in her
innocent simplicity, would have let you swim her; and at her trial she
declared herself a clear woman. This was her behaviour. And what could
any of us have done better, excepting in that case where she complied
with you too much, and offered to let you swim her?

"(3) When you used the meanest of paganish and popish
superstitions--when you scratched and mangled and ran pins into her
flesh, and used that ridiculous trial of the bottle, &c.--whom did you
consult, and from whom did you expect your answers? Who was your father?
and into whose hands did you put yourselves? and (if the true sense of
the statute had been turned upon you) which way would you have defended
yourselves? (4) Durst you have used her in this manner if she had been
rich? and doth not her poverty increase rather than lessen your guilt in
what you did?

"And therefore, instead of closing your book with a _liberavimus animas
nostras_, and reflecting upon the court, I ask you (5) Whether you have
not more reason to give God thanks that you met with a wise judge, and a
sensible gentleman, who kept you from shedding innocent blood, and
reviving the meanest and cruelest of all superstitions amongst us?"[55]

[Footnote 55: Hutchison's "Essay on Witchcraft," p. 166.]

But although individuals of the English Church might on some occasions
be justly accused of falling into lamentable errors on a subject where
error was so general, it was not an usual point of their professional
character; and it must be admitted that the most severe of the laws
against witchcraft originated with a Scottish King of England, and that
the only extensive persecution following that statute occurred during
the time of the Civil Wars, when the Calvinists obtained for a short
period a predominating influence in the councils of Parliament.

James succeeded to Elizabeth amidst the highest expectations on the part
of his new people, who, besides their general satisfaction at coming
once more under the rule of a king, were also proud of his supposed
abilities and real knowledge of books and languages, and were naturally,
though imprudently, disposed to gratify him by deferring to his judgment
in matters wherein his studies were supposed to have rendered him a
special proficient. Unfortunately, besides the more harmless freak of
becoming a prentice in the art of poetry, by which words and numbers
were the only sufferers, the monarch had composed a deep work upon
Demonology, emb