THE WITCH TRIALS
Towards the middle of the seventeenth century there lived at Manningtree
a certain Matthew Hopkins, whose name deserves perhaps to be recorded.
Not that he stands by any means apart, a veritable Lucifer among the
devils. Sprenger in Germany, Torquemada in Spain, Grillandus in Italy,
de l’Ancre in France, and other persecutors over Christendom, were
better known and had killed more people. But Hopkins went to work on
English ground. The people were then professing the same creed that the
majority do now. Shakespeare had been in his grave more than a
generation, and trees may have been standing as bushes in the fields and
lanes of Essex which will yet renew leaves and branches at the kiss of
coming spring. Hopkins reveals the spirit of his time, for it has been
wisely observed that every society has the criminals it deserves. His
kind remain with us still as spies and blackmailers, traitors and
“friendly natives” of the tribe of Judas generally. But they derive
their power to harm from the community in which they live. Parasites
need a proper “host” to flourish in. A dark and superstitious age it
must have been to countenance this man; for he was a professional
“discoverer,” or, as he was sometimes called and styled, Witch-Finder
General. He began with the destruction of some half-dozen persons in his
native hamlet. We cannot determine what had marked them down—perhaps
they were his private enemies—moral reform has always been a ready
pretext to work vengeance with, and has been much employed in these
latter days. They may have been old, eccentric, isolated, or insane; in
any case, once seized they had to die, and in their torments implicated
others, most likely any names conveniently suggested to them. The fame
of the new discoverer spread far and wide. Towns and hundreds in the
eastern county, and even places far outside its boundaries, sent to this
fell apostle, saying, “Come over and help us,” and on the track of blood
the monster went. It was his wont to ride upon these expeditions
accompanied by another man, and by a female searcher, whose services
would be required in the minute personal examinations which were carried
out, especially on women. He made an open charge of twenty shillings for
each village visited, but no doubt in this nefarious calling there were
other and more profitable ways of extorting money. Can we not well
imagine what sums may have been paid to him (as they are to the “sex”
blackmailers of to-day) to avoid accusation? How many may have yielded
their little all to save some one who was dear to them from common
ill-usage, probable death, and certain disgrace, which such a charge
involved? Who knows how extorted gold might influence the ordeals
enforced? Who shall say what may have come by stealth to the
witch-finders to bring ruin upon some enemy, perhaps upon some rival?
Who, indeed? From place to place swooped this bird of prey, descending
on peaceful homesteads and capturing whom he chose. Woe to the man, and
still more to the woman, who lived alone, who kept a black cat, or who
was found to carry birthmarks on her body, or to be the least out of the
normal in physical structure! Woe to the person who was eccentric,
subject to fits or trances, or who might be in any way deranged or of
weak intellect! Woe, in fact, to the unhappy creature who by any means
came in for accusation! The Pishogue mark would thenceforth be upon
them; relations would drop away as from contamination with the
plague[516]; and the most brutal rabble of that time would jostle round,
intent upon the chase, with their fierce lust for blood not the less
keen from the idea that there was something Christian in their cruelty.
The victim would then be seized and carried off to further
interrogation, ill-treatment, and torture. Parents and children,
comrades and lovers, might weep in secret, and the boldest might even
venture to denounce the senseless iniquity of the proceedings—at which
they would incur no little danger. But they would speak unheeded, and
have to linger around the gallows till the final act, when something
swayed and dangled from a cord.
But somehow good Master Matthew began to be unpopular, and many reasons
might account for it. Perhaps he had been unwise in the selection of his
“subjects”—it looks like it, for one was an old clergyman—and lived to
find out that some of them had not been quite so friendless as he may
have counted on. Perhaps the supply of lonely or defenceless folk had
given out, or that in pushing his profession so far afield he could not
estimate the new material. “Discoveries,” of course, had to be made to
keep up his reputation and his income, and as he pursued his way through
a wide area it may be that quite a large number of people began to feel
themselves open to accusation, and so were ready to consider it
suspicious that he alone had such an eye for witches. And then a
whispering rose up amongst them, until it reached the persecutor’s ears:
For sure this man is aided by the Devil, or else he would not ferret out
so many. And he may well have started when he saw the anger-light in the
fierce eyes around him, and when he felt at last the frightful
superstitions, which he had kindled and well thriven on, were out of
hand, turned hard against himself. So he produced a little book which
bears the date of 1647, printed, he tells us, “For the benefit of the
whole Kingdome.” It has upon the title-page the somewhat troublesome
quotation, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” Exodus xxii. 18. We
cannot do better than glance through its pages and at the “Certain
queries answered which have been and which are likely to be objected
against Matthew Hopkins, in his way of finding out witches.”
_Querie I._—That he must needs be the greatest witch, sorcerer, and
wizzard himself, else hee could not doe it.
_Answer._—If Satan’s Kingdome be divided against itself how shall it
stand?
The next paragraph is interesting as once more emphasising the crude and
absolutely material notions conceived of the spiritual world.
_Querie II._—If he never went so farre as is before stated, yet for
certaine he met with the devill and cheated him of his booke, wherein
were written all the witches’ names in England, and if he looks at any
witch he can tell by her countenance what she is; so by this his helpe
is from the devill.
_Answer._—If he had been too hard for the devill and got his booke it
had been to his great commendation and no disgrace at all.
It will be noticed that he does not exactly deny even this report, or
appear to consider it at all unusual to meet the devil walking about
casually. “We must needs argue,” he continues later, “he is of long
standing, above 6000 years, then he must needs be the best scholar in
all knowledge of Arts and tongues, and so have the best skill in
Physicke, etc.” Mr. Hopkins’ own skill, he pleads, was really forced on
him. “This discoverer never travelled for it,” he writes in reply to
Querie V., “but in March 1644 he had some seven or eight of that
horrible sect of witches living in the towne where he lived ... who
every six weeks, in the night (being always on a Friday night), had
their meetings[517] close by his house, and had their severall solemne
sacrifices there offered to the devill, one of which this discoverer
heard speaking to her imps one night and bid them go to another witch,
who was thereupon apprehended and searched by women who had for many
years known the devill’s marks, and found to have three teats about her,
which honest women have not. So upon command from the Justice they were
to keep her from sleep two or three nights, expecting in that time to
see her familiars, which the fourth night she called by their severall
names,[518] and told them in what shape a quarter of an hour before they
came in, there being ten of us in the roome.[519]
“The first she called was (1) Holt, who came in like a white Kitling.
(2) Jamara, who came in like a fat Spaniel without any legs at all....
(3) Vinegar Tom, who was like a long legged grey hound with a head like
an Oxe with a long taile and broad eyes, who, when this discoverer spoke
to and bade him go to the place provided for him and his angels,
immediately transformed himself into the shape of a child foure years
old without a head and gave half a dozen turns about the house and
vanished at the doore. (4) Sacke and Sugar, like a black rabbet. (5)
Newes, like a Polcat. All these vanished away in a little while.
Immediately after this witch confessed severall other witches from whom
she had her imps and named to diverse women where their marks were ...
and imps’ names such as Elimanzer Pyewacket, Peck-in-the-crown, Grizzell
Greedigut, etc.; which no mortall could invent.... Twenty-nine were
condemned at once, four brought twenty-five miles to be hanged where
their discoverer lives, for sending the devill like a beare to kill him
in his garden; so by seeing diverse of the men’s papps and trying
various wayes with hundreds of them, he gained the experience.”
Although his dealings must be described as mild compared with the
ghastly inconceivable tortures in vogue with the inquisitors upon the
Continent,[520] his victims were yet baited and handled with the
grossest cruelty. They were supposed not to weep,[521] being witches,
though indeed cause enough was given them. It is remarkable in this
connection that Shelley,[522] with how much accuracy I am not aware,
alludes to the “dry fixed eyeball” of the tortured. Hutchinson[523] held
this phenomenon to have been due to prolonged deprivation of sleep and
exhaustion. Doubtless the weary length of the investigations, and often
the age and senile desiccation of the victims, might easily explain a
state of tearlessness whenever it was really prevalent.
They were supposed to possess an insensible part in their bodies,[524]
and the examiners would prick over them to try to find it out.
Especially, a witch was affirmed to have somewhere upon her person the
“Devil’s mark.” “Some bigg or place upon their body where he” (the
familiar, imp, or spirit) “sucketh them.”[525] This alleged “mark” might
be almost anything or nothing; from an abnormal, and perhaps atavic,
teat, down to a birthmark, mole, old scar, or even a tiny vein under an
eyelid. They were supposed also to float upon being “swum.”
They were, for the most part, wizen, old creatures, clad in long-used,
greasy garments.[526] Such skirts would retain much air; they might be
bound so as to favour this, or spread, as with Ophelia, widely inflated.
It was quite likely they should thus be upborne (and also, for they were
mostly poor and thin, that the heavy, sometimes chained, Bible should
outweigh them in the ordeal with scales). But ordeals are uncertain and
dangerous unless they can be carefully manipulated. Mr. Hopkins had been
keen on the water test; it was the finishing touch and proof at the end
of a long series of torments and examinations.
But a day came, it is said, on which a few brave Englishmen, who had
perhaps lost some one near and dear to them at his hands, laid hold upon
the witch-finder himself, and binding him in a sack, cast him into a
pool. It was a bold act, in those savage days, to interfere with any
kind of inquisition. Catholic or Puritan, and was no doubt attended with
great risk. But only for a moment in this case, for there before them
bobbed the dread discoverer of witches, floating upon the surface of the
water; and all declared the devil got his own. But such an end was
altogether unexpected and unusual; it was downright bad luck and
misfortune, from Mr. Hopkins’ point of view. His position appeared
unassailable, and indeed probably would have been, if he had kept to the
right sort of people, and practised on the isolated or unpopular, who
could have been legitimately sacrificed. All he had done was quite
lawful and regular.
Witchcraft, like many acts against religion and morality, had always
been an ecclesiastical offence, and had been punished in the secular
courts as leading to murder and personal injury,[527] and it was made a
felony in 1541.[528] But it was the (then) recent law of 1603 that was
much in force,[529] by which, in the quaint language of the statute, it
was forbidden, upon pain of death, to “employ, feed, or reward an evil
and wicked spirit.”[530] And since the High Court of Parliament had
recognised witches,[531] it became necessary to investigate accusations
and probe for “spirits” through the forms of law. Thus Hopkins could
claim to be a moral reformer, putting in force the statute of the realm;
he could quote Scripture clearly to his purpose, the justices and
gaolers obeyed his call, assizes waited to condemn his prisoners. And if
his method seemed superstitious or barbarous, he could perhaps cite Mr.
Perkins’ way,[532] or could refer to Mr. Kincaid’s custom in these
matters,[533] and could quote standard works with precedent on his
side.[534]
So he seemed truly to have a safe task and a paying one, built up upon
the prejudices of the people. But as by their superstitions he rose, so
also by them he fell—utterly, and unpitied.[535] It was not his
monstrous cruelties, but “God’s ordeal,” which showed him up, delivered
to the devil; and, in the caustic words of Samuel Butler, as one “who
after proved himself a witch, and made a rod for his own breech.”[536]
But now, dismissing this particular parasite, we may review the course
of thought upon the question. Belief in witchcraft is so ancient and so
universal,[537] that the existing religions, and perhaps all religions
whatsoever, must have arisen in its atmosphere.
From time to time the Christian Church dealt with the question,[538] and
had elaborated quite a ritual of tests and remedies. And it was after
nearly fifteen hundred years of Christianity that Pope Innocent
VIII.[539] issued a special Bull against all supposed witches (December
5, 1484), naming one Sprenger, a Dominican, and Krämar—whose name
latinised to Institor—inquisitors to seek and punish them; and this they
did with frightful cruelty. They wrote a text-book on their methods and
discoveries about 1489, and kept the torture chambers busy and the
faggots fiercely burning.
Their book was answered by John Wier, physician to the Duke of Cleves,
in 1563.[540] He refuted many of the grosser superstitions prevailing,
and also suggested that the devil deceived people and made many confess
to impossible practices;[541] likewise, that the witches did not really
occasion the illnesses and calamities which they were accused of causing
and even admitted having brought about.[542]
At first the work awakened only controversy and condemnation—a stage in
advance, however, since the most wronged are generally undefended, and
pass to their doom in silence and with no one to speak for them.
In 1580 Bodin, a French writer, published a most furious attack on Dr.
Wier, declaring him to have been the pupil of a sorcerer and that he
wrote inspired by the devil. He reiterated all the old fantastic stories
as being true, and in the hideous procedure of investigation which he
set forth, applied such diverse and such agonising torments as could not
have been surpassed by any of the earlier inquisitors.
Bodin in turn was answered, from England, by Reginald Scot, in 1584, who
wrote a long and powerful review of the witch persecutions, in which he
quotes extensively from Sprenger, Bodin, and the Continental tormentors.
Full of wise saws and modern instances, he cast doubts on the rationale
of the witchcraft tests and trials.
But although just a century had gone by since Innocent launched his Bull
from the Papal throne, many poor people, some at that time unborn, were
destined still to suffer trial and torture. And more than another
century had to pass before the law would leave “witches” alone; before
afflicted, half-mad, or unpopular old women could throw crumbs to the
sparrows upon the snow, or keep a cat, without danger of death. King
James, as a young man, fell foul of both Scot and Wier in 1597. Speaking
of them he said: “One called Scot, an Englishman, is not ashamed in
publicke print to deny that there can be such a thing as witchcraft, and
so he maintains the old error of the Sadducees in denying spirits. The
other called Wierus, a German phisition, sets out a publick apologie for
al these craftes-folkes—whereby procuring for their impunitie he plainly
betrayes himselfe to have been one of their profession”; and six years
later came his grotesque law already alluded to, sanctioned with all the
weight of Parliament.[543] The trials in Germany were severely
criticised in 1631 by Father Spee, who published his book at first
anonymously,[544] and checked the ardour and the cruelty of the courts.
But they were defended again by Joseph Glanvil,[545] chaplain to the
king, in 1681. About this time Dr. Bekker, a clergyman, living in
Holland, compiled four lengthy volumes about witchcraft,[546] in which
he contended that neither devils nor spirits could act on mankind. In
England, ten years later, wrote Richard Baxter,[547] author of _The
Saints’ Rest_ and other evangelical works which were widely read,
supporting the weird beliefs of the witchcraft schoolmen.
By this time the persecutions, which were waning in England, had broken
out at Salem in America; and we find Cotton Mather (like Glanvil, a
divine, and F.R.S.) writing a little book[548] to justify their
existence[549] (and his own conduct, for many were sceptical), upon that
continent where, as he quaintly says, the Pilgrim Fathers “imagined that
they should leave their posterity in a place where they should never see
the inroads of Profanity or Superstition.” The records of the nineteen
executions in this neighbourhood, of one poor creature who was pressed
to death, and of the crowd of unhappy suspects who were cast into the
prison,[550] show how the frenzy of this murderous “revival” swept like
an epidemic down upon the settlement,[551] so that for fifteen months
the air seemed charged and laden with hysteria, and are a grim
commentary. But evolution operates even on taboos and superstitions, and
this was probably the last general persecution, and Bishop Hutchinson
called his learned work _An Historical Essay_,[552] for it was dealing
mainly with the past. The law lagged behind, however, as it generally
does, the statute of James I. (1603) being, when Hutchinson wrote, “now
in force” in 1718.
And so it continued for eighteen years longer, until repealed in
1736.[553] In Ireland the law lasted until 1821. Witchcraft was clearly
kept alive by theology. People who really believed in a personal devil
(and even those who questioned the witch convictions assumed the devil
to be very much alive), designing mischief and disguised everywhere,
could easily accept tales of familiar spirits.[554]
Those who received the Hebrew and Christian records as altogether
inspired, could not ignore possession and sorcery.[555] “Après que Dieu
a parlé,” says de l’Ancre, “de sa propre bouche des magiciens et
sorciers, qui est l’incrédule qui en peut justement douter?”[556] And
Sir Matthew Hale said in his summing up: “That there were such creatures
as witches, he made no doubt at all. For, first, the Scriptures had
affirmed so much; secondly, the wisdom of all nations had provided laws
against such persons, which is an argument of their confidence of such a
crime.”[557]
Speaking of a particular case, Mr. H. L. Stephen[558] quotes Campbell as
follows: “... During the trial the imposture practised by the
prosecutors was detected and exposed. Hales’ motives were most laudable;
but he furnished a memorable instance of the mischief originating from
superstition. He was afraid of an acquittal or a pardon, lest
countenance should be given to a disbelief in witchcraft, which he
considered tantamount to disbelief in Christianity.” Glanvil[559]
follows on the same side, arguing with great ingenuity from the
scriptural point of view (for instance, in dealing with certain
doctrines as to the fate of unbaptized children, p. 22). “The question
whether there are witches or not,” he begins in Part ii., “is not a
matter of vain speculation or of indifferent moment, but an inquiry of
very great and weighty importance. For on the resolution of it depends
the authority of our laws, and, which is more, our religion, in its main
doctrines, is nearly concerned.”
And what may be called the religious belief in witches[560]—a very
different thing from the torturing of them—outlived the penal laws
concerning them.[561] The Rev. John Brown of Haddington (1703–1791)[561]
complained of the repeal of King James’s Act,[562] and even John Wesley
(1722–1787) declared that giving up witchcraft is, in effect, giving up
the Bible.[563] On page 366 of the journal[564] which he edited we read:
“With my latest breath will I bear testimony against giving up to
infidels one great proof of the invisible world. I mean that of
witchcraft and apparitions, confirmed by the testimony of all
ages”;[565] and Huxley[566] alluded to a contemporary clergyman who had
been preaching diabolical agency. Nor did the actual persecutions cease
altogether, and though the last legal trial in England took place in
1712[567] (the last execution in Europe is given by Lecky[568] as
occurring in Switzerland in 1782; another authority mentions Posen,[569]
with date 1793), sporadic outrages continued in the country, and persist
in a modified form to the present day.[570] At Clonmel, Ireland, in
1895,[571] a poor old woman was placed upon the kitchen fire by her own
family and burned, so that she died from the effects.[572] But what were
once pious customs and duties had at length become crimes, and the chief
mover in this latest witch trial got (to the best of my recollection)
twenty years’ penal servitude.
A belief so universal as that in witchcraft must clearly be founded upon
positive phenomena. It will not serve our purpose to discuss what yet
unknown supernormal powers might be attained under special conditions,
or how much more there may be to discover beyond X-rays and wireless
telegraphy. For while old ideas as to imps and devils, brooms and black
cats, were manifestly ridiculous, and although the abnormal powers,
whatever they may have been, could work no rescue in the hour of need,
there may be many things in heaven and earth undreamed of in our present
state of knowledge. But ordinary witch cases appear to have been
resolvable into the examination of—
(_a_) Hysterical subjects—sometimes crowds of them—who might imagine
anything and accuse anybody, including themselves. Such people were (and
are) often given to swallowing needles and other things, some of which
found their way through the body and emerged from all parts of it.[573]
This would have been considered strong evidence of diabolical agency.
Many of these would be subject to epilepsy, catalepsy—accompanied
sometimes by that strange insensibility to pain[574] which is a
well-marked symptom in hysteria, and which was remarked on by the
torturers—and to obscure nerve diseases generally.
(_b_) “Wise women,”[575] midwives, doctors good and bad, who may,
according to the custom of the times in which, as among savages,
magic[576] and medicine were inextricably mingled, have resorted to
charms[577] (as are still employed by old women to cure warts), and
sometimes, doubtless, to preparing and administering actual
poisons;[578] and who, whenever anything remarkable occurred, were
always liable to be accused of having in some way trafficked with the
all-explaining devil.[579] They sometimes claimed to possess the powers
of witches, and tried to gain support or protection from being feared,
deceiving others and often themselves as well.[580]
(_c_) Private enemies,[581] whom an accusation of witchcraft,[582] or of
any of the little group of offences[583] which were always supposed to
be closely allied with it,[584] was the readiest way to ruin.[585]
(_d_) People accused for the sake of gain by means of deliberate plots
and conspiracies. Feigning to be bewitched, and naming some (known to
be) innocent person as the cause of the mischief, was a mean crime that
was by no means uncommon, and many flagrant instances are given of it by
early criticisers.[586]
(_e_) The main body of the victims.[587] Old women who had outlived
family and friends, who were helpless and solitary,[588] ugly from age,
unclean from infirmities, eccentric in wisdom, crazy with delusions,
palsied in limbs, or wandering in mind.[589] All these, or nearly half
the old folks in the land, were always liable to accusation on account
of their misfortunes.[590] They were the wretched scapegoats of those
times, on whom was laid whatever might befall, from epileptic fits to
summer hail.[591]
It was a crime imputed with so much ease and repelled with so much
difficulty, that the powerful, whenever they wanted to ruin the weak,
... had only to accuse them of witchcraft to secure their
destruction.—C. Mackay, _Popular Delusions_, p. 109. A certain G. Naudé,
“late Library Keeper to Cardinal Mazarin,” wrote a book, entitled _The
History of Magic_, “By way of apology for all the wise men who have
unjustly been reputed magicians from the creation to the present age.”
Englished by J. Davies. London, 1657.]
(_f_) The people denounced by prisoners under torture. As we have seen,
accusation meant examination, and this had two objects: to extort a
“confession” from the suspected witch, and to compel her to reveal
accomplices. Some might confess at once, and did so in the hope of
execution (the _kind_ of confession required was already well known, and
the more monstrous and elaborate it might be, the better would be the
chance of escaping torture). Others would naturally deny taking part in
abominations in which they had not engaged, and most of which were
beyond possibility. And no doubt nearly all would make a long and
desperate struggle against incriminating their unfortunate friends, who
might, however innocent of crime, be also other people’s enemies. And so
the accursed ingenuity of man was practised on these miserable victims
of his ignorance and superstition. One hideous device[592] tried by a
Frankish king was to drive sharp spikes underneath the nails;[593] this,
he contended, always induced confession from the intense anguish. Very
likely it did.
Other inquisitors went their own sweet way, and used all possible
varieties of the question, that they might make out of the shrieks and
ravings the sort of story they expected and prompted,[594] and lash more
suspects down upon the rack. No wonder, then, that persecution
spread;[595] the aged and the disordered were always there, and any one
of these might be thought a witch,[596] or find herself denounced from
the torture-room—perhaps by a lifelong friend.
The readiness with which all “evidence” was acclaimed and the appalling
means by which it was got together placed any abnormal person in
constant peril, and will account for the enormous numbers of the
implicated. Tens of thousands of victims, says Lecky,[597] perished by
the most agonising and protracted torments without exciting the faintest
compassion. In a single German city they used to burn 300 witches
annually.[598] In Nancy, 800 were put to death by a judge in the course
of sixteen years.[599] Zachary Gray,[600] who edited an edition of
_Hudibras_, claims that during the Long Parliament 500 witches were
executed each year, and that he read through a list of no less than 3000
of them.[601] The total of Great Britain has been estimated at
30,000,[602] and it has been estimated that during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries the witch death-roll for Europe[603] reached
200,000 people.[604]
Perhaps the sidelights give a more graphic conception of what went on in
those dark days of error. Listen to this complaint of a French
writer[605] who evidently thought he was approaching the “last days.”
“Was it [sorcery] ever so much in vogue as here in this unhappy
[sixteenth] century? The benches of our courts are all blackened by
them; there are not sufficient magistrates to hear the cases. Our
prisons are gorged with witches, and not a day passes but our warrants
are ensanguined with them, and we return saddened to our homes, shocked
at the ghastly and appalling things that they confess.” And in our own
land, about fifty years later, we come upon a letter written to Sir
Edmund Spencer in 1647: “Within the compass of two years near upon 300
witches were arraigned, and the greater part executed, in Essex and
Suffolk only. Scotland swarms with them now more than ever, and persons
of good quality executed daily.”[606]
It was in Scotland, likewise, that there used to be kept a chest “locked
with three severall locks and opened every fifteenth daie,”[607] which
might receive, as did the Lion’s Mouth at Venice, denunciations slipped
in secretly; and that in 1661 the justices were ordered to attend
certain towns to hear cases of witchcraft at least once a week.[608]
The witch trials are ended. So far as _they_ are concerned, we can look
back from the heights of history over this vast red sea of superstition
which has swallowed up such multitudes. And to think it was all so
useless, so unnecessary![609] but yet by no means hard to be explained.
The underlying and provocative phenomena had really been present in a
huge number of cases (and when they were not, were fervently conceived,
and so suggested, looked for, and enforced as to set up all kinds of
hallucinations in the accusers and sometimes in the accused), and in
default of tracing out their causes,[610] evident or recondite, clergy
and jurists, and of course the populace, gave out a false and
thaumaturgical account of them. They were correct in affirming many
amazing facts and phenomena (and all these persist, for nature has not
changed.[611] There are at least as many abnormal and half-mad people
amongst us now as there ever were, only we treat the clearer cases
kindly, and are no longer afraid of mythical influences), although these
were magnified and multiplied million-fold, for Superstition is a
monster that grows by feeding. They were fantastic in their fabulous
explanations of them. The rest—in those cruel times when torture was as
common as is cross-examination—followed quite naturally. The doctors,
theological and legal, erred in their diagnosis, mistaking diseases for
devils and abnormality for magic. We shall come upon this again, crass
and close at hand. May the Future condemn the Present, as we now deplore
the Past.
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