In two hundred years thirty thousand witches are said to have
been destroyed in England; and as recently as 1716, when the
town was enjoying the wit and satire of the “Queen Anne men,” a
woman and her child nine years of age were hanged at Huntingdon.
Addison, with a mind that wavered between superstition and good
sense, said he could not forbear believing “in such a commerce
with evil spirits as that which we express by the name of
witchcraft,” while, at the same time, he could “give no credit
to any particular modern instance of it.” Scotland, which is
regarded as an enlightened part of the empire, held with the
utmost tenacity its faith in witchcraft. The Scotch, a vigorous
people, put their hands to the work heartily. It was easy to
find victims, since, as we have said already, they tortured
until they confest. It is calculated that two thousand persons
were burned in Scotland in the last forty years of the sixteenth
century. A century later a witch epidemic broke out in the
village of Mohra, in Sweden. A number of children were said to
be bewitched, and familiar with the devil, who was described as
wearing a gray coat, red and blue stockings, a red beard, and a
high-crowned hat. The witches kept this exacting person supplied
with children, and if they did not procure him a good many,
“they had no peace or quiet for him.” The poor wretches were
doomed to have no more peace or quiet in this world. Seventy
were condemned to death, and twenty-three were burnt in a single
fire at Mohra. It is noteworthy that a belief in this frightful
superstition which destroyed more innocent persons than the
so-called holy office was held by men of great intellectual
power--by Erasmus, Bacon, and the judicious Hooker; by Sir
Edward Coke, Sir Thomas Browne, Baxter, and Sir Matthew Hale.
And the old belief is not yet extinct in country districts. Only
recently a man at Totnes accused his father of bewitching, or,
as a “white witch” called it, “overlooking” his daughter, so
that she suffered for months from a disease in the arms; and the
people who live in remote villages may often hear of similar
cases.--London _Illustrated News_.
(3478)