes which gave their opinions, for a
period, greater influence than their opponents on the public mind.

It is first to be observed that Wierus, for what reason cannot well be
conjectured, except to show the extent of his cabalistical knowledge,
had introduced into his work against witchcraft the whole Stenographia
of Trithemius, which he had copied from the original in the library of
Cornelius Agrippa; and which, suspicious from the place where he found
it, and from the long catalogue of fiends which it contained, with the
charms for raising and for binding them to the service of mortals, was
considered by Bodin as containing proof that Wierus himself was a
sorcerer; not one of the wisest, certainly, since he thus unnecessarily
placed at the disposal of any who might buy the book the whole secrets
which formed his stock-in-trade.

Secondly, we may notice that, from the state of physical science at the
period when Van Helmont, Paracelsus, and others began to penetrate into
its recesses, it was an unknown, obscure, and ill-defined region, and
did not permit those who laboured in it to give that precise and
accurate account of their discoveries which the progress of reasoning
experimentally and from analysis has enabled the late discoverers to do
with success. Natural magic--a phrase used to express those phenomena
which could be produced by a knowledge of the properties of matter--had
so much in it that was apparently uncombined and uncertain, that the art
of chemistry was accounted mystical, and an opinion prevailed that the
results now known to be the consequence of laws of matter, could not be
traced through their various combinations even by those who knew the
effects t